Rant #2 of 2018

The postal service sucks and it's ruining the online shopping experience. 

Have you noticed how horrible of a job the USPS/FEDEX/UPS services are doing with delivering packages that you paid so much money to be delivered? No? Well, I have because as a business owner and an assistant and a traditional human being, I often find myself waiting in line at the US Post Office in Harlem or in Midtown Manhattan. In fact, I've spent hundreds of minutes waiting in line to send and retrieve packages from all over the world. And I'm sick of the horrible customer service ( an exception with the lady with the long nails at FDR Station building)! Why even waste ink on my receipt to ask me "How Are We Doing?" in a survey that you're probably not going to read. These past few years, it has been a struggle trying to conduct business when there's always something going wrong. 

First of all, sending the zine out to buyers has been like a game. When I started distributing the zine, I often found myself at the post office in mild panic attacks. My first zine was printed by a company in Philly and when it was time to ship the final product, not only did it cost be $40 due to weight but also due to inflated expedited costs. I was lucky enough to be home all day to receive the package but it was still a headache trying to get my first zines in my sweaty hands. The years following the foundation of the zine, it has been nothing but "oh no's." Some buyers never received their zines, USPS takes weeks to deliver packages abroad, and UPS doesn't have an empathy when it comes to plants delivered in boxes. 

Let me take another paragraph to explain the time my monthly fresh follower delivery was sent to North Brother Island because I wasn't home to sign for the package. Because don't you know it was a Friday and the UPS people sent my fresh flower shipment to a warehouse this is closed over the weekend?! So when Monday finally rolls around, my fresh flowers that have been boxed without sunlight for at least 4 days finally get to my hands. I think I took off work to make sure I'm home. The flowers look OK thanks to Enjoy Flowers, past client of mine.