U.S. P. S. mail slower where you are?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We live in West L.A. Lately we’ve noticed that mail seems to take much longer to travel than it used to. For instance, my wife receives a monthly statement from an old account that she has in Milwaukee, and the last one took about 10 days to reach us. An overdue warning to me from the UCLA library, mailed on a Friday, reached us on Tuesday, days after I had already returned the materials. And a bill payment a couple of counties over didn’t seem to get there until about a week.

What’s up with this? Have they stopped using airplanes for long-distance domestic mail? Are security procedures adding extra days to the transit schedule?

2

Postal worker checking in (okay, not an American one, but the changes in mail processing in the last couple decades are pretty universal):

My guess is that you’ve probably had a bit of bad luck, and that your sample size is too small. In Australia at least, the advances in OCR technology over the last twenty years have made mail processing more efficient, and I’m sure that is the same in the US. I am expected to sort 1500 articles per hour manually to a “72-way break” (72 pigeon holes within reach of my hands). Since there are thousands of post offices in the country, that 72 doesn’t quite cut it, so letters are sorted multiple times in their journey. On a machine however, I can run about 38 000 articles through in the same hour, and send them to over 300 different output apertures, so they are sorted fewer times (and it’s processing not transit that is the time killer). Where in the old days, mail would be delayed because the sorters simply ran out of time and the stuff got left behind, these days if it’s delayed it’s usually because a machine has misread the address and sent it to Mongolia instead of California. So, you’ll probably find that you get fewer late letters these days, but the ones which are late are very late. In general though, Australia Post operates at about 96-97% “on time” efficiency, compared to about 90% in the early 90s, according to the KPMG auditing. With “World’s Best Practice” , the International Postal Union, ISO 9002, and the like, most other industrialised nations’ postal administrations (the USPS in your case) would be likely not much different in this.

Competition and the internet has made things tighter in the business these days, and yes, they are always looking for ways to truck stuff long distance instead of flying it, but they’d probably have to do that while keeping to guaranteed delivery standards, and that’s easier said than done, so your letter from Milwaukee would have probably still been flown.

You will notice increased transit times for international stuff (especially parcels) due to hightened security, but I can still get a letter to the continental US from Sydney within the week most times. For standard sized domestic letters, it would probably seldom be an issue.

Short answer: the mail is probably slightly better these days. The average person might not notice ten letters getting there in three days instead of two, but they will notice three of those letters getting there a week late, even if the other seven are on time.

3

You may not be aware that the New Orleans main post office has been closed sinced Hurricane Katrina. It was a main hub for mail coming our way (I live in Baton Rouge).

There was also a few weeks worth of mail backlog that was undeliverable to addresses in several parishes in SE Louisiana. This mail – and most other mai heading in and out of Lousiana – has been re-routed to Beaumont, TX, which is the replacement hub for New Orleans.

But the effects of the post-Katrina backlog, combined with the Beaumont main post office doing over double capacity, have made the mail in our area much slower than usual.

4

Never mind, **Spectre ** – I read “L.A.” as “LA”. :smack:

5

Here in San Francisco, I’ve noticed the mail being much, much faster. I’ve ordered stuff online and had it show up the next day. That just seems ridiculous to me – it’s practically “click a button and it’s on your doorstep.” If I wanted to send a birthday card to someone, I used to give it about a week. Now letters go anywhere in the country in two days.

You might want to contact your local post officer or postmaster. There may be a very localized problem on your end.

6

I agree with this. Your postman may store stuff up for a couple-three days.

My incoming mail is timely, but outgoing is iffy. I can tell by when the checks clear if it’s just sat for a day or four. If I have anything positively time-sensitive, I take it to a particular mailbox near downtown.