Syracuse, NY – With the coronavirus pandemic taking e-commerce shipments to new heights, the US Post Office is struggling to deliver by Christmas.
In the week ending December 12, post-delivery delivery performance reached just 87.5%, according to industry tracking company ShipMatrix. In comparison, FedEx was at 93.9% and UPS at 96.1%. (ShipMatrix excludes delays caused by bad weather from its performance data.)
The performance of the Post Office improved in the week ending December 19, as volumes declined slightly. The week ended with a 93.6% on-time delivery, said ShipMatrix. However, the service is still behind FedEx (95.2%) and UPS (96.3%), in part because the Post Office had to deal with a few million additional orders per day that were not accepted by FedEx and UPS , said.
“Despite such a marked improvement in the final stretch, over a million online orders are still at risk of not being delivered until Christmas Day,” said ShipMatrix.
However, ShipMatrix President Satish Jindel said that not all items that will still be in transit at Christmas are Christmas gifts. Many are simply domestic purchases that families have made online because of the pandemic, he said.
Package shipments have increased 30% this holiday season compared to last year, with retailers and consumers turning to online ordering and home delivery because of the pandemic, said Jindel.
Tom Dlugolenski, chairman of the Syracuse branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the increased volume of remittances, along with the shortage of personnel caused by Covid-19 cases among postal service employees, is affecting local operations.
“To be honest with you, I am quite confident that many people will not receive their packages until Christmas,” he said. “Here, locally, we receive calls and complaints from people, ‘Where’s my package? It is not being sent. I look at the online tracking and it shows that it is in this facility or something like that. ‘We have capacity on the network, but you are understaffed and the huge increase in packages is certainly overloading the system right now. “
Adding to the challenges, he said, is the fact that the Post Office depends on airlines to dispatch orders over long distances, as the service does not have its own fleet of planes like FedEx and UPS. And as airlines have substantially reduced flights during the pandemic, some air shipments have been delayed, said Dlugolenski.
USA post office at Franklin Square in Syracuse. (Rick Moriarty | [email protected])Rick Moriarty
“We have received historical volumes delivered, but historical volumes are yet to come,” said Maureen Marion, spokeswoman for New York Central Postal Service operations. “It really was an incredible and historic year for us in every way.”
She said the volume of correspondence dropped considerably during the pandemic because of coronavirus-related blocks. But the volume of everything else has soared, she said.
“Toilet paper, dog food, clothes, work supplies, games, crafts, books, everything you can imagine started to arrive in the mail because there was no alternative,” she said.
Marion said that local postal workers are working hard to deliver holiday packages until Christmas, but acknowledged that this will not be possible in all cases.
“We are still working on them,” she said. “We still have correspondence. Part of it is material that arrives at the counter every day. Part of this is material that is in our pipeline because we simply don’t have enough trucks to move everything forward. “
The service hired about 75 seasonal mail handlers and support workers in the Syracuse area this year. These jobs usually end at Christmas, but some will be kept longer this year, said Marion.
“It will be a little bit more in hand and we are grateful for those seasonal people who can stay with us to serve downtown New York,” she said.
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