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A lot of comments locally about the erratic mail delivery - sometimes 10am, sometimes 5pm, sometimes a day late and often wrong address. The answer from those talking to the delivery folks is that they are very understaffed - go figure, right?
Is home mail delivery so important that it is needed M-S? Would M/Th, Tu/Fr, W/Sa work just as well - or M/W/F and T/T/S depending on your neighborhood?
Seems it wouldn't take any longer to deliver 2 or 3 days of mail one time than 1 days worth. This could reduce the number of carriers needed, reduce the number of vehicles, and certainly the amount of fuel used. I know USPS isn't the most popular 'government' service, but that's not a reason to help them out some.
It does take longer to deliver multiple days worth of mail per delivery point, especially to routes with higher concentrations of centralize deliveries as opposed to door to door, but not double the time. So going to say odd even might take an average route 9 hours a day instead of two eight hour days. However the wildcard is the parcel load for those who delivery is on an off day. The "baby chicks and medications for our veterans" still has to go out and since the service has no ideal what is in the package if it is other than media mail that currently takes about 4 hours for most routes if done alone and not riding along with letter delivery.
Which brings that 9 hour day, if the routes remain the same size, to a potential 13 hour day with a 12 hour OSHA limit for drivers. With ever increasing amount of parcels coming that 4 hours to deliver just parcels is going to increase and thus the base route to deliver letters will have to be cut in size
I recently posted that it took USPS 27 days to deliver an AT&T bill that I mailed weeks before it was due......it still got there late.
We never pay anything late, always early, so no more mailing bill payments for us.
Our mail gets here late, as late as 8PM sometimes if at all.
Receiving someone else's mail, often from not even the same street is common., very common.
Seems to me that incompetence is a big part of their problem nowadays.
I live in a small town in CO. My water bill must travel hundreds of miles to NM by truck to be sorted then trucked back to town and put in my PO box takes 8 days lots of time and gas to travel 2 blocks.They no nothing of how to run a business and should be over hauled top to bottom.
As for the late night deliveries that is done to accommodate the reporting of its being done "today". So carriers who get to your business at 9:00PM still delivered your mail on time even if it was 3 hours after you closed. For the record we know of one route in my district which had carriers out at 2:00 AM to meet a "today" mandate.
The pressure to deliver "today" sees to it that starting times, thus ending times, pushed later and later so more pieces can be run through the machines and the dispatch trucks are held to the absolute last second. One of the Postmaster General's reforms was to stop that practice but it was seen as a political maneuver.
A simple solution is to reinterpret when the day begins, like is done in the Jewish calendar. When the sun goes down it is no longer today but tomorrow. Thus the incentive is to send the carriers out in daylight rather than wasting daylight to meet the "today" mandate. Just as the USPS week starts on Saturday and not on Sunday like it does for the nation the delivery day could start at 6PM and thus the pressure would be get it before the sun goes down, rather than before the sun comes up the next morning.
Is de Joy still in charge? Or did they manage to get him out? He is the cause of slow mail in the past few years.
Yes PMG DeJoy is still in charge and delivery units, especially in higher cost of living areas do not have full staffs and folks are not willing to take the job as $19/hr might be good in Mississippi but not in D.C, L.A., or N.Y.C. and the pay structure with no adjustments for the local cost of living predates President Nixon and the Post Office Department becoming the Postal Service.
About 10 years ago to get their union members parity in pay with letter carriers the American Postal Workers Union gave up career status for newer employees and an arbitrator forced the same structure of second tier half benefit workers on the carrier contract. And thus when the labor shortages started to manifest the golden egg, the federal workers benefit package was no longer there as an incentive to hire staff.
Even before COVID we were seeing early retirements with no replacements due to overwork without replacements coming because a the absolute minimum wage with benefits to get someone to work in New York suddenly didn't have benefits attached. Then bang here comes the parcels as other services limited what they would accept and raised their prices the postal service did not have such flexibility.
So the service had one option force those on the payrolls into ever increasing hours. Beyond being forced 12 hours a day and having off days cancelled for 2 years the current fight is extending to Sundays as carriers are being mandated to carry packages for Amazon and using up to 12 of their 60 hours for the week on Sunday leaving units unable to deliver to all routes come Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Would storage of mail to be delivered 3 times a week be an issue?
For the past month, including Christmas the mail has been delivered within 3 days of mailing.
But for the past few years, most have taken weeks. There are a few pieces that were lost forever.
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