REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 YOU CAN THANK PRESIDENT TRUMP FOR ALL THE DAMAGE TO THE US POSTAL SYSTEM

 

                                      …A regular scene at most US Postal Offices

 

E-commerce sales are up by 33% compared with the same period last year.

 

Well, I can personally attest to the jam up of postal packages at the local Post Office.  My mailman delivered a package to me this week.  He also said that he may not get to our regular mail delivery on that same day as he had just received another 300 packages for delivery on his route.

There is a current historic crush of e-commerce packages that is threatening to overwhelm US Postal Service operations, just weeks before Christmas.

As Americans increasingly shop online because of the pandemic, private express carriers FedEx and UPS have cut off their delivery service for some large retailers, Today, massive volumes of packages are being shipped through  the US Postal Service.  That has led to widespread delays and pushed the nation’s mail agency to the brink.  Postal employees are reporting mail and package backlogs across the country, and they are working vast amounts of overtime hours that have depleted morale during this latest surge of coronavirus infections nationwide.

A letter carrier in Detroit reported that their colleagues around the city were assigned two eight-hour routes each day last week, just to make up for missing employees and pallets full of undelivered boxes. In the first two weeks of December, nearly one of every five work hours within the entire agency was an overtime hour.

The agency is now bracing for even more volume. It warned employees in a statement, “Peak season to peak this week.”

“We thank our customers for their continued support, and we are committed to making sure gifts and cards are delivered on time to celebrate the holidays,” Kristin Seaver, chief retail and delivery officer of the Postal Service, said in the release. “We continue to flex our network including making sure the right equipment is available to sort, process and deliver a historic volume of mail and packages this holiday season.”

E-commerce sales are expected to reach $189 billion in November and December, that’s up 33% compared with the same period a year ago.

To prepare for the influx, some retailers have advertised shipping deadlines to encourage customers to make their purchases early and allow ample time for packages to arrive by Christmas Day. The Postal Service encouraged customers to do the same, and hired more than 50,000 seasonal workers, added transportation and packaging tracking, and expanded Sunday deliveries for cities with especially high volumes.

But the tidal wave appears to have caused delays even in the delivery of first-class mail, such as letters and bills. The Postal Service told Congress that only 78.9% of first-class mail was delivered on time during the week of Nov. 28, well below its internal goal of 96%

The Postal Service logged 94.8% of packages through handheld bar code scanners that track an item’s progress through the mail system from receipt to delivery. But a Washington Post investigation in October found that postal workers and supervisors routinely falsify those scans.  It is one of few package-related performance statistics the agency makes public to boost performance statistics.  (Do remember that Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Post.)

Commercial delivery services including Amazon, UPS and FedEx rely on the Postal Service for the “last mile” shipping of its packages to save money, or to ensure delivery on Sundays or to rural areas. Those packages frequently end up in the same delivery trucks carrying other mail processed through the Postal Service, which contributes to delays.

Postal analytics firm Late Shipment wrote in a 2020 holiday shipping report that massive hiring sprees from private shipping firms will not be sufficient to combat expected delays. From April through October, packages shipped through FedEx and UPS express delivery services nationwide were delayed at rates on par with or higher than during the 2019 holiday season.

A representative from UPS did not respond to a request for comment. However, FedEx spokesman John Scruggs said in an email that the company expects an “unprecedented surge” in mail this season.

“Delivery drivers, warehouse employees, and support staff across the globe are tirelessly and safely working to meet the surge in demand this holiday season on top of volume increases created by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Scruggs said, noting that FedEx has hired more than 70,000 seasonal workers, moved to seven-day operations, sped up Sunday delivery and is proactively working with customers.

Former Army secretary and GOP congressman John McHugh, chairman of the Package Coalition, an advocacy group that relies on the Postal Service for mail delivery, said the agency should be positioned to accommodate the influx of mail.

“Any commercial interest that mails packages to their customers wants those customers to be happy and receive packages on time,” he said. “Everybody is doing their best to try to accommodate this. There’s a reality, though, that the increase that has been seen in the package industry, writ large, was really planned for over the next three or five years instead of the next three or five months. It’s a real conundrum to have that much growth in that period.”

The package delays come after a tumultuous summer and election season for the Postal Service.  The agency struggled to implement cost-cutting measures imposed by Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. They then had to deal with the more than 65 million Americans that voted by mail in the November election.

Now the immense package volumes threaten to snarl postal operations in Georgia amid their runoff elections for both of the state’s Senate seats.  Long a Republican stronghold, Democrats hope both races are in play after Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue were embroiled in ethics investigations.  Neither received 50% of the vote during the November election, pushing the races to a decisive January runoff.

Already, more than 1.2 million voters have requested mail-in ballots in Georgia for the runoff election.  More than 260,000 ballots have already been returned, including more than 100,000 through the Postal Service..

Postmaster DeJoy released a video message thanking Postal Service employees for their work during the holiday season.  “We are expecting record package volume this season, possibly a third more than last year,” he said in the video. “Our competitors are likely to get more volume than they can handle, which means we may be getting a lot of overflow.”

DeJoy added that the Postal Service is experiencing high rates of absenteeism among workers in locations where coronavirus infections are surging, which puts a strain on the system’s processing.

Trump tried to have DeJoy slow down the postal service during the election in order to keep some presidential mail-in ballots from arriving on time.  DeJoy had sorting machines destroyed and he stopped massive amounts of over-time for the service, all the while putting a moratorium on hiring personnel.  Fortunately, he got caught and the courts made him recant much of what he had done.  But it and the pandemic has caused the US Postal Service to fall way behind, especially during this holiday season.

We can thank President Trump for much of the issues this year from ignoring Russia hacking into our systems; to DeJoy’s horrible management of the postal system; to not having a national plan for dealing with the pandemic, and for not conceding in the election and all that he and his Attorney General Barr have done over the last years of Trump’s presidency.

Thank goodness Trump and his family is going to be gone from the White House by next month.

Copyright G. Ater 2020