I thought this was bound to happen due to the sabotage of the post office that is somewhat bipartisan but increased with Trump term 1. But yesterday my grandmother just got a birthday card she had sent to me two years ago returned as “undeliverable” despite the address being correct and the postage paid. And this also caused me to find out that this happened to several other relatives, though without the two year delay, despite the address and postage being definitely correct.
Yes.
A part of the “modernizing” the post office was to close down smaller processing plants and funnel all that mail flow into single larger plants. (Same was supposed to happen with the little post offices in very rural areas… cut offices, cut carrier, make more mail run through fewer offices being handled by fewer people and delivered by fewer carriers). Somehow this was supposed to make the mail run better.
Word on the grapevine is that in some places that did not have larger plants built and staffed, the smaller plants were already scaling back on workers, hours and the sorting equipment.
Retention seems to be a problem. So people who know how to do things retire, quit, or are fired before anybody new has been around long enough to learn everything. While there are several places where instructions (text, graphics, videos, etc) are available online through USPS sources… all the repositories are uncurated with out of date material that can be difficult to sort out from current material or just straight up barely functional (ie: Bluetube… USPS’s place to upload videos because Youtube is blocked on the USPS system… and will take 15 mintues to play a 5 minute video.)
Managment mostly seems to fall into two main camps: “Huge assholes on a power trip” or “Pretty much never around”. So you’ve got a significant portion of the work locations that are either toxic to work at or everybody is just left to their own devices to figure out how to do as much of the job as they can.
Shit, at the office I work at, it used to be that every afternoon a contract driver would pick up all the mail and take it to the local Package and Distrition Center. So you give me your mail today and by tonight it would be at the processing center for sorting, then loaded onto trucks and probably be out on the road the same day. That shit got changed so that anything I’m handed today won’t leave the office until the next morning. So if you drop something off on a Saturday, it will be sitting at my office until Monday morning and won’t get out of the P&DC until Monday evening or Tuesday if the mail volume is high.
Priority Express is only going to make a two day window if you are dropping it off in a major city or very large/high volume office.