Online Orders

Unfortunately for you to see what prompted this rant you would need my password, which I'm not willing to give since I have a lot of personal information on my amazon profile. You'll have to do with personal experience with amazon, or you can imagine it I'm sure.

I ordered the flip camera on amazon.com thinking that, ordering it a week in advance with regular shipping, I would have it before class met again. As I go through and check my order multiple times a day, however, I am finding each day for the last three days that my camera still has not shipped. It seems I will have to pay the extra $10.98 for two day shipping to have any chance of receiving the camera next week, and it still isn’t expected to be received until September 16. Since today is September 11, I wasn’t aware that two business days came about on the 16th.
But all of this got me thinking about how tracking packages has evolved. I do almost all of my shopping online anymore since our only outlets are JC Penny and WalMart, which don’t exactly provide choices. When I want something really fast I still won’t pay for the extra shipping because let’s face it; I’m poor. However, I track my packages religiously. How did they stand it when mail became mobile in the first place? No tracking, actually no real knowledge that anything was actually on it’s way. Who puts that information into the systems so that we can track what city our package is in? Evidently they just scan the number and bar code assigned to each package when it comes in and when it goes out so that when we put in the code they gave us with our order, or in the e-mail they send after the order is complete, it shows when it showed up and when it left again. The system is pretty amazing overall, and still completely slow and unreliable in the United States Postal System, or even starting with the original supplier; as in this case.
Speaking of slow mail, how’s this for inefficient?

http://keloland.com/NewsDetail6162.cfm?ID=0,72439