At first, I thought it might just be me. I understand that sometimes there are periods when someone might not get much in the way of mail. But when neither my mother or I don’t get mail at the same time, that tells me it isn’t happenstance.
For some time now we’ve noticed that we don’t receive any mail every other day. Occasionally we only get mail every third day. Asking neighbors, I’ve found that they are experiencing the same thing. Today I asked some of my co-workers, most of them living in other nearby towns, if they have experienced the lack of mail delivery.
Every single one said yes.
I don’t know if it’s a problem beyond our immediate area or if it’s widespread, but it seems the USPS may be having problems with staffing. If they don’t have enough letter carriers to cover all of the delivery routes every day, even with overtime, then moving to every-other-day deliveries make sense. It would have been nice to have received notice that the USPS was moving to every-other-day delivery rather than leaving us wondering what the heck was going on.
Checking the ‘Net, I’ve seen dozens of articles and announcements about delivery delays, but many of them date back to prior to Christmas and are aimed at informing customers to allow longer delivery times due to both Covid and heavy online order volumes.
We aren’t seeing delays here, per se, but non-delivery. No mail one day, then twice the mail the next day. That tells me it’s probably a mail carrier issue, at least on the local level, and not a distribution problem. I have yet to determine if anyone else in the area is receiving mail every other day, but on the days that I am not. That would certainly indicate it’s a lack of mail carriers and not a distribution problem.
