Sorry to change the topic “but” just wondering how your USPS mail delivery is these days? I realize the first excuse everyone will have is ‘it’s the holidays’.
We subscribe to Informed Delivery. For those of you not familiar with Informed Delivery it’s a service provided by USPS that sends you an email advising you of what mail you will be receiving. It even gives you a photo of the pieces of mail in the email they send.
Anyway we have been having a lot of non-delivery of mail. A couple of weeks ago the boss was supposed to receive an invoice from QVC. Now women don’t want to get cross haired with QVC. No way Jose. Then a week or so ago I was supposed to receive church envelopes and a statement from Deustche Funds. Yesterday I was supposed to receive my Fidelity statement, my Baird statement and two notifications from the SSA one for the boss and one for myself.
I don’t know about ya’ll but some of that stuff seems to be important. At least to me it’s important. Guess what? It ain’t important to USPS.
I called the local USPS and was informed that Informed Delivery doesn’t mean you are going to get it that day. BS! Total BS! What’s going to happen when the year-end statements come out?
The sad thing is once it’s not delivered you are screwed. I think they must dump it down the sewer or something because they make no effort to deliver the ‘non-delivered’ mail.
Louis DeJoy is a piece of work. He is handing business to the private carriers. He was supposed to streamline the post office. Hardly.
He has made inroads into the budget problems.
But the real results were from Congress.
Google result
Congress has provided assistance to USPS through the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022. Key among the changes includes cancelling a requirement that the Postal Service prefund retiree and health benefits.
Several months ago there was story about how Louis DeJoy is telling postal workers to delay 1st Class mail in order to concentrate on higher revenue packages for FedEx, UPS and Amazon.
Good grief, is that creep still in there? He wanted to remove USPS drop boxes, too, remove sorting machines, was out to kill USPS! Needed to be tossed as soon as the Admin changed! Hanging in from some Civil Service gaming I think… Irritating… Our services locally are fine, I think, some new faces…
I also have Informed Delivery and it is pretty nice. I usually get the stuff they say the same day. However, maybe once or so ever week or two I get the mail a day or two later than the email indicated. Inside the email or if you login to your account there is an option to report something as not delivered! Have you tried that?
I have been using it since it became available. Remember one key point: The mail image is scanned into the system and sent to you when it hits the first post office (where the first sort takes place). It is then routed via their system to you, which may take 1-4 days. The system also does not do a good job on large envelopes. I usually get the message “an item does not have an image”. You get the idea. I just know to look for a large envelope. I do get a fair number of packages too, and those are shown as the tracking number.
Hey Jim. Thanks for that tidbit. I didn’t realize that option was available. I’ll have to reread the email and try to find the option you mentioned. Thanks a lot.
We signed up for informed delivery when it became available. Is good but a little hit and miss. Not everything is scanned but it does seem to hit the majority of “important things” at a 90% rate. One big caveat, most of our “important things” we get email notification and then download and print out for our accountant. And frequently things are scanned and delivered the next day not that day. But we also think our mailman tends to skip our house if they are running late. We are not in a neighborhood but off a busy road. No rhyme or reason with the holidays.
I just logged in to my account. Each piece showing has a line at the bottom to say you did not receive this piece. I can’t speak to effectiveness as I’ve never used it; but it is probably worth a try. Be sure to report back.
I followed up on the ‘reporting of missing’ pieces option. Unfortunately two of my groups of missing mail had expired. I was able to report the group of mail from two days ago even though it said to wait a couple of days. BS, I’m reporting it now. Oh, by the way, don’t call the Post Office. Big waste of time.
Routine mail (junk, magazines, letters, bills) shows up when Informed Delivery says it will. Occasionally packages don’t, and we get some weird text about they weren’t able to access the property which is a load of …
We have more trouble with FedEx deliveries than USPS. We had one from FedEx that showed up 6 weeks late. We had cancelled the order and been given a refund. The merchant told us to keep the late item as an apology for the poor service. The box looked like it had been through the wars. It had shipping labels over shipping labels but they all had the correct delivery address. We’ve had several others that have been delayed by FedEx, but that was the worst.
I imagine DeJoy’s instructions were to destroy the USPS. Make it easier for UPS and FEDEX to compete, and not have to go ‘through snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…’ nor to the farthest reaches of mail delivery. They use USPS for that last unprofitable leg.
It is profitable for the USPS. They are required to serve every address in the US, generally Mon-Sat (most business offices closed on Sat, so no way to deliver mail to them). That is why deJoy found it harder to destroy the USPS than he expected. With the Congressional change to retirement funding for all employees, the USPS no longer has to prepay future expenses other private businesses also do not pre-fund.
Normally my mail delivery is good to excellent, but this month it has been pretty bad. Stuff just takes longer.
I noticed years ago the Informed Delivery wasn’t necessarily accurate, so I don’t put tons of stock in it. But it has been a little worse than normal lately too.