OT. Slower Mail Delivery

You got the mail from Wells Fargo.

How about actually referring to the USPS instead?

"Most First-Class Mail (61 percent) and Periodicals (93 percent) will be unaffected by the new service standard changes. Standards for single-piece First-Class Mail traveling within a local area will continue to be two days."

"The Postal Service will increase time-in-transit standards by 1 or 2 days for certain mail that are traveling longer distances. By doing so, the Postal Service can entrust its ground network to deliver more First-Class Mail, which will lead to greater consistency, reliability, and efficiency that benefits its customers."

Very depressing. I wonder if this can be reversed. They've actually gotten better about delivering my weekly newspaper. The last two have come almost on time (instead of 1 to 3 months late). I got one yesterday Monday that should have come on Friday, and sometimes Saturday. Of course this can be reversed and they may reverse it.

--The paper now puts on the mailing label "DATED MATERIAL - DO NOT DELAY". I doubt that helps but maybe it fulfills some USPS regulation. And on page 2 is a box that takes up 1/5 of the page that says "Dear readers, Due to the Covid-19 pandemic there are unfortunate delays in the postal service, including the delivery of newspapers....."

This doesn't prove to me that the problem is really covid. The paper isn't looking to make enemies.

And they say they have been sending a link to download a digital copy of the whole weekly paper. And indeed they have, but I don't like the format. It's the one that looks like a magazine and you can use the mouse to 'turn page', but it shows the whole page and you constantly have to zoom and unzoom. So i've just waited and I get the paper late

-- I hope I've gotten every one -- and I read the news when it's not new.

Wells Fargo are the ones that created phony accounts for its own customers, 10's of thousands of them iirc, so they could charge unearned fees.

They also reordered the arrival of checks, and applied the largest ones first when the total would cause the customer's checking account to be overdrawn. If they applied them in the order they came in, the normal method for over 100 years, and small ones came in first, then the small ones could be paid and there might be only one bounced check for which they could get their 35 or 50 dollar bounced check fee, but by applying the checks largest first, they can bounce all the little checks, allowing them to charge the 50 dollars for several checks. (Bank of America did this too.)

I think there was a third illegal thing they did.

No one went to jail, no one was criminally charged afaik.

That still leaves 39%.

Leaves 7%.

But evne if my weekly newspaper is part of the 93%, it has been, since a year or maybe January, 2 to 3 months late, or on a good day, only one month late. So if it is unaffectesd by the new standard, I guess they can continue to send it late.

(as I said in the other post, it's been only a couple days late for the last 2 weeks, but I also said the problem is not just mine.)

Last January they announced plans to hire 100,000 new employees. Why can't they deliver more 1st-class mail...?

And then there are cluster boxes, that make people go outside for their mail, even when it's raining or freezing out. That's definitely a step back, for the "richest country in the world". Do people still call us that?

Overall, I'm fairly satisfied with USPS. Last week they really surprised me. I sent a small first class package from NJ and it was delivered in AZ in just under 48 hours. On the other hand they don't do a very good job of communicating. I found out about a week ago that they have suspended first class package service to Australia and any packages already in the system that haven't cleared the US intl center will be returned. I have the USPS app on my phone, get daily delivery notifications via email and not a peep about this from USPS directly. It's caused by an Australian problem, their mail system is breaking down, at least partly from Covid problems. But you would think the USPS could inform people here.

Where I live now, the cluster box is only 100' further than my mailbox for the past 40 years.

Do you have Informed Delivery? I get an email in the morning showing me what is in the delivery that day. If it is junk and raining, I don't walk across the street.

The Trump appointed head of the USPS is Dejoy and he is cutting cost and service. Not easily gotten rid of.

Overall, they do a good job but there are some deficiencies. The good news, the Post office contracted with a private carrier, XPO Logistics, to move some of the mail and DeJoy will profit from it as he owns some property they are renting.

Because a large fraction of mail going long distances was shipped on passenger aircraft as belly cargo. There are less than half the normal scheduled flights in the air today when compared with 2019, so they need to ship more first class mail by surface (e.g. truck).

Note that the 39% to which they added 1-2 days of transit time is mail that is addressed to locations further than a day's drive from the post office where the mail was deposited.

Let's not take your one issue and paint the USPS with a broad brush.

I couldn't be more pleased with their communication efforts.

At least once a month I receive something from a specific health insurance company addressed to a person who has never lived at my address. For the 6 months I've been doing the "Return to sender. Addressee unknown" thing. Nothing changed.

A couple of weeks ago I used the Contact Us link at usps.com and explained the issue, asking for advice on how to stop the annoyance.

Less than 2 hours later - on a Saturday morning - my phone rang. It was a rep from the USPS telling me that he will contact my local branch and have a note placed in my basket informing the mail carrier not to deliver mail addressed to (insert wrong name here). He even explained the issue, which I already knew. Our regular mail carrier has been out sick for months* and they've been using subs.

I'll have to wait and see if it helps, but from a communications standpoint I think a 2 hour response time - on a Saturday - is pretty damn good.

I got the same sort of email from my CostCo Citi card a couple of weeks ago.

Somebody needs to stop the bleeding. People still think they should be able to mail something thousands of miles away for a dime and have it get there is a day or two. Now that is 58 cents but it is still a bargain. If you want to invest, buy forever stamps.

OTOH the biggest cause of the bleeding at USPS is the unfunded pension plan.

They are raising the rates and I think another dime would still be a great deal. I won't walk across the street for fifty cents let alone across the country.

My problem with DeJoy is some of the antics with mail in ballots and intentional delays from his "polices". A truck was considered "on time" within some period after the scheduled time. He demanded trucks leave at the exact time and they did, but were often empty and mail was delayed, including live animals and prescription meds. Oh, and mail in ballots.

You mean your mailbox is not at your front door? I agree that another

I have informed delivery and it often says that there were things it does't have pictures of and it doesn't say anything about what they are. And it only does envelopes that are smaller than a certain size and doesn't do packages. And sometimes mail is important and you can't wait until it stops raining (or stops being freezing which can take weeks in some parts of the country. )

And the cluster box fills up if you take too long to empty it. Perhaps you're sick. Then I don't know what happens but it's not good.

And things don't always come the same day they appear in Informed Delivery, so the first day that is a trip to the box for nothing, and then maybe you should go the next day but maybe it still won't be there.

No matter how you slice it cluster boxes are a big step backwards.

Does that mean things will go back to normal if we start having a lot of plane traffic again.

Well I'm not sure how I feel about that distinction, but thanks for the added information.

But the point of the OP is that it will no longer get there in "a day or two".

And that won't make it get there any faster, as fast as it did before.

Why would you possibly call that bleeding? It's a debt that has to be paid.

Send me a link or a file and I'll see if I like it. If I do, I'll recommend it to the paper. Just delete NONONO from my email address.

Where do you buy them for 58 cents? I buy them at the post office, 55 cents. Maybe they are cheating you. Time for another conspiracy theory?

I've never owned a house where the mailbox was at my front door. None of the houses was inside a city, town, or village. All the mailboxes were/are on a post at the edge of the road. I consider myself lucky that this house has the post on my side of the road, so I don't have to cross the 45-mph (with people actually doing more like 60 mph) traffic to get the mail.

If the weather is bad, I pick up my mail on my way in or out; I stop the car and the end of the driveway and walk a few feet to get the mail.

We don't use USPS for very much. Everything is electronic: bills, newspapers, once in a while a package. I'm quite satisfied with my two electronic daily newspapers. Each is a facsimile of the "real" newspaper. I can zoom in on each page and scan up and down it, navigate to the next page or next section at will.

Cindy Hamilton

Dean didn't do anything wrong. He just repeated what the email said. Anything we read in email or on the web or in person is subject to more investigation if one has endless time, and he chose to just say what he already knew.

And I got the same email from Wells Fargo today, one day later.

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't notice this line until you repeated it. Somewhere along the line, I became a sloppy reader. It might go back all the way to my sojourn in law school where the amount to read was overwhelming.

A) And I'm as annoyed as you are that the WF email left out "that are traveling longer distances." The same short email includes "What you can do. If you haven't already, consider options available through the Wells Fargo Mobile® app and Wells Fargo Online® banking, like 1) switching to online statements for quicker delivery, 2) making payments to your Wells Fargo credit and loan accounts by transferring money, 3) paying bills using Bill Pay, or 4) setting up alerts for payment due reminders"

B) IOW, they are trying to make this change by the USPS sound wose than it is to get customers to do things that WF already wanted done, 1) mobile statements to save WF money on printing, labor, and postage, 4) setting up alerts to increase the number of people who make their payments on time, and 2 and 3 may be in the same category. Encouraging these things would be fine if they didn't do it by exaggerating the change being made by the USPS.

C) There was a Learn More link, but it had no more about this omission.

D) They could have included those words and also pointed me to the same url you did, but they didn't.

Its email says instead "revised its service standards for certain First-Class Mail items, resulting in a delivery window of up to five days" I know that even if the branch one deals with is a block away, mortgage and credit card payments often go to Iowa or some other faraway place. Of course it's not a secret, the address will be on the envelope. Does that relieve WF from criticism for omitting "that are traveling longer distances"????? That itself is rather vague.

I despise WF and I only have an account there because, before its scandals, I wanted to have some money in a 2nd bank near me, in case for example, my main bank suffered a ransom attack. And having two debit cards, carried separately, was very good when one was stolen while I was traveling.

Should I write them a letter repeating paragraphs A, B, C, and D, or will that just cause them to lose my account, invalidate my bank card, or steal some of my money?

I wonder about that too for these guys. Trump is a sociopath, who wants to hurt people and society, but I thought there were very few such people. Trump was the first one I identified and the only one unless tiro is one too.