The United States Postal Service is moving forward with its plan to slow delivery of about a third of small and light packages as it advances its plan to cut costs and reverse long-standing financial losses at the agency.
Currently, USPS aims to deliver all First Class packages within two to three days. As of May 1, that will change to just 68%, with 17% in four days and 15% in five days. The change is part of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year strategy to stabilize postal finances and follows the USPS lowering its delivery standards for about 40% of first-class mail last year.
The postal service is moving forward with the change even though the USPS regulator in September criticized the agency for failing to demonstrate that it could implement its operating plan, provide consistent and reliable service, or achieve anticipated efficiencies. Postal management relied on overly simplified assumptions and predicted “potentially inaccurate and unattainable” results, the postal regulatory commission said. He added that USPS did not analyze the impact of its changes on customers and questioned the proportion of packages that would be affected.
While it appears reasonable, “the proposal’s reasonableness rests on the postal service being correct in its assessments of consumer preferences and its ability to achieve the modeled increases in reliability, cost savings, and efficiency,” the commission wrote. “If the postal service is wrong in its predictions in the above areas, the rationale for the proposal may prove illusory.”
the opinion of the people’s republic of china was of an advisory nature and did not have any enforcement mechanism.
usps said its current standard of delivering about 80% of its first-class packages in three days is unrealistic and no longer achievable. The postal administration will reduce its reliance on air freight and instead ensure its trucks are fuller each time they go out, which it said will increase reliability. has estimated $42 million in annual savings from the changes, but prc disputed that total, saying that even if true, it would have little bearing on the agency’s overall finances.
postal service kept slowdowns will improve reliability for customers while making your network more efficient. USPS will actually increase the rate for packages delivered within two days by 4%.
“This action will contribute to our cost-saving efforts and improve our reliability across all product classes, including our growing package market,” dejoy said. “By implementing elements of our 10-year plan, we will provide the consistent and reliable service that the American people and our customers expect and deserve and will increase package volume, spurring revenue growth that can be invested back into the postal service. ”.
In a recent interview, dejoy said he doesn’t anticipate further changes to delivery standards after slowing down both mail and packages. he also predicted that ultimately “no one will miss out” on previous faster delivery times. He said that he can’t compete with digital communication and that he won’t try to, and offered advice to anyone looking for faster correspondence: “email, if you need it there in a minute.”
critics of dejoy have pointed out that packages, like pharmaceuticals, cannot be sent via email. USPS has estimated that nearly all medications currently shipped in two days would be unaffected, and 16% of those shipped in three days would move to a four- or five-day window. Nearly 14% of drugs shipped through USPS would be upgraded for faster delivery. prc blamed the postal administration for not exploring the impact of those changes on recipients of pharmaceuticals, saying “it may be prudent” to exclude them from the slowdowns.
Postal customers will continue to offer a more expensive option, Express Priority Mail or Regular Priority Mail, to ship packages anywhere within the contiguous United States in one to three days. USPS also announced that it will remove an additional delivery day it added to its standard in April 2020 due to the pandemic for priority mail shipped via ground transportation, but will remain in effect for packages shipped by air.
The postal service has maintained a long-standing goal of meeting its delivery standards 95% of the time, but it hasn’t for years. has shown improvement in delivering more mail on time since adjusting its standards in that category, although it is still behind its goal. The USPS hasn’t said when it expects to hit the 95% threshold for packages, though it acknowledged it’s unlikely to do so in fiscal 2022.
in recently passed legislation to overhaul the postal service’s finances and reform some of its operations, congress included new oversight and transparency of the usps’ performance. however, those efforts will only apply to mail delivery and not packages.