Plaidophile

I once had a package go from San Francisco to Nashville to Oakland. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't delivered on time.

I'm kind of bummed about this because I was looking forward to having my new turntable today (up until today it said May 1 was the estimated delivery date). Oh well. It's not like I have much of a vinyl collection to begin with.

For the same reason a traceroute from Raleigh to NYC goes through Atlanta.

Hubs.

Hubs don't explain why it would go to the hub in Sacramento, then be routed to a further-away hub in Reno before being delivered in San Francisco. The only legitimate reasons I can think of for them backtracking is either the Sacramento facility was full (unlikely) or the truck to Sacramento had to leave to Reno before they could get it transferred somewhere else (also unlikely, seeing as how they were able to scan it just fine in Sacramento).

More likely they just fucked up and put the box on the wrong truck.

Hub in Reno is a more major hub?

I'm not defending them, just... well... speculating (you can too).

It'd have to be one hell of a weird-ass scheduling algorithm for 'more major' to overrule 'it's one city over you idiots.'

From what I understand, FedEx's scheduling algorithm involves a lot of "where are trucks/planes already going". Their reasoning is that it's preferable to have a package go in the wrong direction for a bit than to have it sit in a warehouse not going anywhere.

Well I don't have to explain star topology: Sometimes stuff has to go nyah before it goes nyah.

But I agree with the general sentiment in this thread, which seems to be that "where are trucks/planes already going" should be altered to more closely coincide with "where the packages need to go". Maybe a Digg-style algorithm where hubs are upvoted/downvoted. Then all the packages would go to Rick Astley.

Right, reducing warehousing is all well and good, but it's ridiculous to think that there wouldn't be any capacity going from Sacramento to San Francisco, and that they should delay a package by a day, ESPECIALLY when it's just one hop from the end. (Incidentally, the current status is that it's left Reno about 5 hours ago, which means it might or might not be in San Francisco now anyway.)

Also, star topology makes more sense when the physical interconnections between the hubs aren't a bus which happen to share traffic to begin with. (Because, again, Sacramento is on the road from Reno to San Francisco.)

Although I could see something like "oh hey traffic on I-80 really fucking sucks at this time of day but if we send it at night it won't be too bad." When I was driving down to SF from Seattle, the last 3 hours of it were spent in the last 15 miles. I-80 is ridiculous.

Efficiency!


(Note that it was still processed a second time in Sacramento.)

I can see how this would save on fuel costs though, since assuming no warehousing in Sacramento it's better for it to just stay on a truck which is already in circulation and then delay it enough that they don't have to send a truck during I-80 hell hours. In this case they didn't have to deal with crawling I-80 traffic (since it's pretty much empty at 6 AM). So this routing was better for the environment, even if it was slightly more annoying for the fluffy.

Well, it's delivered now, at least. Hm, I wonder if anyone will be selling homemade vinyl records at Maker Faire tomorrow or something. That'd be awesome.