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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
When has first class mail taken three days? Not recently! If it started taking five, I would be nothing short of thrilled. Lately, a lot of my first class packages are taking two WEEKS and longer, with a few taking as long as six to seven weeks!
In some cases, rail could replace trucks. At one time the Postal Service shipped some magazines relatively short distances rail in containers to reduce backhaul costs. While air will continue to be dominant for first-class mail and lightweight packages, containers shipped long distance by rail and short distance by trucks could lower the US Postal Service carbon footprint and increase reliability if managed with reliability as a top priority. Direct rail times coast-to-coast could be three to four days instead of five days by truck. Slowing mail service will require increased storage space mail waiting for transit to the next sorting facility. Did the postal service have enough parking for trucks used to “store” mail waiting for processing last fall?