When Postmaster General Louis DeJoy sought to rein in expenses at the U.S. Postal Service, he put into play cost-cutting measures that slowed mail delivery and hurt small businesses that rely on mail carriers to ship their products.
“Every single one of our customer complaints is delivery-related now,” Christine Marie Mason, founder of Rosebud Woman, a company that specializes in intimate skincare, told the Washington Examiner via email.
Mason said the slowdown has caused multiple delivery-related order cancellations and delayed the arrival of skin care samples that have been in transit for more than two weeks.
“The list goes on,” she said.
DeJoy reportedly instructed postal workers in July to leave mail behind at distribution centers if collecting it would delay mail carriers on their routes, according to an internal post office document obtained by the Washington Post.
“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” the document report states, as reported by the Washington Post.
Postal workers do not normally leave behind mail, but the new instruction was to help cut overtime pay and transportation costs and improve the Postal Service’s bottom line: Paring back those items could save $200 million over an undisclosed period of time.
The policy change provoked some mail carriers to speculate that a growing backlog of mail and packages would pile up at distribution centers and post offices.
DeJoy recently paused the initiative, saying that he wanted to avoid even the appearance of slowing the delivery of mail-in ballots, but his announcement left some small-business owners scratching their heads as he vowed to freeze implementing the cost-cutting measures and not reverse the ones that are already in place.
DeJoy announced on Tuesday that “mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are.”
More than 670 sorting machines were slated for reduction starting in June, CNN reported. The news organization also reported that 475 of the machines were to be removed by the end of July, according to documents.
The Postal Service processes more than 420 million mail pieces every day and has hundreds of processing centers located around the country. It measures the speed and reliability of mail delivery on a quarterly basis, which has yet to capture the activity for the current quarter. However, a spokesman for the agency told a local news station that there has been a slowdown due to increased volume in mail because of the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has led to heavy parcel volumes as customers continue to place online orders of essential items as they shelter in place,” said spokesperson John Hyatt. “U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail products and First-Class packages may require more time to be delivered due to limited transportation availability.”
Still, Aaron Wong, owner of the clothing store Murder Apparel, said that the level of service declined immediately following DeJoy’s earlier announcement to retool the agency by cutting costs.
“We’ve been seeing the USPS losing more mail than usual. The tracking number just stops tracking randomly. And a lot of the time, [the packages] are delivered to the wrong address, sometimes in different states,” he said.
Arianna O’Dell, who runs the gift shop IdeasbyArianna, said that delivery wait times have at least doubled since DeJoy initiated his cost-cutting plan. She also said that an increased number of packages have been lost in transit or returned to her for no apparent reason.
“A package got returned to me even though it had the right address,” she said, noting that the decline in the post office’s efficiency has hurt her customer rating.
“Even after giving tons of refunds, [my customer rating] dropped to a 4.5, which actually hurts me financially,” she said.
The slowdown in mail delivery has prompted some of her customers not to believe her when she says a product shipped but has failed to arrive in a timely manner.
“I had a customer calling me a liar and to go to hell. I was like, I gave you your money back. What else do you want?” she said, adding, “I am frankly very stressed out to wake up every morning to have lots of people yelling at me.”
O’Dell is considering using FedEx or UPS to deliver her products, but they are more expensive. For example, a 2-pound parcel shipped from Los Angeles to New York City would cost more than $30 using FedEx or UPS. The cost is less than half of that using the post office.
Wendee Shulsen, who owns a knitting and fabric supply store called Hazel Knits, told the Washington Examiner that using FedEx or UPS would drive her out of business because her products are lightweight and much more expensive to ship using a private carrier.
A ball of yarn priced at $20 costs $4 to ship from Seattle to Maine using the Postal Service, Shulsen explained. The shipping cost would be 5 times greater using the other carriers — and double the price of the yarn being sold.
“If we were to send the exact same product to the exact same address using Fed Ex or UPS, it would cost $20,” she said. “Some of my customers simply will not do it. … Without the Postal Service, we would be out of business. There are no bones about it.”
