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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

>Obviously, it should have been insured for the full value. But please understand that hindsight is 20/20. The sender chose the insurance amount, and had no reason to suspect the package would be lost, and that we would be given no help on the matter. It's not unreasonable to believe a mail carrier would try to avoid the need to pay out 1000 Euros worth of insurance by not losing said package.

That's some really high expectations there.

If you want to send something to another country and aren't willing to lose it? Buy a plane ticket.

It's essentially impossible for the carriers to prevent this from happening given their volumes.

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With the estimated value of that package, cheap insurance seems less of a "hindsight 20/20" problem and more like a "extreme risk-taker" type of problem.

The package is the sender's responsibility until it's received.

If I wanted to be a monster and screw over the guy who already successfully lent me a package of 100 PAL games back in September, and was nice enough to lend me another, and say "well it's all your fault for not paying for more insurance!", I could do that.

But that is not the kind of person I am. He was doing me the favor. If not for my asking, he'd still have all his games right now. And I'll make it right if I have to.

But I'm still holding out hope that someone at USPS might notice this and lend a hand.

My dad sold an original Strat-o-matic game on Ebay last year and sent it through USPS insured at $1500+. It got stolen in transit. Why would someone steal a lightweight, unmarked box unless they had access to the insurance amount and could get away with it? I don't trust USPS. Sorry for your loss, I hope your package turns up.

Wait, so you didnt even reimburse him cost of insurance?

> that's some really high expectations there.

The USPS is easily on my top 5 list of incompetent companies.

Why is that? They deliver more mail than all the other US carriers combined, and deal with almost half of the worlds mail traffic. For the truly massive amount of traffic they deal with, they are incredibly accurate and fast. If you have lived in another country like I have, you will quickly learn to appreciate the USPS.

Exactly! It is very impressive when you think about how unusual it is for something even as small and seemingly unimportant as a postcard to fail to arrive.

I'm sure it could be worse, but out of the 3 main providers we have in the US here, they're the most unreliable. I'm not trying to just rip on them, but from my experience, they don't think much of delivering packages a day or more late as it happens fairly consistently.

> I'm sure it could be worse, but out of the 3 main providers we have in the US here, they're the most unreliable

Yeah, I don't know. Fedex Ground seems to be focusing their efforts on package delivery via t-shirt cannon or something, lately.

In my experience DHL is the absolute worst (I know others have said they're pulling back from the US, but they certainly still do a lot of deliveries here in San Francisco, especially Amazon deliveries).

One time DHL literally threw a package containing a hard drive over my gate to land on my concrete steps. Thankfully the shipper had put a ton of bubble wrap in there so the hard drive itself ended up without any damage, but I still count myself lucky. That was actually the third time they'd done that sort of thing, and after calling to complain (for the third time) they finally told me they were putting a note "don't throw packages over the gate" on my address. I'm shocked that's even something that they have to say.

The real problem is that there are very few delivery companies, so everybody has to pick one.

Just like banks. Name any random bank in the world and you'll have 50 people saying "Best. Bank Ever", 50 more people giving you horror-stories and saying "Worst. Bank. Ever", along with many more people who are entirely indifferent.

At the volume the delivery companies are operating, with millions of deliveries a day, even 0.05% of failures will affect a large number of people, and will result in "Worst. Delivery. Ever" complaints.

Sadly there's not a great solution. No matter which delivery company you choose you might get your stuff quickly, or you might not. The only practical step you can take is make sure you minimize risk (multiple smaller packages + insurance).

It varies widely based on the sorting center near you, your local post office, and your specific mail carrier. A friend of mine used to work in a sorting center and said it was the most brutal job he'd ever had because it involves a lot of physical labor. He said he never saw anyone purposefully mistreating mail, though he did see one or two people busted for stealing packages. He also saw several accidents where automated machines would mangle a package, once while he was working the station. IIRC he had to carefully pickup all the pieces he could get out of the machine and pack it in a new box.

Everywhere I've ever lived all of them were great and I've never had a lost package or any problems.

The only negative experience I've had is the substitute carriers here in SF; when my regular guy is out the sub loves to claim he tried to deliver the package without bothering. When someone is home all day it is a bit difficult to believe they attempted delivery without leaving even a note.

I have found just about everyone picks one carrier: FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc, and decides they suck. It's all anecdotal. I've had several problems with UPS and so I tend to avoid them. Yet USPS is batting 1000 for me.

Same here, been repeatedly screwed by FedEx (parcels marked as delivered, carrier shows up 2 or 3 weeks later and won't explain WFT happened), but USPS has treated my parcels pretty well. The employees at my local post office are competent and well meaning, opposite the vibe I get at other shipping places.

Ultimately, they all do work most of the time (except OnTrac, showing up at 11pm at night at my office and calling me is not acceptable).

I'm not a high volume shipper, but I do a fair amount of buying and selling online, and I have never once had an issue with USPS. I understand the last mile service quality varies widely across the country, though.

> If you want to send something to another country and aren't willing to lose it? Buy a plane ticket.

And how often do airlines lose luggage? More often than packages go missing.

I assume he's referring to carrying it on, where you can maintain physical proximity to it, rather than checking it.

I'm pretty skeptical that you can take a package containing 100 SNES games as carry-on.

There's no way that happens, especially if they're boxed. The boxes are something like 180mm * 105mm * 30mm or 567000mm^3, a carry-on is 220mm * 350mm * 560mm or 43120000mm^3, if you just tape up and wrap all the boxes into a carry-on-sized package you're barely fitting 76 boxes volume-wise, and I'm not sure you can actually lay them out such that they'd fit in the prescribed dimensions.

In photography circles in the US it is occasionally suggested put a gun (can be a flare gun) in the luggage as well -> it then has to be specially tracked and is supposedly looked after a lot better. No clue how much truth there is to that.

There certainly are additional declaration, inspection, and tracking requirements for firearms in checked luggage, so it might well be a cheap way to get extra insurance that your expensive camera gear ends up in the same place you do.

>And how often do airlines lose luggage? More often than packages go missing.

Are you sure that's true? I think the loss rates of both are around 1%

But yeah as dtparr said, obviously don't check your luggage. If it's too big to carry on, take it to the gate instead of baggage drop to ensure that it's manually put on the plane.

For UPS anything over $1000 is considered high value and treated differently.

You can insure regular mail up to $5000.

You can insure Registered Mail up to $50,000. Registered Mail is treated differently (e.g. stored in locked cages in transit, tamper-evident packaging) and comes with delivery verification. It's also, obviously, slower and more expensive.

> It's essentially impossible for the carriers to prevent this from happening given their volumes.

On the contrary, there are probably billions of items shipped every day that does not get lost. Even if the 'lost' packages are 1%, it would still be reasonable to expect that you are in the 99%.

I have no idea, but I would expect the total amount of loss is less than 1% (?).

> It's not unreasonable to believe a mail carrier would try to avoid the need to pay out 1000 Euros worth of insurance by not losing said package.

If it costs 1000 Euros to insure a 10,000 Euro package, doesn't that sorta indicate that the chances of something happening to the package are on the order of 1 in 10?

Where did you get that figure? The package was insured for 1000 Euros. It did not cost 1000 Euros to insure the package.

I was quoting ryanlol's quote. Seemed steep, honestly.

You're misinterpreting.

The value of the insurance is 1,000 Euros. Meaning USPS needs to pay out 1,000 Euros if they lose the package (that's what ryanlol was referring to). The price of the insurance (that the shipper paid) was not 1,000 Euros. Nobody said what it was, but it's going to be some small fraction of that.

Yup, this. And given that he states twice in his spiel that he "had no reason to suspect the package would be lost" it is almost laughable. Has any single person in history sent a package and said "Well I expect this will get lost in transit!" ?

Why would it matter what he expected? It was the sender that failed to insure it properly.

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