My Ike Dollar's U.S. Summer Tour 2020
mcarney1173
Posts: 927 ✭✭✭✭✭
I purchased an 1976-S Silver Ike PCGS 69DCAM on eBay at the end of June. Little did I know that the coin would have more exciting travel plans this summer than me. What's the strangest journey you've seen your coin travel?
As you read the journey this coin was on, keep in mind that I live in PA about 15 minutes from Center City Philadelphia.
-Item purchased June 27th on eBay
-June 29th: item ships from Pennsylvania about an hour and a half from where I live.
-July 10th: Processed through USPS facility in Jersey City, NJ
-July 11th: Arrival at USPS facility Philadelphia, PA
-July 11th: Processed through USPS facility in West Palm Beach, FL
-July 13th: Arrival at USPS facility Philadelphia, PA
-July 14th: Arrival at Local USPS facility
-July 14th: Out for Delivery
-July 14th: Re-scheduled for next day delivery
7/14 UPDATE: This afternoon, USPS delivered an empty bubble envelope. Large gash in the back. Ridiculous
(P.S. This is meant to be a light-hearted story about a very strange USPS mail route that my coin is currently on. This is not meant to minimize the stories of forum members whose valuable coins have been lost in the mail, damaged, or stolen. If this is a common occurrence in the USPS than I clearly don't know much about the postal service. I hope you found this as humorous as I did.)
Comments
this sort of thing isn't limited to the USPS, I think it involves logistics and what the cheapest way is to do something. of course, it could be due to an error by someone.
I remember when I was in the Navy, home in the Cleveland, Ohio area on leave for a few weeks. when I called to book a flight back to Seattle, Washington the cheapest ticket was one that routed me with changes down to Atlanta, over to Texas or Omaha and then up to Seattle. I paid extra and got a direct flight with a brief layover in Chicago, never had to leave the plane.
A few years ago I was booking Seattle to Philadelphia. The cheapest flight was Seattle to Chicago to Philadelphia. At five times the cost was Seattle to Portland to Anchorage to Chicago... for the same flight to Philadelphia. Itinerary was only an extra 16 hours.
For the USPS, the vast majority of the time they get it right. On rare occasion it goes wrong (bad routing), and on much rarer occasion, like here, it's downright awful. I'm guessing the damage and misrouting are tied to each other somehow--package goes to the wrong place, gets damaged, can't be ready properly, goes somewhere random, gets worse, etc...
A few months ago a package I sent took around a month to arrive, and that after a long period where the tracking didn't update. Buyer asked for a refund and said he didn't want the coin anymore, so I told him to just put RTS on the package when he got it. He emailed me when it finally arrived to say it came with the label mangled so it could barely be read and just put it right back on the mail. I'm assuming I'll never see it again, but appreciate his forethought in checking to make sure there was a readable address somewhere on the package...
I had a coin going to Australia that spent a good two weeks in Saudi Arabia
Send it on a Summer vacation trip by mail to CA so PCGS can consider upgrading it PR70DCAM! 😂
Wondercoin
These stories appear from time to time... even my wife had a package that crossed the U.S. twice before arrival (origin NJ, destination NYS)....However, statistically, with the millions of mail/packages handled daily, the USPS still does a good job... Beats the Pony Express
Cheers, RickO