Society is not maintenance free, and the institutions and services society depends on are not maintenance free either. The Postal Service, like many services that we depend on in society, are just assumed to always work because for years and years they did work. Yet we allowed improvements to be delayed, allowed leaders in who acted in bad faith, and the result is an service that is substandard by it's own measure.

What's the answer? Commit to do the work necessary to turn it around. The mail hasn't changed over the last two years in some fundamental way that makes it disruptive. Investment in the system was simply deprioritized. We know what the system needs, so let's just do the work. We need the Postal Service to operate as it should, as it's a key piece of infrastructure that society depends on, whether we recognize it or not.

I find that the problem is last mile. I’ve lived in 4 areas in the Us where I received a lot of mail. 3/4 were amazing and everything came quickly. I assumed all USPS was great.

For the last 10 years my post office has had many problems. Packages where tracking shows it “out for delivery” but it never arrives. The electronic delivery email sends scans of letters “arriving today” that don’t come until the next day. Drivers who put “redelivery notices” in the mailbox rather than door saying I wasn’t available, backdated to previous days.

It’s very strange because contacting the postmaster just results in odd excuses, for example, I was told that the delivery driver was really busy that day and couldn’t make it to my house. I live in suburbia in a neighborhood with hundreds of houses.

So this post office sucks. It seems drivers suck, management sucks and that results in slow and missing mail.

I travel a bit and like to send post cards to family, including my own. A post card to my house consistently arrives 2-4 days after the card to a family member in a zip code 50 miles way, an even more remote suburb. This seems consistent from very remote locations as well as domestic. Curious.

My soft conclusion is that the “systematic” portions of the USPS are reliable and good. But the “local” portions are hit or miss.

> The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window.

That is still a fantastic result. Considering the size of the delivery area and the very disparate abilities of the delivery network (rural, urban, suburbs, etc), I am impressed.

For an underfunded and constantly sabotaged public institution, it still appears to work reasonably well. And yes, the 55p price is absolutely cheap for the expected service. First-class mail in Europe is often 1-2€ for much smaller countries.

The US postal service might not be what it used to be (I didn’t get a Christmas card I was sent until mid-April) but it still remains one of the most impressive logistics systems ever built, in my opinion. Letters sent to me have tracked me through multiple moves with the high point being a letter showing up in a mailbox after I’d moved twice, with one of the moves being across state lines and the other being intracity. Was it late? Yes. Did it arrive? Yes. It’s probably the only portion of the US government that I’m absolutely certain will eventually do its job.

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+.

I operate a DTC company in the Boston area and send thousands of packages every year.

Even the tracked Priority Mail packages have delays. The system promises 2-3 day delivery (and that's what customers are told during checkout, no way to change it) but it's often longer than that, particularly for larger/odd-shaped packages such as the long Priority Mail tubes.

In New England, a lot of problems can be traced to COVID outbreaks among USPS staff in processing centers. It was especially bad starting in November and continuing through February.

At one point the Post Office stopped scanning parcels (for us, in mid-December) and huge backlogs built up across the system. We heard from our USPS business rep in Boston that 200 workers were out sick at the giant processing facility in Nashua NH, leading to trucks arriving at the parking lot that couldn't be unloaded. They switched to processing Priority Mail at the facility in South Boston and everything else in Stamford CT, but they weren't able to work through the Nashua backlog until January. One Priority Mail parcel we shipped on Nov 30 that was supposed to be "3-day delivery" arrived at its destination in Kentucky 45 days later, on Jan. 13.

As much as I enjoy always pointing out things that we do better in the EU, unfortunately the situation here is opposite. Sending a letter from say Germany to France is a complete black box. Even with all the "priority" /airmail whatever stamps it takes 2-3 weeks on average. I understand this is different countries and all, but courier companies have it figured out. I could send a parcel with UPS from Poland to Spain using their cheapest Standard service and it will arrive in 2-3 days. Send the same parcel with national mail and it's any amount of time, with very little reliable tracking.

Perhaps the USPS is less efficient than it used to be, but we can't ignore the pandemic's effect; it's not limited to just USPS. Both Fedex and UPS suspended their on-time guarantees last March, and only a few weeks ago did they restore any of them, and that's only for a small subset of their services (guarantee still suspended for ground deliveries)

I was looking at some NBA history and naturally Karl Malone ended up in my list of people to look at (there's a video about how him and Stockton somehow didn't win the championship, despite being quite good).

Dude's nickname was "The Mailman", which I wondered about.

Turns out they used to say "The Mailman always delivers", so actually it was a compliment at the time. I think reputations change slowly, but this one had gotten to where I could no longer recognize the original intent.

At 55c to send anywhere in the US I think it is not a bad service. I have to pay the equivalent of 1.10 USD (1.00 CHF) to send a letter "First Class" (A-Post) inside a tiny country (Switzerland) almost the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

Edit: Corrected price

Even just two years ago, I could count on first class mail always arriving within 3 days, it just happened, so reliably you never doubted it.

What happened?

Gonna repost this reply wherever it seems fitting:

The USPS has been legally blocked from adapting by anti-infrastructure ideologues (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A ) in order to set them up to fail.

In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure.

Any discussion of adaptivity or resilience is incomplete without considering these facts.

Things fell off a clif in December I had multiple pieces of mails take months to arrive. One of them was a check mailed to the next zip code over but instead made it’s way to Florida before meandering back to the nearest metro area post office. That particular mail had tracking. Once you lose faith that something sent will arrive in a timely fashion that is the beginning of the end for a mail service.

> Editors, reporters and producers at GBH News sent nearly 100 letters from different places in the metro area at various hours on the same day to correspondents of their own choosing in 38 states, creating a random sample.

That's not a representative random sample of the mail the post office delivers. It likely oversamples from long tail requests: reporters are likely to choose zanier locations, and even the fact that they're sending the mail (instead of some kind of an institution) makes for a weird sample.

Now, I don't particularly love that the modal mailing is a piece of junk, or that I have to rely on mail to receive certain kinds of institutional communications, but there's no particular reason to think the experiment revealed a failure to meet their SLO.

This isn't an accident. The USPS got partially dismantled last winter in matters related to the election, and has not been repaired since.

Reminds me of a page I found way back, where a guy tested to see just what kind of things he could get delivered through the postal service. I tried digging it up but can't find it.

He mailed a lot of things to himself, but there were two that stood out.

One was a brick, IIRC not wrapped, just taped address and stamps to it. It arrived with some delay, in a bag, smashed to pieces, likely in search of drugs.

The second was a full-sized cod or similar fish. Can't recall if he wrapped it. In either case, the fish did not arrive.

Instead he got a stern warning that if anything like that ever happened again, he wouldn't get any more mail delivered, ever...

IIRC apart from those two, most of the weird attempts were delivered successfully.

The USPS from time to time does do testing on delivery. I was part of a test program a few years ago where the USPS was testing the delivery of mail. They would send me addresses and postage and I was to send them from a drop box or at some times send them from the counter. The addresses were both US and domestic. I would also get letters from people around the world or in the US. Inside was just a code that I would have to go put into a website run for the USPS by IBM. As a reward I would get a booklet of stamps or a letter opener. In truth the coolest part was getting the stamps from around the world showing up in my mailbox.

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Living overseas, it's always entertaining to get letters from the IRS. Especially when they say "you need to do such-and-such by Feb 15th" and you received the letter on May 1.

Someone should re-run this test with an airtag in the envelope to see where the delays are. I wonder if a few non-performing nodes are slowing down the whole system...

UPS should offer a "quote and send" system for letters, so that you type in your address and say when you want it to arrive, and they quote you a price. If it doesn't arrive by the time you said, you get a refund.

The quote system could have everything from "1 hour" for door-to-door direct courier (probably costing $50), up to "30 days" for really low priority stuff. The system would give you a barcode to print on your envelope/package instead of a stamp, and an API so it can be integrated into business processes, apps, etc.

Then use a fancy algorithm to set pricing to perfectly fill every truck, reduce load at busy times, etc.

There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive.

When your letter or package hits the bottomless pit known as the north houston facility, you just have to wait for it to come around the dark side of the moon. Basically everything in houston hits that. Makes me think of toledo too. All mail was routed to detroit and back, even if you mailed it from toledo to maumee.

> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot”

Is this a bad example or are paychecks a normal thing in US ? If yes, are they sent by mail ? I'm just curious about how this works.

Every time I read an article about money in the US, I have the feeling that a lot of money transaction (paycheck, paying your bills ...) is done by paper/mail. I'm surprised each time I read this since I never had to think about paying my bills or receiving my pay on my account.

I'm not even sure my parents ever get paid by check (like, with some sort of paper that you have to give to your bank) but here, maybe I'm wrong. And I know it can sometimes happen here for short contracts to get paid by check, but even in this use case, it's pretty rare.

If I'm right, is this more a cultural thing or some sort of technical limitation ?

Is there any real competition to USPS? Or do they get their check from the government regardless of how poorly they perform?

In my own country, the government owned postal service is complete trash. Yeah, it’s almost “free”, but we’re paying for it in taxes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually costs way more than private carriers. Not to mention that the workers are incredibly lazy and rude, and opening hours are ridiculous. I’ve ordered a package which took 5 days to get here from the other side of the planet, by private carriers, and then it got stuck in the national mail service for 3 months. The seller was kind enough to resend the package, but I’m not sure if it’ll ever make it either.

What are you gonna do, choose the competitors? They still get their check.

I believe experience with USPS varies across the board from worst to the best. I am in the Bay Area, and in the last 8 or so years, USPS has been the best among all carriers. Be it package, letter or a Registered Parcel.

Of course, my experience does not translate to that of the entire service, but the point I am trying to make is what GBH experienced cannot be generalized to USPS. There are several other factors (some described in the responses here) that can make or break the service.

As with any Government provided service, there are inefficiencies, which need to be addressed and removed. I think these are being politicized by various parties to privatize it, which IMO won't solve the problems.

> Scott Hoffman [...] told GBH News the slowdown in the mail has been a direct outcome of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, including a reduction in staff overtime, removal of high speed sorting machines and a decision to hold mail trucks until they are full instead of letting partially-loaded trucks head out to get mail moving.

> “The postal service is now walking away from its service commitments” in the new 10-year plan. Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it.

There's a push to privatise the postal service in Brazil.

UPS, Fedex and such might be faster, but the postal service is a lot cheaper. I would very much like to keep this cheaper and (sometimes) slower option.

Lots of defense of the USPS because "important things get mailed" etc. Lets be honest: there are lots of choices these days, and the USPS is just one. One very old, very tradition choice to be sure.

It's entirely possible that the USPS could be obsolete. A few examples of niche purposes doesn't end the discussion. It just begins a new one around "How do we do that then, without the USPS?"

Anecdote: I mail small packages regularly using USPS. I buy and print a label, apply it to the package, and drop in a blue box.

I've had a fantastic experience. Very few lost packages, and quick arrival times: 2-3 days if in the region, 4-5 days to somewhere far away but domestic (eg California from NC). 1-2 weeks to Europe, 3-4 to Asia or Australia.

I know there are tons of politics and whatnot involved, but this is what I want from the post office.

Monthly mail, instead of daily. I only open my mail quarterly anyway.

Charge more for bulk mail not less, Junk mail should be punished, not encouraged.

Allow me to create a list of blocked senders.

Thats it, please and thank you.

Here are some more benchmarks against USPS and other big brand carriers: https://benchmarks.wonderment.com/

This also includes UPS, Fedex, and DHL against a much larger sample size.

https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h10d190b9?country...

Formulating any analysis of the Postal Service on 100 letters is like formulating an analysis of the internet based on 1000 packets. Something longitudinal with a vaguely statistically significant sample set would be more meaningful

My friends are still getting Christmas cards mailed out on Dec 17, 2020.

Interesting, this completely contradicts my own experience. Is it possible there is something broken with the Boston area USPS operations that isn't systemic across the rest of USPS?

I make every reasonable effort I can to avoid using the USPS. I have for decades. It's terrible, and has only gotten worse. This article is not surprising.

Silly? Its covid time. The post office was hit hard by restrictions. They told us where I live that delivery was going to be affected.

> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot,” he said.

Are people in America actually still paid by physical cheques? They're getting pretty close to the telegram in terms of obsolescence in the UK. The only times I get cheques are tax rebates & the similar. Probably one cheque per year, max. I haven't owned a cheque book for maybe 15 years and I've never been paid by cheque.

I'm not seeing any references in this thread about the Trump regime's undermining of the USPS.

Last year during the election, they removed and disassembled sorting machines from the USPS. They just came in and took them out. They disrupted the mail service.

Don't complain about the USPS for things that were done to them in an attempt to undermine your democracy, instead contact your representatives to reinstate the USPS to their full capacity and then some.

I cannot fathom why Louis DeJoy is still in office. He was planted in the USPS for the purpose of disrupting the mail service and his biggest order was the dismantling and destruction of hundreds of automated sorters around the country that do the job of dozens of employees each [1]. You can find hundreds of sources on why this was done: it was done to disrupt mail-in voting for the purpose of aiding Trump's campaign both by losing and slowing liberal-leaning mail-in votes and by reducing confidence in the postal service. I will not beat around that bush. He knows he is destroying the post office (one would have to be a half-wit to argue otherwise).

A partisan effort by the Rs disrupted the post office decades ago by requiring pre-funding of benefits (costs them an extra several billion per year) [2]. There have been some efforts to remedy this lately [3].

1. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/dejoy-says-usps... 2. https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis... 3. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2021/02/cong...

For those who might be wondering why it's getting worse from a systemic perspective, this article about the privatization playbook with respect to the TSA might shed some light:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-pr...

Part of it is also almost certainly due to the public spat Trump had with them:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump...

How Louis DeJoy is not in cuffs is beyond my understanding.

> Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it.

We don’t need to privatize. We need to get rid of it and switch to digital for everything except physical goods. Revamp USPS as a package delivery company, or just outright get rid of it and let the existing delivery companies handle it.

USPS has an $80 billion annual budget. Put that money to use investing in something that has more use in the future. We don’t need to invest more in spam delivery.

Gonna repost this reply wherever it seems fitting:

The USPS has been legally blocked from adapting by anti-infrastructure ideologues (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A ) in order to set them up to fail.

In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure.

Any discussion of adaptivity or resilience is incomplete without considering these facts.

Do not use the USPS for anything important:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-postal-service-employee-ch...

https://triblive.com/local/south-hills/2nd-local-postal-work...

https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/mailman-throws-away-m...

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-postal-worker-accused-of-thro...

https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/postal-worker-fired-for...

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/10/06/wyoming-mail-carrier...

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/25/postal-w...

https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/11/video-shows-po...

https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/virginia-beach/mailman-...

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/immigrants-in-elko-...

Probably because they're too busy spying on US citizens.