Anyone else having trouble with the US Mail?

[meyatt]

Originally Posted by David Kirk

We are having issues with local pick up/delivery of mail. I think on average we have mail service 3 days a week due to a severe labor shortage in the area. For the past few weeks the gentleman delivering our mail has been a New Yorker who is working here as a temp and making a more money that he otherwise would.

dave

USPS pays temp workers from November (sometimes mid-October) until the beginning of January to deal with the excess of holiday packages. They've done this for quite a long time and the temp hourly wage is generally pretty decent.

A non-trivial issue is in 2006 they passed the The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. It forced the USPS to pre-fund more than $120 billion in retiree healthcare and pension liabilities. They undid this in 2022, but services were largely decimated by the change. They were set up for lettered mail, not the package economy Amazon created.

My dad carried mail for 15 years and worked in maintenance operations another 30 years. He started and it was a fairly stable job with benefits, by the time he left it ended up as a common destination for people dishonorably discharged from the military, with bare-minimum staffing and sorting machines from the 1970s.

Postal service funding is regularly raided to pay for other services.

[DfCas]

I get letters sent by banks or businesses that say, in large clear letters, “ Payment Enclosed”. About 2 a year disappear. Got one today.

We live in a townhouse community with a cluster of mailboxes. Its a daily thing on the facebook group asking if anyone got my missing package.

[fiamme red]

I had bank checks shipped to my home. Last Monday the USPS tracking showed that they had been delivered to my mailbox, but they weren’t there when I arrived home. I had to have the checks stopped.

[oliver1850]

Lots of lost packages and contents here in the past year or so. Broken flat rate boxes delivered with USPS "received damaged" tape, missing contents. No luck filing claims despite bringing the boxes to the PO and providing detailed info on missing items. How an 18" 1/2" drive can get "lost" I can only imagine.

[Fat Cat]

Originally Posted by Clean39T

Get used to it. This is apparently what half the country wants. En****ification of everything. Break all public works so the only viable solution is a two-tiered privatized version of the service - the rich get their needs met, the rest of us are left with third-world level access to things that most of us assumed would be there forever.. libraries, public transportation, mail service, hospitals, etc. But the people have spoken. We ARE going back.

Absolutely !


All of those funds for public services are much better off going into a contributor's pocket.
USPS, VA, Social Security, etc, etc ........

[Likes2ridefar]

To add to the pile, unrelated, maybe…

We send international mail back and forth from Europe (CZ specifically) and a few times recently received texts impersonating USPS with clear knowledge of an actual package being sent stating a payment is needed due to customs or some nonsense. My SO fell for it and used her credit card to pay a few cents through the texted link. Thankfully she passed this on very shortly after the occurrence so I stopped the credit card.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by Likes2ridefar

To add to the pile, unrelated, maybe…

We send international mail back and forth from Europe (CZ specifically) and a few times recently received texts impersonating USPS with clear knowledge of an actual package being sent stating a payment is needed due to customs or some nonsense. My SO fell for it and used her credit card to pay a few cents through the texted link. Thankfully she passed this on very shortly after the occurrence so I stopped the credit card.

I get these a few time/year, sometimes I have packages inbound/outbound from EU or China, sometimes I don't. When there is a package, I always have to do a double take.

[GParkes]

I can't say how long ago it was that I sent a payment via mail and it didn't get to the intended destination. USPS had been so reliable. On October 29th I sent a credit card payment (Yes, I still prefer checks to online bill pay) from Albany to Philadelphia. Typically three days...............as of today, check hadn't arrived, not cleared the account. So 17 days. Is it possible mail system flooded during election period with mail in ballots? In Philadelphia? Perhaps, but crazy, still.

GP

[Vientomas]

It's intentional. Defund and decry and DeJoy.