Sometimes I get US mail at 10 am , sometimes at 6 pm. Is there any reason for such a wide variation? Maybe they are doing the route backwards when it comes at 10 am? Never seen this before in decades. We are a fast growing area so maybe that explains it.
First thing to come to mind is your local office is short staffed and the carriers are running two routes (possibly on a rotating basis).
Our mail delivery is all over the place too. The mail that I receive at the office sometimes comes around noon, sometimes 2:00, and other times it hasn’t arrived by the time I leave for home. At home, my mail is delivered anywhere between 1:00 and 5:00. It’s never been like this before. I used to be able to set my watch to both mailmen. My only guess is short-staffed.
I find it unlikely that one carrier could do two routes, not if the routes were as long as the ones I had when I was a summer sub carrier.
Perhaps the carrier is mixing up the order they do the subroutes, so that no house always gets the mail late. That would be more interesting for the carrier and fairer for the customers.
I am out walking at 5 pm many days, and almost never see carriers around. If you get your mail at 6 pm, then I could see the reason being doubling up. But around here anyhow we see different delivery times without any obvious shortages.
I generally get my mail between 3-4 pm, but sometimes it can be as early as 2 pm and as late as 6 pm. Never in the morning.
My condo building is on a route with many other large buildings. So lots of individual boxes to stuff at each stop, but not much driving from here to there. When our regular carrier is on duty our mail arrives very reliably between 2pm and 3pm.
When it’s a different carrier, even one I’ve seen on occasion, not a total noob, it could be anywhere from 10am to 5pm. Do they tackle it in a different sequence? Do they not know the route and names as well and waste a lot of time the regular carrier has learned to avoid spending?
Don’t know, but the effect itself is real reliable: regular carrier = regular arrival time; irregular carrier = irregular arrival time.
Is it mail or packages? I have found that, even when shipped by USPS, sometimes Amazon packages will come at odd times. I’ve always suspected it had to do with their deal with the post office. I mean, they are the only company I know where USPS delivery will arrive on Sunday–and that’s always early morning instead of the usual afternoon delivery.
I also note that Saturday mail (including packages) tends to be on a different schedule. I susoect it’s because they have different carriers on the weekend. They’re usually part timers.
My experience matches LSLGuy’s. When it’s my regular carrier, the mail shows up around 10 or 10:30. A couple of days a week it will be a substitute and the mail arrives mid to late afternoon. My guess is that the irregular carriers just run the route in a different order.
I believe the regular guy only works 5 days so you always get someone else 1 day per week
When I was a temp carrier I never did the route in a different order. I didn’t know it well enough. Maybe they split the route between two carriers instead of using a temp.
They didn’t let me sort the mail, since I would have been terribly slow, but once I got everything sorted names and such didn’t matter at all. I was sometimes slow because I didn’t know shortcuts, like moving between two houses without climbing up and down stairs. And some routes were longer than others.
that’s my experience. Our regular weekday carrier comes around 3:30, and the Saturday carrier comes around 1:30.
Our mail is terrible. They’ve gone through 3 postmasters in the last 2 years. It is basically random who is delivering our mail and when it shows up. Today (before a big blizzard) it was at 9 am. During Christmas we had delivery as late at 11 pm. During “normal” operations our mail is delivered between 10 am and 7 pm with no pattern that I can tell.
The excuse is that we’re the last area code they deliver mail to before you get into the mountains where everyone has to come to the post office to get their mail.
I don’t get it. What does area code have to do with mail delivery?
Sorry, zip code.
In my area, they sometimes do a round of packages in the morning and regular mail in the afternoon. When that happens, the afternoon mail is way later than usual.