Moving the Mail Through COVID
After the White House issued an emergency declaration regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in late winter of 2020, many people began working from home. But like others deemed essential, U.S. Postal Service employees continued reporting to work. The mail had to keep moving; critical items such as medications, stimulus payments, and Social Security checks became even more important.
In a recent audit we looked at how well the Postal Service was able to move mail during the early stages of COVID. We found that despite unforeseen and uncontrollable challenges — higher package volumes and increased employee absenteeism due to the pandemic, among others — Postal Service management modified normal mail processing, customer service, and delivery operations well enough to mitigate the impact of the pandemic during the early stages.
We also found USPS generally coordinated and communicated regularly with commercial mail customers, conducting weekly meetings to inform the industry of any operational changes that impacted mailer operations. Additionally, management launched a COVID-19 Response Email Campaign reassuring commercial customers of minimal disruption.
We did find some things that could have been done or formulated better, such as the process for alerting delivery units of late arrivals from mail processing and distribution centers. And we identified opportunities to improve the process for prioritizing the delivery of postal products for medical purposes and to enhance the employee availability dashboard by including rural carriers. But the good news is while mail may have been slowed during the onset of the pandemic, it did indeed keep moving — and fairly well, all things considered.
We are continuing our work on service issues in certain harder hit areas and throughout the incredibly busy holiday mailing season. Additionally, in separate audit products we have analyzed or are reviewing impacts of operational changes and the performance of the Postal Service surrounding the election.
What has been your experience with the Postal Service during the COVID crisis? Have you seen consistent performance or has performance improved or declined with the continuing impacts of the pandemic?
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First class mail used to carry a 1-3 day if under 3lbs now it has been bumped up to 20-30 days when did this happen
Priority Mail used to carry 2-7 days s/h and is now 10-20 days and yet when you goto the post office there is no mention of this anywhere, and along with that Signature Confirmation is not used by the Post Office during the COVID that is currently in effect, How do i know this because i sent a customer a $7,000 PC and paid for s/h with $5,000 insurance as that was the limit i could purchase and with signature confirmation, upon delivery i received a text message stating my package had been delivered and so i sent that message to the customer his response was, that's impossible i'm at work, and there is no one home, he left work and got home and sent me a pic of the computer sitting next to his garage............ USPS is doing nothing for its customers and i am stopping from using them PERIOD.
Move in a week. What going on
I have a child been. Waiting on this package. For two weeks
Poor customer service
It not good.
Also, I live about 60 miles from a distribution facility and the local Post Office is about 3 miles from me. It has been taking at least 2-3 days for items to go from regional to local and more than just a few packages has been or are in limbo for more than 3-4 days.
I get the feeling that employees are causing these delays on purpose ( I am fairly vocal about the quality of service from usps).
Flash forward almost a year with the average day starts at 6:30 AM. We take about 30 minutes to load up what large parcels are available. Since they take up so much cargo space, we have to move them to have room for the normal mail load. It takes about and hour to deliver those at the crack of dawn and when then return to prepare our routes for the 8-hour basic day. However, while those large parcels were being delivered the truck from Amazon arrives with another load of large pieces, so we are running near 10 hours to complete a route. Due to staff shortages from quarantines and now injuries from falling in the dark we are also tasked to carry half of another route, in the book that is 3 hours putting us at a 13-hour day when we are supposed to be limited to just 12 hours. Now because the route is vacant there is an extra heavy parcel load and/or heavier than normal mail because the route had been skipped for days awaiting an available carrier, so they plan on that 3 hours to take 4 or more hours after this years’ experience. Which brings the base day to 14-hours. And in the end many still do not finish and bring back part of the routes and then you get the false stop the clock scans as the news of the just added delivery day option on our scanners has not made it down to closing supervisors