A postal worker claims to know the real culprit behind the severe mail jam in the Houston, Texas area that’s been going on since before Christmas – and it doesn’t jibe with a response from the USPS.
As we reported on Sunday, the mail delivery problem has been so bad in the area served by the South Houston Local Processing Center (LPC) in Missouri City, Texas, that members of Congress have been getting involved.
Yet the USPS weekly update on mail service on Tuesday made no mention of the issue as it had of a similar issue in November, when it noted that a facility in Saint Louis, Missouri, had been shut down for two weeks for decontamination of a hazardous mercury leak from an illegally shipped package.
We reached out to the USPS asking about the cause of the Houston backlog and what it was doing to restore conditions. A spokesperson provided us with the following statement on Wednesday:
“We are aware of concerns from some local Houston customers regarding their mail delivery. We want customers to know that we continue the expansion of our operations in the Houston area because of increased volume and we are adding additional capacity with a new facility to improve service. The Postal Service has dispatched additional resources from the surrounding area and implemented improved processes to address root causes of sporadic issues to improve the reliability of mail delivery in the Houston area. Customers should also note that multiple severe weather events in Houston and across the nation have impacted many transportation, logistics, and delivery companies, and the Postal Service is no exception. We express our apologies to those who experienced a deviation from our normal dependable service and customers should already see improvements in delivery as we work though these issues.”
In the meantime, Houston television station KHOU ran two stories on Wednesday featuring an interview with someone it verified as an employee of the Post Office who said machinery changes caused the delays. The worker, who wished to remain anonymous in the report, said the USPS had removed two parcel sorting machines in Houston in December but ran into structural problems getting the bigger replacement machine into the building.
KHOU published another article on Thursday with an updated response from the USPS. It did not address the claims of a machinery snafu.
Any excuse to pacify the public which believes anything that they are told. Gullible.
Suggestion for USPS: next time, first make sure the new machine will fit before removing the existing ones. Happy to lend you a tape measure if you need one.
Also, what’s with all the weather excuses? Didn’t the Post Office motto used to be “neither rain nor snow shall delay the mail”, or something like that? Oh yeah, they dropped that motto years ago. Sad.
Actually, the thing about the rain, sleet and snow was never the USPS’s motto; it was simply inscribed above the entrance to the 8th Avenue Post Office in New York. In fact, the USPS never had a motto, strangely enough.
If they DID have a motto it might be: “Watch Us Waste Your Money”…
I used to work for them and believe me, I know how bad they can be.
Who is the idiot that decides to remove mail sorting equipment in December of all months? Incompetency at its absolute best.
The reason the PO is so screwed up is because a rump appointed bozo with no postal experience is running the joint. Who ok’s a machine that won’t even fit in the door? What’s next? the taxpayer has to pay for a bigger building? – a po near me has been out of commission for 3 weeks because they got flooded. Really? ServePro can’t clean that up for 3 weeks? Think the American taxpayer has suffered enough yet under the unskilled guidence of the head guy? Come on Biden – boot the guy out – it’s time
Biden has nothing to do with this and has no authority to do anything about this problem. USPS is run by a “Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service” and only they have the authority to appoint or remove the Postmaster General. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Governors_of_the_United_States_Postal_Service
I worked in a medium-sized P&DC in California from 2000-2011; coincidentally I also began selling on evilbay in 2000, during the “salad days” of ebay.
As such, I was selling 1-3 items a day and even with the waste, greed and sloth I saw on a daily basis at work, I could confidently tell my customers that their merchandise would arrive 1-3 days after shipping it from across the country.
Circa 2008, Congress began getting more angry about the USPS continually begging for handouts and twisted their arm to make changes. The Postmaster General decided to close smaller sorting facilities and consolidate them with larger facilities. That didn’t turn out so well as gasoline and employee overtime costs money, so the savings wasn’t all that big.
Then they got the bright idea to close post offices in the smallest of rural communities. Turns out, even in the age of the Internet, people still need their mail sent and delivered. That plan was nixed.
Now, they are closing post offices in geographic proximity to processing plants (there aren’t a lot of them to begin with, only one in Arizona, for instance) and bringing the post office into the plants which are already over-crowded.
So, more money is now being spent on remodeling the plants, adding bathrooms, breakrooms, parking lots, fencing, customer service counters (no way are they going to re-use all the old furniture, fixtures, etc) and probably purchase all-new computers, cash drawers, etc. etc.
Way to go, USPS!
Oh, and by the way, I left evilbay in 2015 and migrated to Etsy (now Etsbay) and Bonanza, now called “boner-killer”….
When I ship my merchandise I always give my customers a WEEK’s estimate for delivery, even when going Priority. Sadly, that is often the case with the new and (un)improved USPS…
@Longtime Ebay Seller-
“Who is the idiot that decides to remove mail sorting equipment in December of all months”
the same guy that removed sorting machines right before the expected historic mail in vote of 2020.
BUT, better question….how is he STILL around?
@whatever1234- not just ANY rump- one that is a specialist in destroying services for the community to privatize said services, for his own and his oligarchy’s pockets
@nagmashdriver- no mention of the electric car fiasco
@NYSteve;
There were a whole LOTTA fiascos I didn’t mention for brevity’s sake.