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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Insuring it doesn't help you in recovering the package. It just mitigates the loss. I fully expect that both byuu and the donor would much prefer to have the 100 SNES games than to have a $10k payout.

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The higher the insurance amount is, the more likely it is that it'll be worth it for the company to look for your package.

Perhaps in theory; is there any evidence that the USPS actually operates this way?

I feel that the fact that they were able to recover this package with what seems to be relative ease is evidence of that.

Why would you say that? What got this resolved was someone with influence at USPS seeing the news story and intervening. The insurance amount was completely irrelevant to this.

Also, it apparently wasn't all that easy. They searched, came up with nothing, and then had to request a second search in order to find it.

>Also, it apparently wasn't all that easy. They searched, came up with nothing, and then had to request a second search in order to find it.

But they seemed to have procedures in place for doing so, no?

Someone with influence saying "search again, and search harder" is hardly a procedure.

There is a system for congressional complaints that makes people act.

Do you have any idea how many calls a day a supervisor answering the phone receives? Not just "where's my parcel" but the patron has data that states intermediary carriers (ups to PO for last mile)

Thousands of calls a day. With 31,606 offices there has to be at least 2-3 calls per day.

Search harder is a congressional command. (Besides all their political mail is free to them)

I'm not sure what you mean by relative ease. This only got looked into after months, due to it raising a stink in the media. The package even made its way to the Atlanta office, presumably where its contents were intended to be sold at auction due to undeliverability.

Presumably he meant the relative ease of the USPS, not the sender/receiver's ease at getting the USPS to do the additional search. In other words, if the insurance payout had been higher, that would have triggered the more thorough search rather than media attention.

Yes, it was under insured. But do you feel the $1000 insurance we had was not enough insurance for them to locate the box that has my address clearly written on it? :/

If not, then I'm not sure $10000 would have been either.

There were many reasons we couldn't insure for $10000. That wasn't our mistake, though. The mistake was shipping 100 games at once instead of 20 - 25 games at a time.

> If not, then I'm not sure $10000 would have been either.

i'm given to understand that with at least fedex, there are magical cutoff amounts which change the handling of the package. qualitatively different things happen with something insured for $5000 than $4999.

so, yes, i'd be willing to believe that $10k might've triggered processes that would've gotten the package to you with less hassle.

they also won't pay the claim unless you can prove the item was worth what you say it is. They dont tell you this when you buy the insurance, of course. But once you try to make a claim, they demand proof. They want a catalog showing the item, an appraisal, etc. And just like any insurance, the first thing they will do when you try to make a claim is get out of paying it.

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