I hate to sound nostalgic (AKA old!), but I fondly remember when the USPS managed to deliver mail REGULARLY. We — and our neighbors — have had no mail delivered since Tuesday, and that batch included only some of the mail that had been scheduled to land on Monday, when our carrier was also a no-show.
Because you can receive a daily email from USPS that shows images of what is scheduled to arrive in your box each day, it has been rather unsettling to see how many items qualify as missing. Well, the mystery has been solved.
This morning, my husband decided to pay a visit to the actual post office, after efforts to contact a human by phone went nowhere. A worker explained that the postal manager for the West Chester region issued an edict recently to deal with the agency’s short staffing: surreptitiously skipping delivery days. She said the office needs 80 carriers to handle the load: It has 40. As a result, she said we should expect to see a delivery every 2 or 3 days.
I guess the idea of notifying customers about the worker shortage wasn’t part of the plan. Would it really have been too difficult to put a notice in people’s boxes on their lucky delivery day? Perhaps some publicity about this problem would help solve it. Sigh. End of rant, but curious about whether this is happening in other areas.
~ Chester County Resident # 1
Now this is the second such tale in less than a week.
I have you on my mailing list but my mailman hasn’t been seen for five days. I was told that he had health problems but there were no replacements. Also, PO closed in town. So I will try for Christmas card instead.
~ Chester County Resident # 2
My second friend lives in the Borough of West Chester. She works from home and is self employed and well…mail is kind of essential.
So Louis De Joy you plastic arsehole, where’s the mail? Santa might want to deliver the Christmas cards himself I guess?
It’s time for Washington to deal with this. We need our mail. This is happening all over. It’s bullshit.
Frazer, Malvern, and Paoli United States Post Offices are suffering from staffing shortages these days JUST LIKE SO MANY OTHER BUSINESSES (including but not limited to CVS.)
If you have a small business and depend on the United States Postal Service you are pretty much screwed once again this holiday season. Of course USPS problems go beyond COVID-19 and staffing shortages. We have douche bag Postmaster General Louis De Joy to thank.
Here are some email addresses I dug up if you wish to try to contact them:
I actually encourage everyone to email these people.
As a small business owner, I depend on USPS, UPS, and FedEx. They are all screwed up since COVID-19, but today I just finally reached my limit with the United States Postal Service.
Why?
Because Paoli, Malvern, and Frazer were all closed to counter and window service abruptly this afternoon due to staffing shortages. It’s ridiculous. NORMAL business hours. NO advance warning.
This is so freaking frustrating.
If you are a small business, or even just John Q. Public trying like a damn fool to mail your bills, mail Christmas cards or Christmas presents.
I am still grateful we have nice mail carriers, but we can’t pay them to ship at their US Mail Jeep, can we?
I am actually thinking of shutting down my orders until AFTER Christmas because of these issues.
I think I’m done trying to be sympathetic for a while. I am trying to be nice but today was just unnecessary. I know you’re understaffed, overwhelmed by Covid affecting your workers, and then of course there’s that guy who calls himself the “Postmaster General” who just keeps eviscerating you.
I get Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General is a postal service killer and a jackass, but seriously? We are the people who always have a clear front walk and don’t block the mailbox…even with snow. I am the one that leaves homemade cookies in the mailbox at Christmas for Pete’s sake.
The above package toss was not the work of our normal postal worker or normal substitute. It was some new guy. This was not a heavy box. The path was not blocked. No dog was gnashing teeth and barking. Dude just didn’t feel like getting out of his truck.
I have mail from November and December that just never appeared. A lot of Christmas cards I mailed just never were delivered. I track every package and I signed up for “Informed Delivery” so I can keep track of mail coming to me. On average, “Informed Delivery” mail arrives 2-3 days after we get the email telling us what is coming, if it arrives.
Our mail sorts through Wilmington, DE which is something that in fact, President Biden did while Vice President. Our mail used to get sorted through Southeastern, which of course makes sense. It has never made sense the Chester County, Pennsylvania mail gets sorted through Wilmington, Delaware. We have had problems for years, but since 2020 we hold our breath every time we are expecting something, or mailing something.
Normally we don’t have a problem at the local level, but lately it’s been rather haphazard. We all know if the mailbox is blocked even by snow that none of us on the road will get mail. That has been getting challenging for all of us including our township snow plow drivers because we’re simply running out of places to move the snow. But this today? Just blows my mind because dude had a clear path and he just chose not to get out of the mail truck and chucked my package.
Please, we are trying to not complain, but today was ridiculous.
Customers deserve better. Heck your workers deserve better. But the guy today? He should NOT have done this.
I am frustrated right now. I realize the post office is super busy. I realize my post office is down a postal employee. But the supervisor who works in the office isn’t exactly helpful at times. This is one of those times.
I had something on redelivery that was a giant hassle yesterday. I missed the initial delivery because I had an appointment and the mail delivery was earlier than normal. I called to try to get it yesterday and the supervisor wouldn’t call the carrier who had our route. I was just trying to figure out if it was getting delivered yesterday. Not looking for special treatment….unless basic information is special treatment?
So yesterday I subsequently filed a redelivery request on the USPS website. Have you ever attempted to navigate the USPS at peak times of the year like the holidays? I must have entered the required information seven or eight times. Then I still wasn’t sure if it was in because at one point it told me my request could not be completed or handled or something I forget what the language was, so I called my post office. The USPS supervisor assured me it would be on a truck tomorrow (AKA today), after he tells me he never heard of that error before.
Just swell. Nothing like not being able to drive because you’re waiting for knee surgery and it’s your husband’s Christmas present. Only you aren’t quite sure where it is other than somewhere in the area.
Not helpful.
So the USPS truck shows up this afternoon. A different substitute driver. Very nice, but as I am calling to him to wait because the package I had on redelivery wasn’t there, he is not hearing me and starting to pull away. The reason he wasn’t hearing me is he had earbuds in. For some reason, I thought you couldn’t drive with stuff in your ears like headphones or earbuds that prohibited you from reacting to traffic and what not but I digress….
Anyway, the substitute carrier guy couldn’t have been nicer but he told me it wasn’t on the truck. So I went inside and I looked up the number and called my post office again.
I got the same supervisor on the phone as yesterday and it was a conversation for the record books.
“Hi sorry to call again, but the package you said would be redelivered today wasn’t and the mail carrier just left.” I said
His reply was something along the lines of there were several trucks out. So I asked him if that meant my package would be delivered later. His response was a rather oblique “maybe, possibly.”
I asked him if he could define that answer a little more and he said again maybe possibly.
So I asked if there was anyway to check with carriers to see if my package was on a truck or if it had gotten left behind. I figured that was a possibility since in the frustrating conversation of oblique replies he told me the substitute mail carrier who had been out to the house yesterday was off today.
His response to me was along the lines of “Well, if you asked the carrier to check his truck and he didn’t find it there’s really no point in me calling him.” (I am paraphrasing slightly but that was the jist of the response.)
So I asked him if it would just come out later today and it was another non-answer answer. He’s the supervisor so what does he know? It’s very confusing.
So I called a neighboring post office to see if they had any suggestions. Or if I was doing something wrong. The supervisor in that office couldn’t have been nicer. 
A couple of hours later, the missing package appeared like magic. I think I must have a secret Santa in that other post office.
I know the post office is slammed. I am truly sorry. But when you call for customer service, you should get actual customer service. I know people don’t like being told no, and I am no exception, but I would prefer an honest answer to a non-answer answer.
So all’s well that ends well for me today, but this is the second problem lately. And it felt like the Grinch ate my Christmas mail, right or wrong.
Quite frankly I am dreading putting my Christmas cards into the mail. But Santa says I must. Can’t be a Grinch……
I did not think it was possible for there to be worse delivery services than Amazon Logistics ( I wrote about finding an entire big bag of dumped Amazon packages in September.) but there is worse. They are called LaserShip or affectionately known as LazyShip and LaserSh*t.
Before I get any further, enjoy this video someone did on LaserShip who delivers for all sorts of people including Sephora, Chewy, and Amazon:
Here is what New York Magazine said about them in 2017:
There are certain industries that inspire outsize amounts of rage when they screw up. Airlines are one. TV providers are another. But angry comment for angry comment, there may be no more rage-inducing business than package delivery. If you want to garner widespread customer fury, just deliver a package late or damaged and wait for the storm to roll in. LaserShip — an Uber-like service that delivers packages for Amazon, Walmart, and Sephora, among others — might just be the most hated company on the internet. Some comments, helpfully gathered by the criticism website LaserShit.com…LaserShip — and the ocean of dissatisfied customers it leaves in its wake — is an inevitable result of stratospheric growth. Reliable shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, and the USPS aren’t able to deliver all of the same-day, next-day, and two-day packages ….That’s led to parasitic companies popping up to take advantage of Amazon’s need for cheap, fast package delivery. The poster child might just be LaserShip.
Twitter and many message boards, including posts on Amazon’s own forums, are full of complaints about LaserShip. Packages aren’t delivered. Packages are delivered late ….Packages are marked as delivered and not delivered. Packages are delivered to the wrong address. Packages are often just completely lost. (The message for that one is, “LaserShip is unable to confirm control of your package at this time.”) Sometimes, an error will show up on the tracking page: “Parcel damaged and will be discarded.” Customers who attempt to contact LaserShip report being totally unable to solve their problems; they are better off contacting ….whichever company they originally purchased their item from.
When the order did not arrive by Friday, November 30, I started contacting Chewy. First LaserShip told them there was a weather exception between Montgomeryville, PA and Chester County, PA. I debunked that myth for the lie that it was.
Then of course there is LaserShip on Twitter telling me to just email them. Ummm yeah, been doing THAT for a few days and NOT ONCE have I even received an acknowledgement that I contacted them. I even checked my spam folder.
Then I was supposed to get the delivery yesterday. After a phone call to LaserShip’s corporate offices in Vienna, Virginia (703 761-9030) and they subsequently transferred me to Montgomeryville, PA they changed their story yet again. Supposedly my package was on a truck yesterday and the guy just never bothered to deliver. And then the package wasn’t on the truck today and they did not know where it was and by the end of the conversation the story changed yet again. My package was “somewhere” in the warehouse and would get delivered tomorrow, December 4th.
I do not believe them. I had to go out and buy other pet food. I also let the pet food manufacturer know what was going on. You see, I only went back to Chewy to support them.
LaserShip doesn’t give a damn about me or my package and I know that. I called them because sometimes you just have to. (You can also call LaserShip on 800-527-3764 or 804 -414-2590).
As consumers we are being increasingly driven to online shopping every day, and what we lose is good customer service and companies that actually take pride in what they do. And these predatory shipping companies are also not paying employees well enough so they do not want to take pride in their work. I have been told that by several sources when it comes to the drivers of Amazon Logistics out of the King of Prussia PA hub which services us around here, and well LaserShip is the same subcontracting business model, correct?
Problems with LaserShip are all over social media. It’s kind of crazy. They are really THAT bad.
Anyway, I just wish the companies we patronized didn’t use these cut rate shipping “solutions”. They just create more problems.
What is your mail delivery like? The only thing I like about my mail delivery are our mail carriers. And our postmaster is really nice. But that is where the liking of the U.S. Postal service ends.
THE US POSTAL SERVICE IS SO NOT IMPROVING!
I have a great post office and mail carriers BUT the US Postal Service changed how our mail gets routed to our post office to deliver to me! My mail used to go through Southeastern PA and now they route my mail through a different state— my mail routes through Wilmington, DE!
A lot of our mail goes missing. One person mailed me something almost 2 weeks ago at this point…and I should have had it in like 3 days. And yes, they had the correct address and so on.
A lot of mail is damaged or arrives partially opened like someone was taking a peek.
And sometimes it smells like the bottom of an ash tray.
And when I call to ask, well what can they do? All of the local mail gets routed out of state so it can come back in state. (Or so my postmaster tells me.)
Unacceptable. (But so is much of anything else which has born the touch of the US Government…..)
