USPS improves on-time delivery in delay ‘hotspots’, but faces year-end challenges

The Postal Service is addressing mail delays in parts of the country where it launched the first wave of its network modernization plans.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May that USPS would address a drop in on-time deliveries in areas where the agency opened the first of its regional mail processing mega-centers, called Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs).

These large facilities serve as hubs for long-distance transportation, where USPS employees sort mail and packages coming from and going to other regions.

“In regards to service deteriorating, we recognize that, and we apologize to the constituents that have received that service,” DeJoy told the committee on April 16. “But in the long term, if we don’t make these changes, that will be every day, everywhere around the nation.”

Lawmakers in regions hardest hit by regional delays — such as Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia — say on-time performance is improving.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), one of the most vocal critics of recent USPS delays,  met with DeJoy last month to discuss the agency’s improved performance in his state.

in a press release following the meeting, Ossoff said that “while data has shown improvement, there is still more needed.”

“For months I have sustained relentless pressure on USPS management to fully resolve disastrous performance failures impacting my constituents in Georgia. I’m still hearing from Georgia families and businesses about the difficulty they continue to face sending and receiving their mail,” Ossoff said in a statement.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who also met with DeJoy last month, said service in his state is improving after USPS opened a large regional mail processing plant in Richmond.

“While we are glad to see some gains in the on-time delivery rate in Virginia, there’s much more work to do. We will continue to press for increased transparency, greater engagement with the public, and a higher standard of service for communities across Virginia,” Warner said in a statement last month.

USPS spokesman Dave Walton told Federal News Network in a statement that the agency is “dedicated to maintaining the positive advancements observed in the Richmond and Atlanta areas.”

For the week ending Aug. 2, USPS delivered about 95% of first-class mail within six days.

The agency considers first-class mail delivered on time within three to five days, but also tracks its “plus-one day” performance.

In Virginia, USPS also delivered more than 95% of first-class mail within six days.

“We continue to enhance employee availability, provide comprehensive training for management, address operational and maintenance challenges, and have implemented new transportation schedules,” Walton said.

‘Back to normal’

Edmund Carley, national president of United Postmasters and Managers of America (UPMA), said Richmond is “back to normal,” after dealing with some issues, such as challenges with employee availability.

“Everybody was mad, it was chaos. We didn’t know when the trucks were running. We didn’t implement the change. It’s better than it was a year ago, with a much more efficient process. But it takes a while for it to work out,” Carley said.

USPS is shaking up its nationwide delivery network to save money in the long term. Carley said the status quo is unsustainable for USPS, which is more than a third of the way through a 10-year plan to regain its financial footing.

“It’s going to take a while for the savings and efficiencies to come back after the implementation,” he added. “But you can’t compare it to perfect. You can’t compare the Richmond plants and its performance today to perfect. You’ve got to compare it to what it was before the change. And as long as it’s better, and we’re using a lot less hours, it’s a success. I don’t think anybody steps back and allows us the room to do that.”

Postal experts say USPS improvements to on-time delivery are needed, and must continue, for Congress to allow these plans to keep moving forward. But experts say more improvement is needed for lawmakers to be convinced by the agency’s plans.

‘Steady decline over three years’

While USPS is addressing regional hotspots with the most severe delays, its data shows mail delivery is slowing year-over-year at the national level.

Dave Lewis, president of the postal metrics company SnailWorks, said USPS delivered about 93.6% of first-class mail on time in 2022 — but that so far in fiscal 2024, the agency is delivering about 81% of first-class mail on time.

“It’s a steady decline over three years. And those aren’t fluky numbers. You see it week after week. So they have deteriorated, and it is a general deterioration,” Lewis said in a recent interview.

*2024 data is for the year so far.

According to SnailWorks data, a first-class letter took 2.96 days to get delivered on average, in 2022. So far in 2024, USPS is taking about 3.76 days to deliver that same letter.

“You go, ‘Oh that’s a day. That’s not that big a deal.’ But these are averages. [On] the bad end, I anecdotally, I just hear a lot of really nightmare stories. It’s just things taking weeks to deliver. The bulk of it goes kind of slower, that’s not that big a deal. But at the fringes, I think it’s worse than it looks there.”

Throughout the year, those outliers included Atlanta, Houston and Richmond, Virginia. Lewis said USPS service is improving in “hotspots” that saw the worst declines in on-time delivery.

In the Atlanta metro area, USPS took about 10-12 days to deliver a first-class letter — “way beyond the norm,” Lewis said.

“It has normalized now. Now it’s down to about four days, which is kind of average. It falls in the middle of the pack,” he said.

Lewis said USPS is also stabilizing service in Houston, another previous hotspot of service problems. The regional plant dealt with equipment changes, as well as a recent major storm that knocked out power for the region for about two or three days.

“It just fell apart,” Lewis said about the launch of a new RPDC in Houston. “A lot of mailers were complaining that they couldn’t even get their trucks into the facilities. They were just jammed up. They’re relatively back to normal.”

USPS is improving on-time delivery in these hotspots. However, Lewis attributed part of the Postal Service’s improved service delivery to a relatively low volume of mail during the summer.

The agency, however, will see its workload grow in the leadup to Election Day in November and the agency’s peak season at the end of the year.

“It’s slow right now, it’s summertime, there’s not much mail volume. This service is kind of consistent,” Lewis said. “But I do worry that, because they are they are planning on rolling out more of these network updates in the coming months, and the volume is going to be much, much heavier. At the end of August, it will be flooded with political mail. And I am concerned that there’s going to be places where mail just may get stuck and may not move.”

“For the second half of 2024, I think we will see serious declines. I think there will be some serious issues, because I think the volume of mail will be very heavy,” he said.

‘Something’s going wrong’

Thomas Day, vice chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, said USPS is addressing regional delays, but performance isn’t back to where it was before the agency made its network modernization changes.

“They can’t seem to get it back. They can’t even match prior performance,” Day said. “Something’s going wrong, and I don’t know what the something is. I find it very, very confusing.”

For the week of Aug. 3, USPS delivered about nearly 87% of mail in Georgia on time — and got 95% of mail to its destination a day past its maximum five-day window of being on time.

“If the scores had dropped from 90% down to in the mid-80s, and then after a month or two, you bring it back up to 90%, close to 95%, that’s a reasonable disruption. We’re seeing much broader declines,” Day said. “And the other thing that’s troubling to me is that this is prolonged. This is not a couple of weeks of adjustment getting the staff up to speed on how to do it. This is month after month of performance that is just unacceptable.”

Day, a former USPS executive with 35 years of experience, oversaw the opening of major facilities during his tenure. He said the opening of Atlanta’s Regional Processing and Distribution  was the “worst implementation of a new postal facility I’ve ever encountered.”

Rather than take a gradual approach, Day said USPS “flipped the switch” on Feb. 24 and “moved everything at once.”

“I have never heard of something like that being done. That’s not the way things are done. You don’t just flip the switch and everything starts up. You do gradual build-ups to make sure things are working. And once you’ve got stability, bring in some more. You want to take advantage of the new facility, but if you’ve got to take several weeks, a month or more, to gradually build it up,” Day said.

“In Atlanta, because of the way they did it, they have spent so much more money on trying to clean up the mess, than anything they would have lost in savings opportunity, by just doing a gradual opening over weeks or even a couple of months,” he added. “This isn’t even postal operations. This is a lack of understanding of basic operational concepts.”

‘It just continues to decline year over year’

While USPS remains in the early stages of its network modernization plans, Lewis said the strategy far, has yet to meet its goals of lowering operations costs and reliable services.

“The optimist says that, ‘Well, that just takes time to get these changes adapted, and then they’ll start to improve.’ The evidence I’ve seen so far is that it just continues to decline year over year. If had to bet the house, I would say I don’t see any reason why they won’t continue declining next year. I’m hopeful l otherwise, but that’s certainly been the pattern so far,” Lewis said.

Day said scrutiny of USPS performance in Atlanta isn’t just about the on-time metrics.

Unlike other parts of the country, where USPS is retrofitting existing facilities and turning them into RPDCs, the large mail processing hub it opened in Atlanta was brand-new construction and a model of what USPS management envisioned from its new facilities.

“There was a building that was constructed exactly to what they wanted and equipped with exactly what they wanted inside it with all the transport people, you name it. It was to be the crowning glory of what RPDC was to be all about. It was terrible,” Day said.

Day said the best USPS scores in the country are in the parts of the network that are still operating under the old system for mail processing.

“Unfortunately, that has not worked, at least from a service standpoint — although I should say I’m not seeing a financial standpoint either,” he said.

Carley said DeJoy’s network modernization plans are looking to achieve what USPS sought under another reform plan that began more than a decade ago — and was halted by Congress.

“Some of the stuff he’s doing now with those plants is what should have been done 10 years ago,” Carley said. “The idea is that you have 300-some-odd plants across the country, when you could have 60 larger facilities and 150 small facilities. In essence, it logically makes sense, and it’s where we would have been, had we hadn’t had the political pressure in 2014.”

Carley said that some parts of the latest USPS reforms haven’t gone according to plan, but DeJoy has made adjustments when implementation falls short of expectations.

“I’m all for the plan being flexible. You have a game plan, and you realize you miscalculated something, we’re doing to modify the plan,” he said.

“What I’m grateful for is the idea that, ‘OK, we screwed that up. Let’s stop and think what went wrong,'” he added. “Years before, we would’ve just plowed ahead — ‘We don’t care, we’re going to keep doing it. Round peg, square hole, we’re going to keep doing it.’”

By all accounts, some elements of these reforms are paying off. USPS is saving about $1 billion annually by moving more mail and packages on trucks, rather than paying contractors to fly them across the country.

“He made a critical decision, and he saved a lot of money by doing it,” Day said. “[It’s] consistency of service, and you save money.”

However, Day said USPS can — and should — improve service while also cutting costs.

“When you do the right steps to achieve consistent, reliable service performance, what you’re going to do is follow a process in an orderly manner, which also is cost-efficient. So, when you provide top quality service, you’re also going to provide the lowest possible cost, because the efficiencies come together,” Day said. “There’s this mistaken belief that if we let mail go slower, we save money. No, you don’t. That is absolutely false.”

Network modernization continues

Aside from a summertime drop in mail volume, USPS was able to address regional delays because it’s putting some of its network modernization changes on hold until 2025.

However, USPS is still moving ahead with some projects that are already in the works.

“At first, the industry was overjoyed to hear that. It looked like they were stopping, but they really aren’t,” Lewis said.

USPS plans to launch 15 new Sorting and Delivery Centers (S&DCs) across the U.S. on Sept. 7.  S&DCs are smaller versions of Regional Processing and Distribution Centers.

The agency will open these new hubs in Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Florida and Pennsylvania.

“The Postal Service has targeted key markets where it is beneficial to aggregate delivery units into fewer, larger, centrally located S&DCs — leveraging both repurposed and new facilities — to simplify the entire network and create a more reliable and efficient Postal Service,” USPS wrote in an industry notice obtained by Federal News Network.

Carley said the pause of some network modernization is about “perfecting the implementation.”

“They’re not slowing down. Nothing has slowed down here. The planning is still ongoing. I think they’ll hopefully have a better handle on the implementation, come 2025. I don’t think, by the end of 2025, they’re going to have any fewer facilities implemented than they would have done without the pause,” he said.

While USPS has seen service degrade in some spots where it’s rolled out its network modernization plans, Carley said USPS is also shaking up its network in places where there aren’t complaints about on-time delivery.

“They’ve put 53 of these S&DCs together. Atlanta’s the only one you hear about,” he said. “Are the other 52 perfect? Probably not, but they’re at least not getting in the newspaper.”

Marketing mail holds steady

While first-class mail service deteriorated in areas where USPS first rolled out its network modernization plans, performance for marketing mail remains steady.

“That service has not deteriorated in three years. It’s exactly the same. In fact, it’s gotten a little bit better for flat-size mail,” Lewis said.

Lewis suspects marketing mail performance is holding steady, because USPS discounts prices for marketers who drop off their mail to a facility that’s closer to the area in which it will be delivered.

“That’s the last mile, and they’re really good at that. And that has not gotten worse. It’s the getting it to the last mile seems to be where they’re really struggling.”

In other words, first-class mail is moving slower when coming in and out of a state or metropolitan area.

“That transportation element, that’s really the heart of what they’re trying to change with this network. And the transportation piece just doesn’t seem to be working. That’s where the first-class mail is. The marketing mail, knock on wood, is doing very well for that same time period,” Lewis said.

Lewis said flagging USPS service may drive away customers, particularly as the agency keeps raising prices.

USPS raised the price of a first-class stamp from 68 to 73 cents in July.

“The prices just go up and up and up, and then the prices drive more mail out of the system,” Lewis said. “Banks are going crazy trying to get people to go paperless, way more than they have in the past. They really don’t want people using the mail for that.”

Election mail challenges

Lewis said USPS is well positioned to handle mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day. It’s everything else broadly categorized as “election mail” that may put a strain on the agency.

Lewis said his company tracked more than a billion pieces of election mail USPS delivered in the 2022 midterm elections.

“That means, the ‘Vote for me’’ stuff the candidates mail, and that will be billions and billions of pieces mailed in the next three months,” Lewis said. “There are billions of pieces of that, and that’s what’s clogs the system up. That may get in the way for some of the ballots, that concerns me.”

USPS relies on tried-and-true “extraordinary measures” to expedite the delivery of ballots to election officials.

Lewis said the agency can automatically sort out and fast-track the delivery of ballots because of an intelligent mail barcode that goes on every piece of mail, or every piece of commercial mail.

“That indicates that it’s ballot mail. So, the machines can automatically identify ballot mail as it goes through. And the point of that is so the Postal Service as the election nears, they can identify where that mail is and pull it out and make sure it gets delivered on time, and they’ve done a very good job of that in the past.

“I don’t think it’s going to be terrible. I think I think ballots will be well delivered. The Post Service understands the importance, and they have something in place to identify that and give it the special handling that it needs.

Day said recent USPS performance in Atlanta raises legitimate concerns about whether state election officials will receive mail-in ballots in time to be counted. “At the very least, a great deal of caution has to be shown about how mail-in ballots are going to be handled in the Atlanta area. Just to be very, very safe and make sure everything gets counted.”

Some states count mail-in ballots after Election Day, as long as the ballot is postmarked before the election. However, Georgia has stricter rules and will accept ballots no later than Election Day.

Day advised Georgia voters voting by mail do drop off their ballot about 10 days in advance of Election Day, “just to be safe.”

“Georgia is a swing state, not the place you want to have problems with mail-in balance. And so, there’s going to have to be a real concern about how people are advised in the state of Georgia.”

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