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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

What's amazing is there's no recourse.

That's pretty much par for course with the USPS. One of the selling points of UPS/FedEx is that they have actual proper customer service (at least for large accounts).

One time a USPS delivery person stole my package.

I know this because the tracking information a USPS clerk looked up for me showed the delivery person marking the package as delivered while being nowhere near the delivery address. In fact, nowhere near an address at all. It was marked as delivered to a street-intersection which houses a vacant field.

The USPS clerk acknowledged this, but said that because there were no other complaints about the delivery person that day, there was nothing they could do.

So it seems like USPS delivery people are literally allowed to steal one item of mail a day.

Maybe he drove off, remembered he had to register your package, and then stopped to register it as delivered. Later a thief took it from your mailbox?

I've seen USPS packages get marked as "delivered" quite a while after they've been physically delivered. Like half an hour later, if not more. Unless it was physically impossible to get to the marked location within that amount of time, I don't think you can assume the timing to mean anything as to its actual delivery.

The issue is not with USPS, but with Customs, a wholly separate government entity.

The sticker their package got links to the United States Postal Inspectors website which indicates this is USPS inspectors rather than an unrelated government agency.

https://www.uspis.gov/about/what-we-do

Unless there's some weird hierarchy I'm not aware of, that is USPIS, not USPS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspectio...

Parent agency: United States Postal Service

That makes me wonder if shipping it via UPS or similar would get them more information?

There's no recourse for anything in the US government or justice system.

You just count your losses if you can't figure it out and accept it + move on.

If you throw too big a fit things can often wind up being made worse for you, out of you being an inconvenience.

Compared to a lot of other places to live, I'm not complaining though.

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