USPS Needs Years to Meet the Standards It Just Lowered

Today, the USPS responded to criticism from PostCom and others in a filing available on the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC)’s website. We hadn’t noticed until Save the Post Office (@savethepo on Twitter) tweeted the following:

“In a filing today the USPS says it intends to “transition” to an on-time performance score of 95% “over several years.” When it made the case for reducing service standards to the PRC, USPS gave no hint that it would take years to get to 95%. None at all.”

Yesterday we reported that in January and February, the percentage of First Class Mail delivered “on time” decreased 2.3 percentage points to 86.9 percent – and that’s after it lowered the bar for what was considered “on time” delivery on October 1, 2021 (slowing about 40% of FCM).

You may remember that the idea behind the mail slowdown was to move mail by truck instead of by plane (“The USPS says it can save money by using ground instead of air transport, thus the slowdown in service standards it’s requesting,” we reported last year).

These days, it’s no slam dunk to move things by truck; in fact, today, the USPS announced it was continuing a pilot program to add more tractor-trailer operators (“Effort to find tractor-trailer operators continues”).

Here’s an excerpt of the USPS response to PostCom’s critique in today’s filing:

“PostCom complains that the FY 2022 targets are not already set at 95%.(5) However, the Postal Service intends to transition to 95% over several years as the infrastructure and network changes necessary to achieve this performance are implemented, rather than immediately implement unrealistic changes to that level that are not achievable absent other fundamental changes. (6)”

You can find the March 1st PostCom filing on the PRC website along with today’s response by the USPS.

The entire docket can be accessed on this page of the PRC.gov website where you can read comments from other organizations about the Postal Service’s FY 2021 Annual Compliance Report.

And feel free to join other sellers who are reporting on the delivery performance of their packages sent via USPS in the comments section of the AuctionBytes Blog. (Note that the performance standards referred to in this article refer to First Class Mail including First Class Package (FCPS), not Priority Mail or other competitive services.)

Postscript: Save the Post Office found some damning testimony, following up its original tweet with this:

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.