The United States Postal Service is alerting Bay Area residents not to be alarmed if you start seeing mail delivered as early as 5:30 a.m.
The postal service is expecting a huge increase in the number of packages it delivers this holiday season – up to 50 million more than last year’s total, according to a postal service news release.
The busiest week will likely be Dec. 17 to Dec. 23. Workers may process up to three billion pieces of mail that week.
I am a retired Postal supervisor and I have to agree with the idea of restructuring the plant so that carriers are starting earlier and returning earlier instead of trying to deliver mail in the dark. The Postal service is top heavy in administration. Too many supervisors, managers and don’t even get me started on plant personnel. The plant wants to get their numbers up but by dumping walk sequence mail they are only making it harder for Associate offices to keep their carriers from working excessive overtime. No wonder we can’t get out of the “red”. Additionally, the supervisors that they promote are ignorant and know nothing about running an office.
Why doesn’t the Postal Service try and change with the times and the customers demands. Meaning change clerk bids for this time of the year to reflex distribution clerks to start at 12 AM bring in your window clerks later on to service the window until 5PM. Advance all mail and parcels, so we can start our carriers at 6 & 6:30 AM, this way if an office is short of CCA’s the carriers that office can still pivot and deliver the route in day light hours. This also removes the need for early parcel runs during the holiday season. A carrier ten hour day will end at 5 PM, this way.
It all starts with the mail plant advancing their operations as well. It can be done, what is needed is the will of Postal management to implement this change for this time of the year or adapt it throughout the year if its working correctly. I’m willing to bet customer satisfaction scores would be increased with earlier delivery both during the holidays and throughout the year.
It’s not that they’re starting at 5:30 a.m., it’s that they’re still out from the day before. Slaves to the Amazon machine.
I thought mail volume was down?? It wasn’t to long ago that mail was only going to be delivered 5 DAYS a week??
We haven’t even entered the busy season yet and our distribution system is in a full fledged meltdown.
Mail trucks are late,
tons of misspent parcels,
DPS is a horrible mish mash of every town in the District,
Periodicals that routinely came a certain day a week now filter in all week long,
Daily Papers come in 3 days at a time,
And every department works against each other in their own best interest, not together to accomplish a mission.
The USPS gives it’s best discount to mailers to put letters and flats in “Walk Sequence”, then the idiots at the plant dump them on flat sorting machines that mix them back up, just to get their numbers up. Then carriers, City and Rural, waste hours putting them back in order.
They send Teams of Management to the Plants to improve efficiency, but apparently they spend their Days lounging in the Plant Break Room, (if you ever worked in the plant you know what I mean) because nothing gets better. But Managements Idea is to send more managers to the Plant (break room) to clean up the inefficiency.
Meanwhile out in the offices RCA’s and CCA’s are quitting at record pace. And who can blame them, our Country has a booming economy with great job opportunities where you don’t have to be treated like shit every day.
You may have heard of the term “6 degrees of separation”
Six degrees of separation is the idea that all living things and everything else in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
Apply that theory to future staffing attempts at the USPS as it currently exists.
Everyone that works for the USPS, or worse yet, has worked for the USPS and quit because of the inhumane treatment tells someone else about the abusive environment and they share what they heard. Soon the whole pool of potential employees is tainted against the idea of subjecting themselves to that treatment, then here we are at a our busiest time, understaffed, and in complete meltdown mode.
Would Privatization really be that bad ?
Isn’t it clear the current crew can’t fix this Cluster Foxtrot ?????
Why would we need to do this? Haven’t they heard mail volume is way down and we are losing trillion of dollars. (wink wink)
I work in the ATLANTA ga area. Our Post Master will not let us start until 8am and we were told no help for delivering packages. So we will be working over 12hours a day and making 2nd trips. Money will be great for us rural carriers. But very hard on us. Government waste at its finest
Lets hope that the usps can deliver on its promises for once. mail should be delivered early and in daylight, not at night. when I started as a ptf. we started at 5:30 all the time it was not unusual.