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If you are an old movie buff (and if you are reading this, chances are great you ARE!), then you likely have seen an old western where a cowboy walks into a saloon and the barkeep says "What's your poison?" or "name your poison?" or something similar! Apparently this really WAS something regularly said in western bars starting around 1870, and it was because they knew all liquor was bad for you, and that you were choosing among the "lesser of evils".

The expression later spread to anything similar, like someone asking for a pack of cigarettes, and instead of saying "What brand?", the person behind the counter might say " What's your poison?". The reason I bring this up is because the same is now true of shipping companies! You likely have heard how bad the U.S. Post Office has become, and it is even worse than you can imagine. Here is a link to recent report from the Attorney General of the Post Office investigating how bad things are at the St. Louis branch, and the results are dreadful: https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/kansas-missouri-district-delivery-operations-st-louis-mo-area

And I have no doubt the same is true for EVERY other Post Office in the U.S., because so many of the packages we send through them get scanned when we drop them off and then vanish into their "tracking system", often not to be heard from again for a week, or two or more. You might say, "Bruce, why not switch to UPS or Fed Ex?", but honestly they are doing almost exactly as badly as the Post Office.

And it is not just delivery times. They sometimes mangle packages (with a force no human being could generate) and their once meaningful guarantees (for Next Day and Second Day) are now worthless, and they weasel out of refunding almost every time. And just so you know, trucking companies are often just as dreadful. We recently had a crate sent to us from California, and it took 5 days to make it the first 2,000 miles, but once it arrived in Springfield (just 100 miles away) it took 4 more days to get to us, and we were lied to about where it was over and over!

This is a national crisis, and it is going to get worse and worse until it finally hits "the front pages" and by then lots of mail-order businesses will have been put out of business, and people will say, "Why didn't someone do something about this?". So when people ask me which shipping company I recommend, these days I feel like saying "What's your poison?". The ONE silver lining is that they are almost completely not permanently losing anything, but month long delays are still super aggravating. There oughta be a law!