I don’t know what the U.S. Postal Service says about theft of packages by its employees, but it does happen. The good news is that I discovered a very effective way to help prevent it from happening.

Let me be the first to admit that this discovery is not based on any kind of intentional test and is not the result of any kind of scientific testing.

I made this discovery rather by accident when I changed the method I used to ship products out to my customers. I have a small online business that requires me to send out small packages to customers.

When I first began sending these packages, I simply slapped an address label on them and took them up to the post office and paid to have then all sent. There were not huge number of packages so it was not all that inconvenient to do it that way.

After a while, business picked up a bit and I decided to look for an easier way to ship my packages. I decided to start using one of the popular online shipping companies that allowed me pay for my shipping right online and print my postage-paid shipping labels here in my office.

It was very convenient to print my shipping labels, stick them on my packages and then just drop them in my mailbox. It costs a bit more than taking them to the post office, but the time I save makes it worthwhile.

Other than the convenience, the biggest change I noticed was that I was not hearing from customers anymore telling me that they never received their packages.

Although it was not an everyday occurrence, hearing from a customer who was complaining that they did not receive their package was not at all uncommon. It happened often enough to make me wonder what the heck was going on.

Was the Postal Service somehow losing my packages? Or, could postal employees being stealing them? There was, of course, no way for me to know. When I contacted the post office to inquire, I was never given a satisfactory answer, but packages were disappearing far too often for me to consider it “normal.”

In my previous experience, something getting lost in the mail is a very rare event. Funny how none of the bills that arrive at my house every month ever get lost. Not once. How could the packages that I am sending to my customers be getting lost so often when none of my ever mail ever seems to get lost?

Well, my eventual conclusion was that my packages were not being “lost” at all. I strongly suspect they were all stolen by postal employees. That would explain why the Postal Service was never able to tell me what was happening to those “lost” packages.

What led me to this conclusion was the fact that packages stopped getting “lost” as soon as I started using the online company for my shipping and it is my belief that it was all because the new shipping labels I am using have a tracking code on them.

The tracking code is used to track the location of the package as it moves through the Postal System. I am guessing that each package is scanned automatically when it enters each postal facility as it travels to its destination.

If this is indeed correct, the tracking code would make it possible to track it to the postal facility where the package disappeared. This, of course, would put the heat on the thieves that work at that particular facility and possibly result in Postal Inspectors sniffing around looking for them. Just what crooks like that don’t want see.

Again, this is pure speculation on my part, but it is the best explanation I could come up with when I saw my problems with “lost” packages completely stop after I started using shipping labels with a tracking code. To this day, I have not heard a single report of a lost package.

So, my advice to anyone shipping an important package through the U.S. Postal Service would be to make sure you use a tracking code. In my experience, it increases the chances that your package will reach its destination without being “lost.”

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