System 13

A little under a week ago, I ordered three books from amazon.com. Because it was available, I selected their free shipping option. They ended up sending my order in two packages, two books in one, and the other book in a package by itself. The package with two books was carried by the USPS. The second one was carried by UPS.

Both of them had tracking information available at amazon.com. However, neither of them proved to be overly useful. Both of the packages were mailed out on February 25th. On that day, the tracking information showed for both items, “Carrier notified to pick up package” and “In Transit.” From that point on the tracking information was never updated again, until after the packages were delivered. At that point, both tracking pages showed that the packages had delivered.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a rant about how long it took my packages to get here – a few days isn’t bad at all, particularly when you use the free shipping method. This is more of a “Huh?” post. Namely, what’s up with the online tracking of packages? I would assume that the tracking systems for both the USPS and UPS would be similar:

1. Each package gets a unique code, which is entered into a database.
2. Whenever the package is scanned at a location, that location, along with the time, is entered into the database, corresponding to the unique code for said package.
3. If the tracking system is on a closed network, the carriers would need to then upload the information to make the tracking information available online.

Now, assuming the workers at USPS and UPS do their jobs correctly by scanning the packages at occasional checkpoints, one would think that, even when it only takes 2 or 3 days to deliver something, a person would see more than “Carrier notified to pick up package” and “Delivered.” If their databases work similarly to web databases, surely it wouldn’t take longer than a few minutes (ideally, a few seconds or so!) for the information to be entered into the database and thrown onto the web. And, if the databases are offline and the carriers “save up” a large number of updates before updating the online version of the information, surely they would do an update at least a couple of times a day?

Like I said, I’m not ranting. I got my books quite fast and they’re in fine condition, thus, I am a happy camper. It just seems to me that when one looks at instant messages, instant email, and websites that load in half a second, the online tracking systems are either broken, horrendously slow, or someone isn’t doing their job quite right. Can someone who has more of a clue than me explain this to me? Are my assumptions about how the systems work totally off?