
When Mail Takes a Wrong Turn
Have you ever tracked a piece of mail and noticed it seems to be taking a not-so-direct journey? This sometimes happens when the Postal Service mistakenly sends mail to the wrong facility. But why does this happen, and how often?
We sought to answer those questions in a recent audit report. Mail can get misrouted for several reasons. For example, postal employees may forget to remove old routing labels from reusable trays and bags. Or mail bins fill up at sorting machines, and the overflow can obstruct the mail chute, pushing incoming mail pieces into bins for other destinations.
The Postal Service, it turns out, does a pretty good job of routing the mail, especially considering the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Less than 0.2 percent of First-Class Mail letters were misrouted. We did, however, identify a few best practices the Postal Service could implement nationwide. These include managers communicating with each other when mail is misrouted to the wrong facility and adding extra containers next to high-volume ZIP Code bins so employees can easily replace the full bins.
These and other measures should help keep mail on the most direct route from sender to receiver.
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I'm not sure why it happens but it has to considered sloppy or just hiring people ill-suited to do work that requires precision or specificity. It would seem to me that with all the dollars shoveled into the USPS we could manage to round up a few people who could actually do a reasonable job instead of what we have now, which is completely slipshod. I'm glad I've managed to screen capture the tracking detail so when I finally get a return call from USPS I can complain about why my package got rerouted 200 miles away from me after it finally got to my town and hence probably another 3 days until it gets back here again.
I'm not impressed with the usps...to say the least.
Why do they keep sending stuff off in the wrong direction? This happened last year when a NJ co. sent me something. It went to Columbus dist. center then got sent to Key West FL for 3 days!!! That was 2 day overnight shipment as well.