Are you suggesting USPS shenanigans are possible? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.
Quite the opposite.
If you ship two boxes, they don’t stay together. They get loaded in a truck, no thought at all whether they belong together, along with all the other packages received that day. Maybe they are stacked together, maybe not, all the packages just get loaded anyway they can get them into the transport rack.
They get unloaded at the next sorting destination with no thought that they stay together,
all the packages going to that zip code move with them in no particular order.
When they reach any sorting destination they are agglomerated with any other packages going that direction to the next major destination point - just put into the trucks (in a rack, with hundreds of others) with no thought to keeping them side by side.
This continues until they get closer to their final destination, when they are delivered at the last PO along with hundreds of packages going to the same zip code and city. The only time they are together again is when the postman takes them for delivery to your house or when they are placed in a shelf to hold until you get the slip out of your PO Box and redeem them. They may be on the same truck, but there is nothing in the system that says “these two packages belong together”
Every package is handled as a separate package. Robotic sorting machines do most of the work after it’s unloaded from a truck, reading zip codes and addresses and routing them to other packages with the same zip code and city destination. But robots don’t care if these two packages are “together” they just know
all these packages move to the same next sorting facility.
For both packages to be pulled and tampered with would be next to impossible unless it was the last point of delivery, when they may be reunited, but not side by side - they are just in the mix with the other packages, and the final PO workers then deliver them to your house or put the slip in your PO Box telling you they are ready for pickup.
They just don’t stay together through the system like that. Even though they are part of “the same set” the post office treats each one individually, hence separate tracking numbers (the last two are different in each package).
Post office theft would be:
the box missing entirely
or the box ripped open and some of the loose contents missing
Or the box destroyed beyond the point of containing the contents and an empty torn box delivered.
I have had all three of these things happen over the years.
But never the contents replaced with the
exact original shipping weight of the original items.
Why would anyone go to that trouble, especially when an investigation of the above mentioned three scenarios would result in a “sorry, here’s your $100 insurance” and a closed investigation.
Replacing the contents is a sure way to get an investigation going and continuing past the point of “it’s just normal business, stuff gets destroyed sometimes”.
Empty boxes would have done the exact same thing with less suspicion on the postal employee. They would just blame the machinery.