They re-routed it to me in Cincinnati!

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It arrived correctly, but then warped away

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Your princess in in another castle.

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It looks like the Columbus entry is just for Columbus receiving data about the package. Both before and after, the package itself existed at Grove City. So they're just really slow.

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Grove City, Ohio, is the south end of Columbus. It went from there to Cincinnati, which is not progress.

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Perhaps Fedex does not do the handoff from Fedex to USPS in Columbus, and has to send it to a Cincinnati facility to do the carrier switch.

Or perhaps they're just being dicks. It's hard to tell with the postal system.

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Clearly, they have to drive to the arctic circle to dig up a plane that will fly them to Columbus.

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Oh, this one's an easy one. The deal is, UPS has delivery hubs all about certain places of the united states, and they're usually in the bigger cities. Places like Ohio, it makes sense that one of these delivery hubs is Cincinnati, and it may have to have been re-routed there before it could be delivered either to you or to the hub nearest you. I'm not entirely sure which hub is closest, but that's a start at least.

Another thing to take into consideration is that UPS temporarily revokes their Ground time-of-delivery guarantee every year around early December. This year, because DHL is withdrawing its domestic services from the United States, UPS' volume is consequentially larger than it was in the past few years or so and the time-of-delivery guarantee was revoked much sooner - in this case, November 24th, where it's being held up.

Oh, and if it didn't arrive Wednesday, it's not gonna arrive today, either. UPS Ground don't work on post-Thanksgiving Friday, apparently.

The best way to go about pursuing this, if you want a more hands-on conclusion, is to call UPS (that so-fancy 1-800-PICK-UPS number of theirs) and dial 0 to get to an operator instead of having to deal with robots. Give the operator your tracking number and see if there's more they can tell you about it than what the website is telling you, but most of the time they can only really quote back what the website is saying. It depends on how much of a problem not having Skywarp is for you, because if you really push it, you can try to get it resolved more efficiently. Or you could wait it out if you don't think it's worth the headache.

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As long as it doesn't tell me it's back in West Virginia tonight, I'll be fine. Thanks for the info!

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Uh, you misread. It was being couriered by FedEx, who then handed off the package to USPS.

It looks like under whatever shipping Hasbro paid for, FedEx was only responsible for bringing it to the state, and USPS is handling the figurative "last mile" of the delivery. And my guess is, FedEx's main sorting depot is in Grove City, while USPS's is in Cincinnati, and they're not setup to do hand-offs on a more local level.

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Apparently you moved.

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Why am I always the last to know?

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Yes. Yes. Everything is unfolding as I have foreseen.

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Tracking systems always provide a good look in the weird shipping routes your packages like to take. I had something I ordered from Southern California (I live in the Northern California) go out to Nevada, go way up past where I know the UPS hub is, then come back down again to where I live. It made a trek that's usually 1-2 days, 3-4 days. Of course it was a textbook I needed in the shorter time.

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Packages I order to be delivered in SF almost routinely go through Sacramento, whether they're coming from New Jersey or Los Angeles. These delivery companies sometimes go north to go south, and as ridiculous as it seems, I've been assured time and time again that there's a method to their madness.

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Yeah, it's just going through the routing hubs with thousands of other packages on the huge trucks before being distributed to the smaller trucks with only a hundred or so. Most of the time it's more efficient in terms of gas expense, but sometimes you get something like this.

I once ordered something from Pennsylvania to be delivered to Arlington, VA (just across the Potomac from Washington DC). It went from the Pittsburg hub to the Richmond hub along the way. The most direct route from Pittsburg to Richmond? Goes straight through Arlington.

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The package may not actually be going to Sacramento. UPS and FedEx don't track individual packages, they track trucks, and the tracking display assumes the package is on the truck until it's scanned as being somewhere else. Your package from LA might have gone like this:

1) Package is scanned into the LA hub (Tracking shows it in LA)
2) Package is scanned onto a Sacramento-bound truck (Tracking shows it in LA)
3) Truck is scanned leaving the LA hub (Tracking shows it leaving LA)
4) Truck arrives in San Francisco sorting hub. Package is unloaded into a holding area, but since it's after working hours, it isn't scanned. (No scan, so the tracking still shows it leaving LA)
5) Truck is scanned arriving in Sacramento (Tracking shows the package in Sacramento)
6) Package is scanned in the San Francisco sorting hub (Tracking shows the package in SF now)

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I can field this one, having had a similar experience with some RAM I ordered a while back. The stuff came into Oklahoma city, which is like 30 miles from me, right? Then the next day, guess where it went? If you guessed my house, you are WRONG!

It went to Dallas. Dallas Frigging Texas. When I called to ask, what I was told was that it had to go back to the main hub for my area, in order to be routed to me correctly. That's a round trip of like, 350 miles or so, in order for it to travel the 30 miles between where it was, and my house. The truck probably passed my house going to Dallas!

I still froth.

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Simple, they had to ship the figure to where the head was lost at to pick it up and re-attach.

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Man I had something like this happen to me. Had a package come from.. Tennessee, I think? From somewhere in TN to Harrisburg, PA. It was shipped up to Pitt, then shipped through Harrisburg to Philly, and then back to Harrisburg. I know that that's how this stuff works; it goes to the nearest hipping.. place, and then to me, but it still seems pretty wacky for it to probably pass a few streets away from my house and STILL have a few days until I get it.

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Y'know, from all these first-hand accounts, it sounds like Skywarp's scenic route is Status Quo. You'd think that someone would realize that it's not always the most efficient system.

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The problem is that they're using a hybrid system. It's the bastard child of both services. The package gets picked up by UPS, shuttled across the country by their transit system (which is theoretically faster and more effective than the post office's cross-country system) and then transferred to the post office for final delivery. (The post office having the better and cheaper set-up for local delivery.) The result is supposed to be faster than regular mail but cheaper than FedEx.

However, the bastard child is not able to make full use of either parent's network. The particular weak point is the transfer between the two networks, which is only set up to happen at certain key locations. So it went to the FedEx hub at Grove City. Then it was sent to the nearest FedEx location to the delivery address. But once it got there, they realized that it had to go to the designated regional USPS transfer point. Which is apparently in Cincinnati. Which is far enough away that getting there required routing through the FedEx regional hub at Grove City. It's horribly inefficient, but it makes for simpler overall system architecture. And, again, it's a new bastard service, and the kinks haven't entirely been worked out.

But yeah, FedEx still does this sort of thing even if you use their full service. I sent a package a while back to a place a few towns over from my house. It went from the drop-off location to the local collection center. From there, it was bundled with the rest of the outgoing shipments and sent to the state hub for processing. When it arrived there, it was routed to the local distribution center for delivery - which happened to be the same local collection center it had gone through on the way out. The package could have been delivered in half the time if they'd simply carried it across the building instead of sending it halfway across the state and back. But that would require that they take the time at the local center to process the outgoing packages rather than simply scanning and bundling them off. Which would slow down the whole line. Easier for them to just use the network, even if it isn't perfectly efficient.

Really, what it comes down to is that when you're looking at the network on a national scale, local issues like this start to seem more like micromanaging. Not worth the time and effort it'd take to fix.

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Remembered this gag I posted a while back:

Hey, did you hear Fed-Ex and UPS are merging?

The process of combining their networks is going to cause huge delays for a while, and of course they'll still be charging 2-3 times USPS postal rates.

The new service will be called "Fed-UPS."

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This sort of thing is the product of a large vertically-integrated system where simplicity (to maximize throughput) is prized above actual efficiency.

If you FedEx a package from Minneapolis to St. Paul, it gets sent to Ohio for sorting. The 10-20% of FedEx packages that are being sent in-state (I'm making this number up for an example,) are dis-serviced by being routed out-state... but the FedEx offices in Minnesota don't even LOOK at the destination when the package enters into the system-- they just ship them off to the Ohio processing center as quickly as they can. If they checked every package to see which ones should stay in MN, they would have to either majorly reduce their throughput, or hire lots more people to do that job. (Not to mention build a facility dedicated to sorting packages locally...)

Since the number of in-state packages are proportionally few, and the penalty for routing them outstate-and-back are low (a day or so via their blazing-fast unsorted shipping network,) where they can be processed, sorted and routed in a monolith-facility designed to do only that much more efficiently than local offices could... their system kinda makes sense. Kinda.

Put more simply- if you wanted your package to take a sane route to get to you, the shipping would be more expensive because of the additional man-hours such a system would require.

(I've had sorta a man-crush on the FedEx shipping model since I was 13 and someone explained to me how it works. It's more efficient... by being less efficient. As a result it can handle absolutely MASSIVE throughput. There's something kinda beautiful about that.)

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Just checking, but... isn't that what I said? Up until the final parenthetical, anyway. Same idea, just different angle, right?

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You spake of specifics of his individual package's routing- I spoke of general principles on which the system operated.

Arguably the general principles were implied in your post-- but they're awesome and I have a man-crush on them, so they bear repeating.

(I want to lick the invisible arrow!)

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Fair enough.

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This sounds like the delayed parcel I had recently which took an extra week to arrive. It hung out a week in Chicago, then went to Londonderry (NH), then Saco (ME) -- both of these shortish distance from me as Fedex goes.

Then CONNECTICUT.

Then back up to someplace else in New England.

Then here.

And then, then, the mailroom took an extra day to tell me they had it in their hands.

So much loathing.

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The first time I looked at this yesterday, I didn't notice the dates, and thought it was listed in chronological order from top to bottom.

It was much funnier that way.

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What the data window you have tells me is that the package left Martinsburg and traveled to grove city. Once there, it was processed and USPS was notified that the package had a *Destination* address in Columbus. It was then shipped from the fedex hub in grove city to the USPS hub in Beechwold. From there, USPS put it on a truck to the Cincinnati depot, from which it will probably be shipped back to Columbus and sent to the local post office for delivery. I'd wager that you've either received it today, or you will get it Monday.

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hrmmm...I forgot about time differences and the fact that I should have been in bed hours ago. I meant that you either received it Saturday, or will get it Monday.

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Yeah that doesn't make sense
Then I realize this is Skywarp we are talking about.
"No don't send me out again! I lost my head the last time! NOOOOO!"

Sorry. I just woke up.

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