USPS Urgent Mail:When It Absolutely, Positively Has To Get There Overnight, But Certainly Doesn't

I'm normally a huge defender of the United States Postal Service because I both like and admire so many of the workers that they employ and because it's an unionized service unlike the competing FedEx company which is nonunion. But the fact of the matter is that some companies such as FedEx and UPS offer some high priced urgent overnight shipping services for important business documents and the USPS seems to want to compete with these services.

It is certainly healthy competition for the USPS to offer an overnight shipping service with rates in the $16.50 range for shipping business documents overnight. Compared to much higher priced services from both FedEx and UPS, this seems like a pretty good deal. And USPS claims to ship even on holidays or on Sundays, which certainly sounds good as well. But I shipped some emergency documents the other day, and guess what, two days later the USPS Urgent Mail letter package has still not arrived.

The fact of the matter is that it appears that the USPS has inflated their claims about their services, and their $16.50 Urgent Mail service is actually hardly even much faster than their normal lower priced Priority Mail service in all reality.

Interestingly, it it also postal inspectors who are involved in the business of working with federal policing agencies to prosecute examples of mail fraud, yet these same postal inspectors don't seem to be spending very much time working on their own company to make it more compliant with it's own exaggerated claims of providing overnight mail service that really isn't overnight at all in many cases.

Well, for my sake it was indeed pretty darn stressing and disappointing to me to find out that the USPS does not really provide the Urgent Mail overnight delivery service that it claims to provide. So much for truth in advertising.