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Comment by t3rabytes | Hacker News Reader

One interesting thing I've noticed is that for my zip (central NC), originating and destinating first-class letters show different areas -- for example, for mail I send, none of it is scheduled for 2-day to Virginia even though I'm very close to the border (50 miles?), but for mail I receive, half of Virginia is in the 2-day zone.

I'm a huge fan of the USPS and really want them to succeed. For my personal stuff, it's really hard to beat Priority (typically I use the flat-rate packaging) for packages that need to cross the country in a reasonable time compared to the Big 2's "ground" services.

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> for mail I send, none of it is scheduled for 2-day to Virginia even though I'm very close to the border (50 miles?), but for mail I receive, half of Virginia is in the 2-day zone.

I think the sweet spot for sending is to be in an area that is busy enough that the USPS is essentially running 24/7 behind the scenes, but not busy enough that they can't keep up with mail volume.

I used to live in downtown Chicago and (pre-pandemic at least) the main post office had a manned counter open until 11pm every day. You could drop off a package at 10:30pm, check the tracking info when you woke up the next morning, and discover that it arrived at the giant sorting facility near O'Hare 45 minutes after you dropped it off, was put on a truck an hour later, arrived at a facility out of state at 3am, and was already on another truck heading to its final destination.

I've been eyeballing a number of locations. It looks like Wichita, KS might be the best sending location. Not a single spot in the continental US that is more than 4 days. Kansas City has a tiny spot in Northern California that is 5 days. As far as the really large cities go, Dallas, Chicago, and Denver are really quite good.

Portland Oregon has a post office right at PDX and that one was/is 24 hrs. Packages there basically go right on a plane. The back of the building is literally the tarmac. I’d say that one is up there. Stuff to east coast would often beat packages going to California. Oddly those would end up on a truck instead of flying to lax.

Wow, that is outstanding if you are a shipper!

For lightweight packages, I think first class is a better value, though it's more difficult to print postage at home.

PayPal will allow purchase of shipping labels.

That’s how I do it.

Check out https://www.pirateship.com/. I think I heard about that site here first. It offers discount rates on USPS and UPS. I think it even offers some USPS services that normally require a trip to the post office.

I use PirateShip all the time if I do want something shipped UPS, it's great.

That's an incredibly sketchy website. Looking through all their about pages all I see is FREE and nothing about how they get discounts and how they make money.

Help > Getting Started > How does Pirate Ship make money?

https://support.pirateship.com/en/articles/1860717-how-does-...

They get discounted rates from UPS and USPS, keep a small percent of that discount for themselves, and pass the rest of the savings between the discounted rate and full retail rate on to the customer.

I have no relationship with Pirate Ship except that I'm a happy customer. It makes shipping via UPS and USPS easier than using the UPS or USPS sites directly, and it's cheaper. I only wish I'd discovered them sooner.

To give an example of one nice touch on their web site. When entering an address, you can fill out all the annoying individual fields, or you just click "Paste Address" and you get a box where you can paste the full address which it parses into the right fields.

flat rate packaging is the best. it's not always the cheapest, but it's the easiest!

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