Tracking not updating - thoughts?

Yeah, you're pretty much spot on. USPS tracking is honestly one of the worst for this kind of stuff. I've had plenty of orders where the tracking just sits at "Pre-Shipment" or "Label Created" for three or four days, then suddenly it's out for delivery. They skip scans all the time, especially at regional distribution centers. Sometimes it'll hit the origin hub, then nothing until it reaches the local post office – and you're left checking like a maniac thinking it fell off a truck.

The thing is, the package is almost certainly moving through the system, just not hitting those barcode readers. USPS relies pretty heavily on manual scans at sorting facilities, and if a package slips through on a conveyor belt or gets stacked in a bin that bypasses the scanner, it won't update until the carrier manually scans it at delivery. The big hubs – like a regional distribution center or a network distribution center – are the most common spots for missed scans because they're moving thousands of parcels an hour.

Packaging-wise, this usually isn't a durability issue — USPS mostly just tosses envelopes and small packages into bins, so as long as your label is secure and the package isn't flimsy, it should survive the ride. Customs-wise, that's a whole different beast, tbh. If this was an international order, the tracking gap might be because it's sitting at customs or going through an ISC (International Service Center), where they often don't scan inbound parcels promptly. But if it's domestic, it's just USPS being USPS.

So yeah, I'd still give USPS a decent shipping-speed rating on the ground — they're usually on time once it's in motion — but their tracking reliability is easily a 2/10. I'd say give it another day or two before you start worrying. Nine times out of ten, it'll just pop up at your doorstep without any warning.

Happened to me, showed up 2 days after the last update