I do not recommend using UPS if you can use anyone else. My first experience using them I had purchased a brand new heavy duty box for about $14. I carefully packed all the things going in there using bedding to pad things that were slightly fragile (and I mean slightly, we are talking sewing box here). When it arrived at my parents home it looked like it had been dropped out of a plane and the handle of the sewing box was broken. Some years later my dad, who is an expert at packaging things, sent me a little thing that was supposed to have a light that comes on when you turn the lights off, it arrived with a piece broken, which was fixable, but the light never came on. Package also looked very abused when it arrived. I also had an incident where I left the signed slip on my door so they could leave the package for me the next time only to return home to a final notice stuck to my door next to the signed one and no package. I was unable to receive that delivery as I did not have transportation to get 30 miles out to the UPS place to pick it up. My room mate also had them do something like that to her where she was at home, expecting a delivery, heard someone on the stairs, waited to hear a knock but no knock, then heard something pat the door. She went to the door and found the sticker and the truck was driving away, he never knocked at all!
I work for USPS, and I can tell you that you cannot possibly imagine the trail packages go through. A typical package can go through the hands of 50-100 people--easy! Mail gets moved in rolling containers that are almost the size of my small bathroom. In order to empty these packages onto a machine, the huge container gets turned upside down and the mail spills onto a conveyor belt. You would not believe the things that come through the mail--from human heads and alligators to individual bananas with an address and postage. Postal life is so crazy that I wrote a book about it! With that said, your experience is pretty bad. USPS processes more mail in one week than Fedex & UPS do combined in one whole year. Yep! You read that correctly. Because of that, we do damage/lose more items than the others, because we do more. The majority of issues I see usually come from customer error though. It is usually them putting wrong addresses, and often they do not package properly. We get helium balloons that are already filled, and blown up beach balls. Something that some people do is to ship items in tupperware containers. It keeps the items from getting crushed, as well as keeps it sealed (you should still use a lot of packaging tape though).
My Uncle worked for the post office for many years too. I have actually never had a problem with USPS, they have always gotten my packages here intact, so I guess even if they are getting dumped, they aren't falling too far. Most of the USPS packages I have gotten are smaller though, that might make the difference.
