Package travels 4,000 miles from Scottsdale to Maricopa

I came to Maricopa from the suburbs of Philadelphia in April. My brother Mike was gracious enough to make the 2,359-mile drive with me in a U-Haul truck. It took us three-and-a-half days.

My recent Christmas card order had a longer trip – to get from Scottsdale to Maricopa.

With all of my family back in Pennsylvania, I thought it would be nice to send them some desert-related cards for Christmas. Admittedly, I was getting a late start.

I found some cool cards online and ordered two boxes: one pictured Santa holding a map while his reindeer rest atop a butte at the Grand Canyon and the other a reindeer-guided sleigh flying low over a Saguaro-filled desert at sunset.

Better yet, the cards were manufactured right in Scottsdale, just 47 miles up the road from Maricopa, which meant I’d likely have them in 2-3 days and still have a chance to get them delivered to friends and family before Christmas.

That was a foolish assumption, it turns out.

A ROUNDABOUT ROUTE

I ordered the cards on Dec. 13 from StonehouseCollection.com. By its own account, the family-owned business processed the order the next day and literally walked it over to the United States Postal Service’s Scottsdale Airpark Station on East Evans Road.

Shipping was free and since my order was more than $15, it was shipped Priority Mail, with delivery typically made within 1, 2 or 3 days, and included tracking. Admittedly, it is Christmastime, the busiest time of the year for the Postal Service, so I didn’t expect my cards the next day.

I also did not expect my order to travel through at least five states, but it did.

The following itinerary is based on USPS tracking and Google Maps estimates of road mileage. Just FYI: USPS tracking typically starts when the item’s sender or a shipping partner notifies the postal service electronically to expect a package. It continues with USPS accepting the package for transit and ends when the item is delivered or picked up by the recipient. Throughout the process, the tracking information is available in several ways.

My package departed the post office in Scottsdale at 7:58 p.m. on Dec. 14.

En route to my home in Maricopa, it was transported and received at a facility in O’Brien, California, a town in the Lake Shasta region about 80 miles south of the Oregon border, at 8:01 p.m. – just three minutes later, according to the tracking history. O’Brien is about 940 road miles from Scottsdale.

It probably wasn’t in O’Brien long, because three days later, at 10:43 a.m. on Dec. 17, my package was scanned at a USPS distribution center in Oklahoma City, about 1,800 miles from the northern California town. It departed that regional facility nearly 13 hours later, headed for Texas.

My cards arrived at a USPS facility in Irving at 5:13 a.m. on the 18th, and departed about 9 a.m.  for a facility about 30 miles away in Haslet, Texas. They made that trip in about an hour. According to tracking information, my package spent the next day, the 19th, “In Transit to Next Facility.”

It then departed the same Haslet mail facility at 2:44 a.m. on the 20th – and headed west again, arriving at the Phoenix Distribution Center Annex at 9:32 p.m. the same day.

At 8:09 a.m. on the 21st, the package was scanned and on its way to Maricopa, arriving at the Post Office at 1:38 p.m. Finally, at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 22, the package was delivered to my mailbox.

By my estimate, the package traveled about 4,000 miles over nine days to reach a destination just 47 miles (and an hour-or-so by mail truck) away. The cards could have traveled from Scottsdale all the way to the town of Clarenville at the eastern end of Newfoundland or to the city of Bogota, Colombia. Or a round-trip to Christmas, Florida.

Stated another way, a representative from Stonehouse Collection could have walked the cards to my house and gotten them there in about 14 hours, or about 163 fewer hours than the Postal Service.

‘YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON’

So, what happened? I don’t know.

The Postal Service has had a tough year. It hinted at troubles and delays in a press release on Dec. 14, the same day my package left Scottsdale. “In an extraordinary year of unprecedented challenges given the COVID-19 pandemic and a historic record of mail and package volume this holiday season,” the agency wrote, “the Postal Service encourages customers to send their holiday gifts and cards as soon as possible.”

The Washington Post reported Monday that “unprecedented package volume has paralyzed the agency.”

“Competing crises are slamming the U.S. Postal Service just days before Christmas, imperiling the delivery of millions of packages, as the agency contends with spiking coronavirus cases in its workforce, unprecedented volumes of e-commerce orders and the continuing fallout from a hobbled cost-cutting program launched by the postmaster general,” the newspaper reported.

According to the report, the backlogs are so significant that some postal managers have contacted colleagues at nearby facilities, hoping to divert shipments. Those places are often full, however, so packages sit for days in trucks until floor space opens so they can be sorted.

Rod Spurgeon, a spokesman for the USPS in Arizona, told 3TV/CBS 5 in Phoenix earlier this month that there were no widespread delays in the network. He did say a record number of online orders was overwhelming sorting machines and that extra staff often had to process packages by hand.

It’s unclear if those particular problems were a factor in this circuitous delivery.

“You’re not the only person this has happened to,” Matt Kersten, the owner of Stonehouse Collection, told me on Tuesday morning.

His company has heard similar stories from customers, including a Florida buyer who reported their order took 10 days to be delivered, and the customer from Buckeye (about 60 miles from the Scottsdale company) whose order was sent to Vermont and returned to Phoenix before making a second out-of-state trek on its way to their mailbox.

In addition to Christmas cards, the family business creates birthday and seasonal greeting cards, notepads, T-shirts and ties, many featuring the unique and humorous illustrations of Kersten’s father, Rick, and an uncle.

The company has heard reports that USPS does not have enough planes and trucks to deliver all the mail.

Stonehouse offered me a refund for the late arrival, which I declined, just happy to be able to fill out my cards and get them – gulp! – in the mail for another 1,000-plus mile adventure. (The back of my envelopes will be marked with a question – “Get this card late? – and a short link to my story online.)

The USPS media relations department did not return an email asking for some clarity on why my parcel traveled about 85 times farther than necessary. And, I have to be honest, I’m not holding my breath for an explanation in case they’re responding via carrier pigeon.