The USPS did a victory lap today, announcing that it had accepted over 13.2 billion mailpieces and packages over the 2021 holiday shopping season and boasting of speedy delivery.
The USPS performance this year was a far cry from last year when there was a shipping meltdown industrywide that resulted in many packages being delivered weeks late. Last year, the USPS didn’t make any announcement about holiday performance after Christmas.
Today, the USPS said its preparations had stood it in good stead in dealing with the holiday surge, which was higher than the previous year.
- Operational improvements and strategic investments under 10-year plan boosted daily processing capacity by 13 million packages.
- Preparations helped mitigate delays even as volumes surged to 2.8 billion the week after Thanksgiving.
The USPS said that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, it took an average of 2.7 days to deliver a mailpiece or package across the Postal Service network. The volume (over 13.2 billion) compared to 12.7 billion accepted for delivery during the same timeframe in 2020 – an increase of nearly 4%.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was quoted in today’s announcement:
“Our mission to deliver for America is an enormous responsibility, especially during the holidays. I am humbled by the hard work and dedication of each and every one of our 650,000 employees who, despite the challenges of the pandemic, helped bring joy and commerce to people across the nation.”
You can find the full press release on the USPS website.
They’ll do even better in 2022 since their getting out of the large package deliveries, Come April I’ll be shipping half what I did last year. I still can’t find out if the USPS will exempt their medium tube boxes of the $15 surcharge. Post master can’t answer and there’s now one to call to verify.
USPS should be privatized. Cost savings would me monumental when compeition. enters the marketplace. It is political. I will stop here.
Ha! I have three packages not delivered to me. All three have shipping updates saying they are being held at the post office at the customer’s request. Uh, no. They weren’t delivered and were taken back to the post office. When I went to pick them up I was told they were out for delivery again. No packages and no updated tracking almost a week later. So where are they? Dumped in a sorting bin or joyriding around the county?
I had better service from USPS this past holiday season for both my outgoing and incoming packages than from UPS or FedEx. I’m sticking with them for my online sales deliveries! In more than 20 years of selling online, I’ve had just a handful of delivery issues with USPS, and all were resolved in short order. Most were packages that got misrouted, but USPS caught the problem and corrected it.
We ship 1000s of parcels USPS and honestly this year was better with far less grief. We track where the issues are system wide and alter our packaging to suit our need for seemingly faster processing and we actually did far less parcel type changes for distribution centers this year. Except for the few times when parcels just went to never never land it was pretty smooth. Now if USPS could just get rid of the entitled attitude of the very many, the take it or leave it attitude with NO real accountability for service offerings and replace lip service with actual employee performance accountability, and performed like a real for profit business it would certainly be great.