Comment by frob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frob | Hacker News Reader

I run a small side business which ships physical goods and I've been seeing similar issues with the "flat rate" priority shipping service from the USPS. These packages are supposed to be delivered to anywhere in the US in 2 to 3 days. When I drop off the box, they will label it with 2-day or 3-day. Since about mid-summer of 2020, those labels are aspirational. I've been tracking by taking to customers I know and the on-time delivery rate is well below 50%. It is not uncommon for 3-day shipments to take 7 days.

Mail issues can also be aggrevated by local policies. I know a former regional postmaster from Wisconsin. I've since learned that during the Scott Walker years, they changed the service in WI so that all mail in the entire state is sorted in Milwaukee. So if I'm up in NW WI and I send a letter to someone a town over, the mail needs to be driven all the way across the state to Milwaukee, sorted there, and then driven all the way back. He says it's making what use to be a 1-day delivery into 3+.

Not sure why you're bringing up Scott Walker, unless it's to take a political cheap shot. The state of Wisconsin is not in the mail business.

I was motivated enough to google the topic as I have WI relatives.

It seems mail the south is sent to Milwaukee, then split the north down the middle and send to Minneapolis or Green Bay

In the process of googling this up, I found some interesting information thats not being discussed... the post office presentations about this topic indicate over the last two decades first class mail volume has decreased about 70%, whereas junkmail has remained about the same. So much as organizations experience growing pains, it seems incredibly likely they will experience shrinking pains.

Certainly, as an older gen-x I remember spending like $5 per month on postage to send hand written personal checks to pay computer generated and mailed bills. Must have been paying ten monthly bills. Now, of course, that's all online and I write single digit of checks per year and use so little postage I now buy individually at time of use.

This isn’t just the postal service being neglected. The entire global supply chain took a supply hit in COVID at the same time that demand went through the roof. UPS and FedEx struggle too.

My side business in Wisconsin uses USPS too. For many years I found that regular first class mail was just as fast if not faster than priority mail, with the added benefit of charging by the ounce for packages under a pound.

Meanwhile, I'm also working my day job from home, so I get a lot of stuff delivered, and from what I can tell all of the delivery services have delays right now. This includes DigiKey and Mouser, two of the most reliable suppliers on the planet.

I'm not sure Scooter is responsible for this one.

That’s strange as everything around here gets sorted in St Paul. Mail used to be sorted at the local post office (many still have the “local” and “long-distance” mail slots but they go into the same bucket) but even now they usually route to the closest sorting facility.

Maybe the very NW is lucky and can use St Paul. I know that places like Madison and Plattville go to MKE and back. It seems we did indeed close the Madison sorting facility in '14 as well as other supporting regional facilities. As part of this Eau Claire moved their ops to St Paul. https://madison.com/wsj/business/u-s-postal-service-to-close...

Thanks for the info!

There was that whole situation with people voting by mail in unprecedented numbers and an ongoing generation defining pandemic that resulted in a shift from retail to online shopping. On top of continued attacks on the USPS by politicians training for lobbying careers.

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