It's possible they use a thrid-party shipping system (Stamps.com, etc) that routes their mail through a regional hub. It may be cheaper in the long run to send the very small amount of orders that ship to a local buyer (who is too lazy to drive to the other side of town ) along with other shipments than to split up the shipment. It's all large scale logistics. The Post Office just needs to re-evaluate its business model. It's costs are too high to support its income - there are two ways to solve this, neither of which is very good, but one of which or a little of both need to be done. UPS/FedEx make money because they simply don't have the overhead that the USPS does - nowhere near as many locations and their core business is the logistics of moving packages, not in posting them. My thoughts? Smaller, single employee Post Offices in grocery stores and/or business stores, like UPS. More online business - the Priority Mail business is fairly well developed. And at some point, we need to eliminate paper mail. It's simply antiquated in our society. The fact you can send a piece of paper across the country for $0.50 or so is simply not economically self supporting anymore. *sigh* Who know's what the answer is...