The Postal Service’s recent claims of readiness for the demands of the 2021 holiday shipping season may be more good PR than accurate, based on what the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General recently reported.  In that audit report, Fiscal Year 2022 Peak Mailing Season Preparedness, issued November 19, the OIG documented both the measures the Postal Service has taken and where those may be falling short.

Getting ready

In any public statement about its products or services, it’s to be expected that a private company will present information that frames those products and services as favorably as possible. Any commercial or advertisement is an example.

Whether the Postal Service should engage in such a practice is another matter. Though it’s supposed to operate in a “businesslike manner,” it’s fundamentally a government agency whose vaunted trustworthiness would make the transparency of operations and complete honesty of information no less than core values.

Though it’s generally understood that manual operations are less efficient than those that are mechanized or automated, a September 21 report by the USPS Office of Inspector General further highlighted the chronic inefficiency in Postal Service manual distribution operations.

Overview

The 2020 peak mailing season likely didn’t go as the Postal Service or its customers had expected, to say the least.

Whatever preparations the agency had made for the usual seasonal volume were severely disrupted as the global pandemic impacted employee and transportation availability, and as package volume surged in response to orders from quarantined shoppers.  USPS processing facilities strained to move volume and maintain service but, as the Postal Service and commercial mailers learned, those efforts were unsuccessful in some locations, necessitating exceptional measures to redirect or completely halt the inflow of mail.

There was a commercial for Toyota that aired several years ago that had the tagline “You asked for it, you got it.”  What “it” was hasn’t been remembered as well as the tag line, but the utility of the line persists.

In this case, given that the Postal Service finally issued its 10-year plan last week, the agency can say “you asked for a plan, you got a plan.”  Congress and the mailing community have been waiting for years for The Plan that the agency’s been promising, and now we can all see whether the result has been worth the wait.

In an audit report released March 10, Excessive Wait Times to Accept Commercial Mail Shipments at the Cleveland Processing & Distribution Center, the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General examined the circumstances surrounding the challenges encountered by the facility in late 2020.  As the OIG stated at the outset:

“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the November 2020 general election, the US Postal Service’s Cleveland Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC) experienced earlier than normal Peak Season mail, including package volume.  This management alert responds to media and mailer concerns indicating that drivers experienced excessive wait times for drop shipments at the Cleveland P&DC.  Our objective was to assess the efficiency of processing drop shipments at the Cleveland P&DC in the Northern Ohio District.”

The following is the second in a two-part commentary, excerpted from the Dec. 9 edition of Mailers Hub News

Changes step 3

An audit report by the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General revealed that changes the USPS has instituted in its processing operations have failed to produce savings at a pace commensurate with the overall decline in mail volume. Released September 9, the report (NO-AR-19-006, US Postal Service Processing Network Optimization) evaluated “trends and practices the U.S. Postal Service uses to optimize its processing network.”

Summary