The Save the Post Office blog has created a dashboard that lets you see at a glance how well (or how poorly) the US Postal Service is performing when it comes to speed of mail delivery.
In a post introducing the dashboard, Save the Post Office says the USPS and Postal Regulatory Commission publish performance data, but explains their shortcomings:
“The Postal Service itself publishes a service performance dashboard, but it shows only quarterly performance scores, it only goes back a year and it doesn’t include the most recent quarter.
“For more detailed reports, you need to dig around in the website of the Postal Regulatory Commission, and the reports there need to be downloaded in order to see them.
“Some of the PRC’s reports, like those requested recently from the USPS as part of the annual compliance review (discussed in this post), are almost impossible to find if don’t know where to look.”
But the Save the Post Office dashboard goes further: it also collects data the USPS supplies to Congress, the courts (as part of litigation involving mail delays), and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
And Save the Post Office offers brief explanations of what service standards, service performance, and service targets are.
Going to the main dashboard page, one is immediately gratified by seeing a series of charts (scroll down, and note they may take a moment to load). For instance, “First Class Mail by Service Standard, Feb 2020 – Feb 2021” conveys in a way words may not the decline in delivery service for First Class Mail.
The chart for “Market Dominant Mail, Jan. 2020 – Feb. 2021” shows the service performance of First-Class Mail, USPS Marketing Mail, and Periodicals for the last 14 months.
SavethePostOffice.com was launched by retired English professor Steve Hutkins, who was honored by Vice.com as “Humans of the Year” for 2020 for his efforts to report on the Postal Service.
Bravo, and hat tip to Postal News.
