The times my bags beat me are typically for the domestic final return leg of an international flight. I might enter the US at IAD, and my bags typically make it out on the very next flight, a flight I couldn't have managed to make myself. At SFO, such bags are usually just outside the locked cage at the back of the baggage claim area. Sometimes they have somebody bring them to the proximity of the appropriate carousel. On one occasion it appeared that my bags didn't travel across the pond with me, taking the direct CDG-SFO instead of my CDG-IAD-SFO routing. Don't recall why I was pretty sure that was the case, knowing that it's not supposed to happen that way.