re: Amazon:USPS

I was a mail carrier for 5 years and now i'm a temporary clerk for the holidays. I am not making any excuses for USPS but will give you some info on how things are.

First off, USPS has been severely short handed for years. Nobody hardly applies any more and due to the crazy workload most new hires just quit after weeks or a month or two. USPS management from station level all the way to the top is horrible. They have no people skills and no management skills. I often say they could not manage a kindergarten bathroom break. Although mail volume is steadily decreasing package volume, mostly Amazon, has exploded. USPS entered into a contract with Amazon years ago without the manpower, vehicles, building space and infrastructure to carry out the contract. Most offices have vacant routes because there are not enough workers. The routes may go days without being delivered. On other routes if a carrier is going to be late getting back they are instructed to stop delivering mail but to deliver every package. Many carriers start at 7 or 8 in the morining and some are being made to work to 10 or 11 at night. Are some carriers lazy? Absolutely. Many are just tired of working 6 days a week are 10 to 12 hours a day and are just worn out. Does that lead to shortcuts or them just not making the effort or not delivering? Absolutely. Packages: short handed offices have to borrow workers from other offices who are not familiar with the area. Often the line of travel they are given is outdated and not correct. Management is very slow at updating line of travel or they simply do not. They do what they can but often make mistakes. Packages that are not delivered for a variety or reasons, carrier not familiar and cant find address, carrier told to come back because its too late, or just a lazy carrier. These are scanned in several different incorrect ways. I see alot of "available for pickup at post office". They should actually be scanned as delivery delay but management would have to answer for that so they just lie to the public with a false scan. USPS does received packages from UPS, Fedex, and DHL. Their websites show the package as delivered when its dropped off at usps. However, they always make their drops after packages have gone out for the day. So those packages don't go out until the next day. There are also many lost packages in the system and i have no idea how that happens. Each days we get anywhere from 20 to over 100 miss delivered packages, that is packages we receive but are actually for another office. They go back to the plant the same day then get re routed to the correct office....hopefully. As for the picture of Amazon outside the post office, we simply get too much Amazon for the dock and work room space we have, and not enough workers to get it all out each day. They literally send more than we can handle but they continue sending it. I'm sure the inside of that post office is crammed with pallets of amazon and they had no place to put it other than the parking lot.