re: What the heck is going on with USPS?

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So they decided that they are gonna double down on slowing up.

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For the latest issues that started in earnest in roughly October you have a single individual to blame: the PMG Louis DeJoy.

I have owned part of a company several cousins inherited about 25 years ago. One of the cousins quit his job and runs the company and the rest of us do nothing with the day to day but each has an area of responsibility we spend some time managing. My area is shipping. We ship about 10,000 small parts packages a year to support out customers. I shifted our small parts shipping to USPS within the first couple of months. It was far cheaper and we still had daily pickups. I have over 24 years of data for well over 2 million packages shipped by USPS and they did a remarkably good job until the last ~5 months. I used to get a handful of flags per YEAR now half the packages flag as being late, though they haven't lost any we did have to reship 16 packages in that time to appease customers and both packages usually arrived on almost the same day.

DeJoy slowed down service on purpose and had more plans to slow it down further and to really screw things up his plans to switch over to more modern sorting machines was a colossal failure due to poor or no planning. We should have a new PMG soon and hopefully will revamp the "Delivering for America" plan with an eye toward returning to better and quicker service.

Just like everything else with the govt they’ve turned into a federal jobs program with no accountability and don’t even pretend to care about doing a good job.

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Explain to me how the post office can't knock out walls or add space to fit newer more efficient machines.

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Processing Center workroom is one giant open space. No interior walls to knock down to add space to. Before the machines were dismantled in the first place, they should have compared existing measurements to the new configuration to ensure they would fit.

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paid for 'priority' shipping

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Wish more vendors offered private carriers, or at least, allowed me to choose the cheapest USPS shipping option, since paying for anything beyond that is a crapshoot, at best.

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A lot of vendors haven't switched their sites to take advantage of the new(er) Ground Advantage. Most were set up to use 1st Class for small packages and for a long time the weight limit was 13oz and more recently it went to 16oz so the software only offered Priority above 16oz. Now Ground Advantage maxes out at 70 pounds (IIRC). Businesses have to take a hard look at what is cheaper because sometimes Priority can be cheaper when either taking advantage of the fact the USPS provides packaging or heavy things with limited dimensions (dense) are cheaper using flat rate boxes or envelopes.

I try to make sure our site provides multiple options from all the major logistics companies so the customer gets to choose what works best for them. This also reduces complaints because we didn't force them into a choice.

My dad had a package come into the New Orleans office last Sunday. It still hasn’t been delivered.

I just got a message that my package coming from one state over is now “arriving late” with no ETA even though it’s been over a week since it was shipped. It’s so fricking slow now.

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USPS has some ridiculous practices--like some things could very quickly be sent from one local post office to another, but instead they insist on sending everything to the regional distribution centers first. Extremely inefficient operation.

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What you are suggesting is true for time efficiency but it is absolutely stupid from a cost perspective.

As it is each post office sends and receives mail to the distribution center in the morning and the evening. This is accomplished by a truck that runs a standard route. What you suggest would require trucks to run from each post office to every other local past office and would be a nightmare logistically and cost wise. There is a reason every logistics company in the world uses a distribution center model and has "forever".

Postal employees steal checks from the mail.

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north send me a care package of elk, mule deer and antelope priority or stat or whatever they call it.

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Why was this not next day shipped with a private carrier?

That's on him for trusting the government.

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Personal inbound data to our camp (most relevant for this forum) indicates both BR and St Rose are where packages go to die, the NOLA distribution center is slower but usually only by a day or two, I have seen more and more packages go to St Rose and avoid NOLA those suck. The normal transit to our camp with a Maurepas address is NOLA to Springfield to the Maurepas PO then out for delivery. That used to happen overnight everytime now it usually stays a day in NOLA but if it ends up in St Rose we may be back home by the time it is delivered.

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I've had multiple packages mailed from Maurepas to Baton Rouge. Late last year things changed and now they are traveling to Springfield, then Shreveport, then back to Baton Rouge. In an earlier thread you said they needed to send packages to hubs to be more efficient, but prior to late last year, they were not going to Shreveport. Is this something new? If I recall, it was a much faster, more direct route, prior to December of 2024 and I always got my packages in a day or two, instead of the now normal week to 12 days.