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byuu's SNES preservation project: $10k in EU games missing in post. Update: Found!

EmiPrime

Member
byuu shouldn't feel obliged to reimburse the collector. He's not the one who sent $10K worth of SNES games by regular airmail post with an incorrect value on the customs label instead of by courier.
 
USPS seems borderline criminal with how they handle lost postage. At the very least, it's incredibly unprofessional and should be subject of some type of BBB review.

I think USPS was the ONE time I started yelling at an employee, ever.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
USPS seems borderline criminal with how they handle lost postage. At the very least, it's incredibly unprofessional and should be subject of some type of BBB review.

I think USPS was the ONE time I started yelling at an employee, ever.

Maybe the Republicans are right to try and destroy it?
 
I'm trying to get in touch with Byuu as I've got a dude who works for USPS that is a "fixer". But we can't do anything without the tracking number.
 
Unfortunately, USPS loses shit all the time. Even if it's less than 1/1000 that's still thousands of parcels a day. If something is worth lots of money, you insure it for the full amount that it would take to replace. I just shipped about $2,000 worth of Magic: the Gathering cards yesterday. I over insured them by $50 just to be safe (and more so to have a round number). It cost me about $30 in total to ship the package 2-day. Was it a lot of money to ship a package? Absolutely, but it's nice to know that I'm not stuck holding the bag if the package is lost.

Dude in my experience that is NOT an expensive package, especially at 2 days haha

I just spent £190 to ship a large Nintendo Wii bundle to Laos from the UK.

Rule of thumb - if the postage cost is a tiny fraction of the £10k this guy just lost - you'd be a moron not to go for it
 

Bit-Bit

Member
I would get packages delivered to my work from Amazon a few years ago. Then a year or two ago, Amazon switched over to USPS and all of a sudden my packages went missing. Fuck USPS
 

dani_dc

Member
Seems shady. Seen enough shit in my life to doubt the credibility of this story.
As someone who has sent a bunch of games only for the package to arrive with a few games missing, I don't find anything shady about this.

Chances are someone stole this package.
 

Paragon

Member
I really hope that this can be recovered.
Byuu has said that he wanted to be hands-off as to not "bother" the shipper, but unless you kick up a stink about it, it's unlikely for anything to be recovered.
If it's really valued at $10,000 that's not petty theft, that's a serious offense.
If it has been stolen, whoever did so probably had no idea of its actual value.
They might have thought it was something like one of those job lots of 100 games for $100 off eBay.
I don't know how USPS does things, but there would be an internal investigation opened here if a package valued at that much just went missing.
It might magically turn up as a "misplaced" parcel in a corner of the warehouse one day once word of that got out.

Though I think it's unlikely for a package this size, it is also possible that it's been misplaced instead of destroyed/stolen.
Just last week I had a parcel delivered to me that was nine months late, and assumed to have been lost. Nothing like this expensive/important though.
There was no explanation for it, it was just delivered as usual along with the rest of my mail.

Unfortunately this may prove to be a very expensive lesson learned for shipping expensive items.
Make sure that they are going via registered mail, and make sure they are insured for the full amount.
If insuring a package for more than $2500 made it too expensive, you should have split it into multiple packages if that worked out cheaper.

Don't give up hope yet, assuming that it's been stolen and is unrecoverable just because it's 10 days late.
 

OmegaX

Member
I have packages arrive 7 months after they were sent using regular mail. If you want something to arrive quickly you have to pay for expedited shipping or use a different carrier like Fedex or DHL.
I think the package may still arrive on its own. A couple of times I complained to Amazon when my package took more than 3 months to arrive, and they sent the same items again at no cost. You know what happened? The original and the replacement packages arrived on my door on the same day.
If USPS are as incompetent as Serpost (my country's national post) maybe the same thing could happen.

Edit. Wait, he did use DHL and it still got lost? That's not normal. I didn't know DHL handed the package to USPS. I'm pretty sure that when I've received packages sent through DHL, it was them that picked up the package from customs and delivered them directly to my house.
 
As part of my business I often go to auctions for unclaimed baggage/parcels at the airport and unclaimed/undeliverable post.

I'd hazard a bet if someone hasn't nicked it - That's where it'll end up and someone like me will spoil a perfectly good pair of underpants upon discovery.
 

Fox the Sly

Member
Wow... I work for USPS at one of the call centers and hear complaints all the day long about how our company loses packages or scans them with an attempted delivery scan when the item was sitting at the local station the whole time. As both a gamer and a USPS employee hearing this story is incredibly cringe-worthy. Sorry for the fuck up!

Also New Jersey and Florida seem to be the worst for lost packages, particularly the Kearny and Opa Locka facilities, respectively. New York for mail carriers. :(

Edit: Not sure if it was addressed or not, but someone asked if employees know the value of items in the packages. The answer is no. Even internal tracking doesn't show value to us which is why we need receipts and proof of value.
 

notacat

Member
Well that sucks. Why are so many people saying it's an inside job though?

For a bunch of old Snes/Super Famicom games? I mean, that's several generations back at this point. So unless some Neogaffer who's way into collecting them happened to work for USPS and managed to conspire and steal them, i'm going to go with it simply got misplaced.

I love a good conspiracy, but this is kinda pushing it.
 
Wow. I feel bad, but what a bonehead.

I work in an industry that produces everyday, boring items and we would never send a $10K order FedEx or UPS, let alone USPS.
 
A huge loss to the community honestly, hopefully in a few months/years he will find a way to get back into it in a more secure way.
 
Insuring things like this isn't really a fix all, the games are valuable because even if you have the money it's hard to find good copies of them, so insurance would only mitigate the economic loss.

As to what Byuu was doing he's trying to get a complete set of dumps of all SNES games including manuals and boxes for preservation. I believe he already did this for US SNES games. So if someone was implying Byuu nicked them , that is incredibly unlikely, he's reliably handled money and rare games for preservation purposes before (eg decapping the special SNES chips to actually allow for accurate emulation).
 
Ugh. Everything about this is painful. Fucking USPS AGAIN! They've lost valuable cartridges for me, as well, when people have chosen to ship them to me via USPS. I usually try to avoid them at all costs.
 

PrimeBeef

Member
I would never risk 10k worth of rare games over regular postal services.
Better courrier? I have had more damaged parcels, late parcels, and drivers sitting in front of my house writing up sorry we missed you slips instead ok knocking because my car was in the garage from UPS and FedEx.

If they insured the package through USPS, it has to be scanned when it changes location. So they should know who had it last. They are also pretty vigilant in investigating stilen/missing mail/parcels. They may not find the parcel if ut was stolen, but they will find the one responsible.
 

OmegaX

Member
Considering what I've heard of Yodel I wouldn't even trust the tracking one bit and so the whole "it has to be in New Jersey, it arrived there" might be a red herring though sometimes it's better not to know as I've also seen when these international shipments go horribly wrong and end up on some massive detours.
That happened to me once. From USA, to Philippines, back to USA, and then finally to Peru. The worst part was that they didn't bother updating the tracking information all the time the package was lost on Philippines until it was back on the USA so I didn't know where the fuck it was for months.
 
Delivery couriers the world over are a law unto themselves

tCxm8Z0.jpg

how does this even happen lol
 

Head.spawn

Junior Member
Damn, that blows hard. Hope he is able to recover them from USPS somehow, otherwise I'd be more than willing to donate to help pay.

I always thought the whole 'shipping' thing was a little much; I always thought him making just making the trip over would've been a better option. Maybe unrealistic also.
 

Decider

Member
Well that sucks. Why are so many people saying it's an inside job though?

For a bunch of old Snes/Super Famicom games? I mean, that's several generations back at this point. So unless some Neogaffer who's way into collecting them happened to work for USPS and managed to conspire and steal them, i'm going to go with it simply got misplaced.

I love a good conspiracy, but this is kinda pushing it.

Wow... I work for USPS at one of the call centers

Fox the Sly, eh?
/s
 
With USPS, you get what you pay for. They're cheap for a reason. If something is of high importance, I never ever go with them. Pay the extra money and use UPS or FedEx. They still have their downs, but they are far more reliable than USPS.

Returned a working laptop to Microsoft Store.

Disappeared from the box partway thete. Big hassle.

FedEx. MS store did reimburse eventually but these things happen at all shipping companies.
 

cyberheater

PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
It was insured (1000 Euros) but not for the full amount.
 
Yeah, postal / shipping sometimes sucks. My first imported 3DS arrived months after I'd applied for and received its replacement from Amazon, it had gone from America to Australia via the Netherlands, I can only assume someone misread/typed Australia as Austria.
 

yyr

Member
FWIW...

Back when it came out (2014 I think?) I ordered a project mirai 2 Special Edition from AmiAmi in Japan. I goofed, though, and put in my home address instead of my job. This thing needed a signature, so there was no way it was going to get delivered there. As expected, I got a card at my place one day saying that I should pick it up at the post office.

I brought the card to the post office to pick it up. They took a look and said that they didn't see the package. Huh? But my tracking info says that it's here. They said I should check back in a few days.

Went back there with the card a few days later. They still couldn't find it.

I ordered another one (they were still in stock somehow). It arrived. They still couldn't find the first one, and the tracking info hadn't changed.

Then, magically, 30 days after it had reached my post office, the tracking info changed to say that it was being returned to the shipper since it was unable to be delivered. What?

Sure enough, it made it back to AmiAmi and I got refunded. Weird. But you really never know with USPS. This box might just wind up back where it came from. Might.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
that's such a tragic news.

And he now needs to compensate the guy with the games, I hope he succeed with his his crowdfunding attempt
 

The Big N

Banned
Probably going to end up in a local shop or on ebay. Shit doesn't get "lost".

Although I never worked for USPS, I did work in a FedEx warehouse for a year, and things do get "lost" when a package handler scans the wrong package or forgets to scan a package, and loads it into the wrong truck. The driver will normally return these items, but it is possible the items are got delivered with packages going to a different stop or the driver stole the package as he knows the package was never scanned onto his/her truck. Obviously, if the box was opened its not impossible for someone to try and steal the contents but these warehouses have security you need to pass through every time you enter/leave the building. Long story short is the USPS screwed up and they should have to pay for the contents of the items lost.
 
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