BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL
Santa Claus At The USPS
Do you pay for Prime shipping? Do your Prime packages arrive on time? Maybe you’re waiting for a paper check — most certainly the landlords, credit card companies and Internet service providers will be requesting payments at their appointed time. Many in Blaine County are expressing frustration with delays in parcels of all types through the USPS. ‘Snail-mail’ delays are nothing new but the ramping intensity, with some reporting waits exceeding a month, begs a question:
What’s up with the USPS?
Is it business as usual during the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year? Understaffed offices? Supply chain struggles? Yes, those general variables are part of the equation, but the postal delivery system is clearly having a rough go.
What was your experience like the last time you entered the post office on Main Street in Hailey, 4th Street in Ketchum, Pine Street in Bellevue? Did you notice stacks of packages? Long lines?The USPS problems are nationwide and while the three offices in Blaine County are immediate concern, realizing it’s a bigger issue could help in innovating solutions and workarounds.
A Brief History of Mail Delivery
“The first postal system in the British North American colonies was started by the Massachusetts General Court in 1639” (Brittanica.com). We’re nearing 400 years of macro-physical transmission of communication! Our mail delivery service expanded with the help of Congressional funding and, in fact ,Benjamin Franklin’s diligence and oversight as the first official Postmaster General. However, it’s only been around a little more than 50 years as the USPS was officially stamped as an “independent agency of the executive branch of the US government” on July 1, 1971 (Britannica.com).
The USPS has gone through many transformations and developed from a revenue generator pulling in around $38,000 annually into the multi-trillion-dollar-per-year service it is today.
From thought to pen to paper to carrier to designation, the postal service is intrinsically connected to transportation routes, methods and storage capacity. From foot to horse to automobiles, trains, planes, and perhaps soon to drone, mail delivery has evolved even more directly alongside the transportation industry.
Throughout the 1900s, mail transport was bound largely to highways and railroads, and a salient detail to keep in mind is the importance of storage facilities to hold all this physical media. However, by 1969, highway offices fell from 169 to zero as airmail took over. (Britannica.com)
Finding Shapes in the Clouds
If it appears that email is magically stored in an invisible ‘cloud,’ take a moment to reflect on your hard drive as it fills or visit a ‘cloud’ storage facility and witness the enormous use of space holding computer servers alongside rack upon rack of hard drives. Miniaturization? Maybe. There’s still a trade-off – the cloud may hold more information than a mail depo but it’s still made of brick-and-mortar buildings with mineral-laden servers bleeping and blooping across storage drives. The largest facility in America, The Citadel Campus, demands 7,750,015 square feet of Nevada land!
To put that in perspective, the largest USPS storage facility is the Processing and Distribution Center in Los Angeles, which covers 1.7 million square feet and does around 1 million packages a day. (ABCNEWS.com)
What about all the boxes? Your new Muk Luks still need a place to sit before they swaddle your feet. That place requires construction workers, security, factory staff, forklifts and fire safety.
Fear is the Mind Virus
So we know how the USPS works and we can identify where there might arise kinks in the knot. There’s BEEN a shortage of post office staff and drivers (throughout the supply chain). There’s NOW intense geopolitical strife such that shipping giant Maersk has paused and rerouted shipping through the Red Sea due to the unprecedented conflict in the Middle East. (More big shipping firms stop Red Sea routes after attacks – BBC.com). And on top of it all this is the busiest shipping time of the year, Merry Christmas!
None of the Blaine County post offices were available to comment via phone but when queried in person the common denominator was explained as the resulting corrosion of the system due to COVID, although not strictly the illness but the mentality that appears to have developed as a result of people being forced to stay at home. “Well, first we’re having Internet issues, people are saying cyber attacks… but also it’s so many that are shopping more from home for sure since COVID but also I just think everybody wants to get rich doing a YouTube channel or a podcast or something besides working in a building.” Name withheld per request. She continues, “Vaccinated people blame the ones without and vice versa but nobody seems to understand this still has to happen. The things they want still have to go from A to B…. there’s a lot of dissociation going on. People could work but they find excuses not to… we’re doing the best we can.”
Sending and Receiving Solutions
Consider the driver shortage for school buses. What elements created that issue and what solutions helped? See the Wood River Weekly article SCHOOL DISTRICT TRUSTEE IN DRIVER’S SEAT for more on that.
As another metric, privatized solutions like UPS, FedEX, DHL or Sendle,only lift so much weight, and that’s if they operate in your community. While shipping giant UPS cut its 2023 revenue forecast as “shares sank to the lowest levels in about three years” (Reuters.com) blaming cost-cutting consumers, the USPS was granted a Mail Growth Incentive request by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
“The objective of the incentive is to encourage mail owners to increase qualifying First-Class Mail and Marketing Mail volumes in calendar year (CY) 2024. The incentive will offer postage credits for incremental mail volume next year (January to December 2024) versus what a mail owner mailed in USPS fiscal year (FY) 2023 (October 2022 to September 2023).” (Postal Action Alert: PRC Approves USPS’ 2024 Mail Volume Growth Incentive – rrd.com)
There are no easy solutions, as of yet, to these issues. However, knowing the key structural problems might alleviate stress and prompt creative thinking to innovate as needed.
Happy Holidays and remember that patience is its own reward.