everything in the united states has noticeably declined in the last few years

I was a USPS worker for about 80 days until I got fired for smacking my mirror on a tree

The volume of work is insane as are the standards you’re held to. They tell you you’re guaranteed one day off a week and then take it away because there’s not enough people.

They get on you for being too slow but then also say safety first and safety is no excuse for being slow

Minimal training, the driving “training” was basically “do you already know how to drive this thing” and overall just not a lot of support.

So of course this shit happens.

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(text, graphics, videos, etc) are available online through USPS sources… all the repositories are uncurated with out of date material that can be difficult to sort out from current material or just straight up barely functional (ie: Bluetube… USPS’s place to upload videos because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.

it’s been going downhill since they started neoliberalizing it in the 1980s (“running it like a corporation”), which led to the phenomenon we now know as “going postal”

Been a lot longer than a few years, USPS has been in decline for decades. GOP has been fucking them over and over while Dems don’t do shit to stop it or repeal it. Pretty sure Biden left that one piece of shit in charge the entire time. I forget his name, but he was literally the CEO of a logistics company. They want to privatize the whole thing and have talked about it for so long

I’ve noticed a huge decline. My neighbor and I get each other’s mail all the time, as do others in our neighborhood. So there’s an impromptu mail service that starts up after the letter carrier finishes with our street, with everyone hand delivering everyone else’s mail. No amount of complaining to the post office fixes it. They just don’t give a shit. And it’s not every piece. They deliver about 80% of the mail correctly, but there’s almost always one or two pieces in the wrong box. And it’s almost always the same neighbor they get wrong. Like it’s always me and this one guy behind me, and my neighbor across the street and another neighbor near her house, etc.

I do a lot of shipping and letter sending, and I’ve actually not seen much of a systematic decline in reliability or speed in the last ten years or so. The second half of 2020 was a bit of a shitshow after DeJoy started as postmaster, but otherwise I think the service has been running reliably, and I continue to prefer it over private parcel carriers.

Wow I’ve never heard of it taking that long before. I have had a couple things recently get delayed upwards to a week.

There has been a noticeable decline in the past three or so years, yes. I’ve had a number of packages entirely lost, including my new passport (!!!). The reason frequently cited is that same “undeliverable address” issue you posted about, despite yes the address being 100% correct.

D61 nailed it in their comment, and sounds like they’ve been through it first hand; and unfortunately FourteenEyes too… and take my word with a grain of salt lol this is all second/third hand. My dad was a rural carrier then postmaster ~ 1980s-~2010s. On the crashing note - I think one of his colleagues had at least a few duis before they fired her lol but that was usually driving in their own car with the light on top so maybe the standards are different. I digress though.

There was restructuring in the 70s and then more and more- the gov determined the USPS needs to turn a profit - and rather than doing so through diversifying into things like postal banking (they used to cash checks, do wire transfers etc) the gov sought to increase volume via subsidized junk mail, and applied austerity elsewhere. They’re also restricted on how they set rates - which has fucked them since the boom of e-commerce- but I’ll get back to that.

Basically all of the smaller rural stations were consolidated to regional hubs, routes became longer, but staffing didn’t adjust for that. They also didn’t adjust infrastructure as most of the transportation is contracted I believe - so with the increase in e-commerce they’re trying to move exponentially more through the same old systems. If the gov would’ve decided to double down on infrastructure development like Amazon has done (with subsidies obvi) - maybe even nationalize it (!?) - they could have a highly efficient system which sustains itself. But again I digress.

They’ve basically just ripped all of the copper out of the walls - so yes - the lights don’t work great.

The 75-year-old guy who works alone at our tiny post office informed me a few days ago that I had to change my post office box because it had actually closed over a year and a half ago and he had neglected to tell me about it during this time because “there were just too many people coming and going.” It’s maybe not completely his fault because I neglected to fill out the form saying that we were still using the box…but damn, I wish we had known that my neglect was going to get us fucked like this, and when I called USPS for some kind of explanation they told me that our post office box was too big and that we never should have had it anyway (we’ve had it for eight years). The old guy at the post office told me we could rent it for, like, $200 a year. Totally bizarre. So now we have to change the shipping information for all the fucking companies that still insist on sending us paper mail.

We also get other people’s mail now all the time. I thought it was grandpa’s fault but I guess it’s a regular thing based on the comments here. What’s also kind of strange is that I went to that guy’s house for my job and it’s a huge fucking gorgeous house in the middle of the woods. Why is he working at this post office? Why isn’t he retired?