Anyone else having trouble with the US Mail?

[5oakterrace]

In retirement I worked for the post office thinking I was going back to summer job I had 40 years ago. The joke was on me. I quit after 2 weeks. They have a hard time "keeping" new workers.

With Amazon having the USPS deliver packages, many routes had their usual mail, plus all these packages. My trainer has 250 packages one day. She gets paid for 8 hours no matter how long it takes her to deliver. 2-3 days a week she cannot finish in 8 hours. She takes no lunch break. On those days she is working those hours "for free. She has been doing this route for 10 years. She knows it like the back of her hand. If you are "new" you have to know how to arrange those packages in the truck in the correct order to save time. It will take you at least 4 hours longer to do that route than the regular. It will take 6 months for you to get up to "regular" speed IF you can do that route day after day, which never happens.

The post master said their routes should be re-evaluated in which case they would divide them up and add 30 percent more routes to make it manageable. That means adding employees. Has not had a re- evaluation in years

Why doesn't the union step in? Because in some areas Amazon does it's own deliveries in which case the routes are decent. But where Amazon deems it economical to offload onto the USPS, Amazon does not deliver. Maybe the USPS should charge Amazon an arm and a leg to deliver for them.

[lunardds]

Originally Posted by meyatt

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.

My usual mail carrier showed up Monday and told me she is sharing my route with the new temp carriers. She had a stack of mail and said the new carrier is just leaving my mail on the shelf claiming my business is never open. I haven't received any mail since then. Pretty frustrating to say the least.

[Lewis Moon]

Originally Posted by lunardds

My usual mail carrier showed up Monday and told me she is sharing my route with the new temp carriers. She had a stack of mail and said the new carrier is just leaving my mail on the shelf claiming my business is never open. I haven't received any mail since then. Pretty frustrating to say the least.

Twice in the last month packages noted as "out for delivery" didn't arrive until the next day with the reasons being "animal interference " and "blocked access", neither of which was true. We have a camera trained on the mailbox area.
I finally chased down the package marked as delivered, but was not. I went to the PO and talked to a manager. The carrier made a "mistake".

[cash05458]

Originally Posted by meyatt

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.

A rather real and true post right here via actual problems via the USPS. And no one responds to the above but all have their true horror stories about said service.

Have to say, I always enjoy the quarterly rants about bad service, politics and who broke what via these what's wrong with USPS posts. Pretty much everyone outside the service have zero clue as to what is going on, has gone on, will go on. You guys are literally old school tho standing at the complaint counter whether that be at Postal or over at Jc Penny's and the old why can't I get a refund after I lost my receipt crew. That's fine and I worked there for 15 years as a mailman. The same sorta posts come up regularly as well via fedex or ups problems and folks scream that that bottom bracket sent from some guy in north dakota got lost for a few weeks. It's endless no matter which carrier.

I don't say any of that badly or to be insulting. But I do find it humorous after being a mail carrier for so very long. Think of how this economy has changed from brick and mortar via how we mostly get things and amazon and all that jazz and what that entails. I buy online as well and put that pressure on all that. But if you think going from the old model of shopping for ourselves to the new one where we all sit around home and have things brought to us isn't going to have huge problems...huge...then think again.


Personally, I think the folks from all 3 mainly used services do a helluva of job all things considering the burden that has been put upon them. And ridiculous expectations as well. I have been in the trenches with two of those companies and know plenty from my friends I am close to at UPS to tell you that it is a lot more complicated than you folks think. And that these folks work insanely hard to get you your crap. It isn't inattention or doing a bad job or not caring...I will tell you that.

But keep telling your stories of how bad things are when something went awry and slapping that hand down on the counter...I am sure it will go somewhere...