Some Christmas gifts found that their gifts did not arrive in time for the holidays despite asking weeks in advance.
SAN RAMON, California. Some who mailed gifts for weeks earlier this year found they didn’t act early enough as Christmas came with their gifts caught in transit.
The U.S. Postal Service said on its website that it “experienced unprecedented volume increases and limited employee availability due to the impacts of COVID-19.”
Austin Race of Grand Rapids, Michigan, placed an online order on Nov. 30 for a die-hard collector’s model of a NASCAR race car. He had not reached his father after the postal service passed through his neighborhood on Thursday night, although he was informed on Dec. 8 that he was being sent by two-day priority mail.
His gift was in Opa-locka, Florida, the last time he checked the tracking number, about 1,200 miles south of where he asked for it in Mooresville, North Carolina. Race, 21, resigned himself to telling his father he will have to wait a little longer for his gift.
“I understand the situation, but it’s still a little frustrating,” he said.
Joanna Goldstein ordered Christmas ornaments online on November 17 for her 10-year-old son’s football coach and for her son’s friend. He thought it was long enough to get from a store about 128 miles from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Everything went well on December 11 when he received a notice from the postal service that the ornaments had been received in Columbus, Ohio.
But then the package made a trip through the distribution centers of Warrendale, Pennsylvania, Grand Rapids, Michigan and Lansing, Michigan, before apparently getting stuck in Detroit.
On Wednesday, he received another notice that the delivery would be later than initially planned. His son was angry, but Goldstein takes it easy.
“Last week I felt frustrated thinking,‘ Come on, get here, ’but now I’m kind of laughing,” he said.
He told his son that the ornaments will hang on the tree next year and that they will have a story to tell about the long journey they made during the pandemic.