Like I said in a previous post, if you are getting a lot of miss-delivery's take a good look at your home and mailbox. On the approach can a carrier see your house number from the street?
On my route I have 2 gangs of mailboxes, both are in safe locations, virtually no traffic other than the people who live there. Normally it is safe to leave packages hanging at these locations and the customers are fine with it. But we have had some thefts in the area so the Postmaster has nixed hanging anything even with the customers OK. With both of these the houses are pretty much extended families. I, when I got the route 5 years ago I left notes asking that they mark the houses so I could bring packages back. Out of the 9 mailboxes in one location I now know the houses that go with 6 of the 9. The other has 6 and only one complied with my request. They are now getting notices and they can trot themselves to the PO to pick up their packages if I don't 100% know it is the right house.
If you are shipping items to zone 5-8 it can get expensive, that's when you really need to know how to use the Flat Rate and Regional Rate mailers.
True Amazon has a contract with USPS but it really isn't much better (with the exception being Sunday delivery) than FedEx and UPS has. The main difference being Amazon needs to contact each PO and let them know arrival times. They have to get there by 8am to get same day delivery in most areas. Like most here on the boards know, I am a rural carrier. I can and have left Amazon packages due to them just not fitting in my Jeep, scanning them available for pick-up. They can either pick them up or wait until I can fit them or there is a LLV available for a clerk or our Postmaster to run it out. I have never been "hollared" at because I can't fit a package. I would however be written up I am sure if I tried to get around the route with an unsafe load. There have been plenty of times I could have added packages to my Jeep but this would have meant that I had no use of my mirrors at least for awhile.
