I’ve never been aware of delivery of first class mail taking so long. My favorite example is my attempt to pay my credit card bill on time. Although it happened at Christmas, it took almost a month for the company to get my check; I had to talk them out of the late payment fee they had charged me. True, the holidays had some effect. But when I look at my bank account, I see that my checks are being cashed about 10 – 15 days after I have sent them. A package a friend of mine had mailed to Texas took months to arrive. One study in December found that nationwide delivery of first-class mail had fallen to 63.9% from 91.8% a year earlier. In Baltimore on-time delivery of first-class mail fell to less than 30% the day after Christmas.
And what is the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy planning to do? Roll out another slate of policies that would significantly hike postage rates and further slow the delivery of certain kinds of mail. The Post says he has more ideas - "preparing to put all first-class mail onto a single delivery track... a move that would mean slower and more costly delivery for both consumers and commercial mailers." Also, he has also "discussed plans to eliminate a tier of first-class mail—letters, bills, and other envelope-sized correspondence sent to a local address—designated for delivery in two days," the Washington Post reported. "Instead, all first-class mail would be lumped into the same three- to five-day window, the current benchmark for nonlocal mail." And, “the plan also prevents first-class mail from being shipped by airplane," the Post noted, "forcing all of it into trucks and a relay of distribution depots
We probably should have expected this as within weeks of taking office in mid-June last year, DeJoy imposed changes on U.S. Postal Service operations that produced plummeting on-time performance rates.
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