US Postal Service Struggles With Deliveries

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 21, 7:30AM EDT

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US Postal Service Struggles With Deliveries — © Ralf Geithe / iStock via Getty Images

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) regularly reports on how well it delivers the mail on time. The most recent report demonstrates that the service continues to have delivery issues.

In the first week of USPS’s fiscal year, October 1 to October 7, the average delivery time for First-Class Mail and other mail pieces and packages was 2.4 days. The on-time delivery rate of First-Class Mail was 92.3%, which was no better than the figure for the latter portion of its fiscal fourth quarter. As CNET reported, this is a downgrade from past targets: “The new service standards for first-class mail and packages, which started Oct. 1, lengthen the delivery time for about 30% of its volume. That means that letters, parcels and magazine subscriptions traveling longer distances could take up to five days to arrive, instead of two or three days.”

The USPS has a tremendous infrastructure to do better. To help reach the revised goal, it has added more full-time people. The USPS says 100,000 people have been converted to full-time since January 2021.

The USPS has a staggering 34,223 offices. 24/7 Wall St. recently wrote: “One absurd part of USPS operations is that it has over 34,000 offices. Once again, much of the communication among Americans and the delivery of documents is done electronically. People do not need a physical post office as much as they did in the past.”
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Ideally, the USPS would encourage people to move from physical delivery of mail and packages to electronic mail. It is substantially more effective and much less expensive. One could argue this would make the USPS much smaller, which should be its primary goal. People also should be encouraged to pay all their bills online.
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The other practice the USPS should encourage is using FedEx and UPS. It is another way the USPS can be made much smaller. This, in turn, would cut the agency’s number of workers and allow it to cut both expensive offices and its massive fleet of trucks.
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Yet another way the USPS could decrease costs is to eliminate the practice of six-day-a-week delivery. It is hard to show that Americans need mail to be delivered more than twice a week.

The USPS continues to meet its own delivery goals. It should not try to. A much better goal is for the agency to shrink itself quickly.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.