The USPS has never been trustworthy in my nearly-50 years living on this earth. The following are all common knowledge among everyone I know:
- never send cash through the mail; a carrier will steal it (same goes for gift cards and really any financial instrument that isn't traceable and imprinted with the identities of the sender and recipient, like a check or money order, that can't be easily cashed by an intercepting third party)
- never send anything important through the mail: a carrier might steal it just in case it's got something valuable in it
- there is no recourse for lost mail; simple stamped envelopes that go missing are simply gone, no refunds, no replacement postage, nothing, while lost packages might get paid lip service (but rarely -- if ever -- a refund or an insurance payout if you're gullible enough to pay extra for it)
- mail you care about may go missing or be inexplicably delayed (again, no refunds or apologies), but by god you can set your fucking watch by the regular arrival of the "pre-sorted postage paid" and "ads on newsprint" garbage they've been paid to stuff in your mailbox for you to throw away without looking at any of it
- nothing important should ever be sent via the postal service except by the overpriced certified mail "service" (so you can at least prove you tried to send something when an adversarial party claims you didn't) -- always send important correspondence via courier if it actually matters to you
- if mail suddenly stops being delivered for days or weeks at a time, they've probably changed something at the local office and didn't bother telling you (and you have to go in-person to find out what changed, why, and how to un-fuck it, and you can count it taking more than one visit)
- all in-person visits to a USPS office will require standing in line for at least 10-15 minutes on a good day or an hour on a bad one; no employee (black or White) will move faster than a snail's pace, know anything at all about their products or services, or be at all interested in actually helping you, but you can count on them having memorized a fantastic list of excuses why they either can't do what you're asking, don't know how to answer your questions, can't find your mail, and why all of that is your fault, you fucking asshole
- no in-person transaction, no matter how simple, will take less than five minutes or involve answering fewer than three marketing questions or other upsells (go buy a book of stamps sometime with cash, time it, and count the number of times they try to sell you other shit while they fish around on their POS to figure out how to begrudgingly conduct a business transaction with as many keystrokes as possible)
- no combination of shipping options (except possibly "Media Mail" if you can actually still get it -- and good luck getting the counter faggots to even admit it still exists or convince them your package is eligible) for any parcel of any kind will cost less than $15 no matter how slow, unreliable, untraceable or otherwise shitty the service is
- no amount of preparation for an in-person request for service will be met with any display of appreciation or thanks for having your own shit in order -- in the contrary, it will offend the counter workers because it means they actually have to do something now (well, eventually, once they figure out there's nothing left for them to complain that you didn't do correctly)
IMHO the USPS is an even more crooked and broken version of Amtrak -- a pseudo-nationalized-yet-somehow-still-private-entity with no viable oversight, accountability or consequences for incompetence, that's guaranteed to be funded no matter how poorly it performs or how much it fucks up.
The only thing that reliably sluices through the USPS is all the fucking junk mail (because it essentially subsidizes everything else and is, as a consequence, their highest-priority business) and the DMV-like contempt its public facing employees display to its customers.
There's a reason nobody trusts the USPS. They're not trustworthy. "Mail-in ballots" have always been a disaster in the making. I'd rather trust the fucking military to deliver my mail to a war zone than the USPS to deliver a postcard to my neighbor.
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