This was provided to us by our good friends at Impact Miniatures... Now we know why our international shipping was taking longer.
USPS Shifting Mail From Air Cargo to Sea Transport (5/16/2020) On May 15, USPS send 22 containers to Europe, the largest shipment to date. Please read more about this shipment here.
Due to limited air cargo capacity, the U.S. Postal Service is shifting select mail from air transport to sea transport in an effort to move mail from the U.S. to international destinations. Typical Priority Mail shipments that usually take about 7 to 10 days will now take about 4 to 6 weeks if the service is available to the destination country.
If a mail item shows on USPS tracking as having left the United States, under normal circumstances, the U.S. Postal Service has no further visibility on that item until a transit country or the destination country provides updated tracking information to its system.
In some cases, it is possible to get more updated tracking by using the destination country’s postal service online tracking tools if the item has entered the country.
This is especially true if the shipment has delivery or routing error, delays, or exceptions as the comments on the country’s postal system may provide more information on the status of the mail items than the update transmitted back to the USPS.
Furthermore, tracking scans of individual mail pieces typically only occur at the local and regional pickup locations, when the parcel enters a country’s customs facility, and at the local or regional destination locations. For tracking information in between these locations, mail pieces are typically tracked in groupings packed inside cargo containers.
There are probably thousands of cargo containers with mail spread all over the world sitting at airport facilities and transit stations waiting to be processed to their next destination.
It will likely take weeks (or months…?) for some mail pieces to move again once these operations resume and cargo capacity becomes available to continue the transit of the cargo containers.
Brian and the Midkight Heroes Team.