US Postal Deliveries Continue to Disappoint

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 8, 12:30PM EDT

US Postal Deliveries Continue to Disappoint — © Ralf Geithe / iStock via Getty Images

As the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) bleeds money, its delivery time for First-Class mail continues to disappoint. The public cannot say it was not warned. Last year, the USPS reported that First-Class delivery times would change from a range of one to three days to a range of one to five days.
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Among the comments made before the new range went into effect was, “The Postal Service further notes that it has been unable to achieve its service performance targets for many years, and that these service failures illustrate the weakness of the current transportation model.” In other words, First-Class delivery has been a wreck, unrepaired, for some time.
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The USPS just issued its data on delivery times for the fourth week of its fourth quarter. This covers the period from July 22 to July 29. The average time to deliver a mail piece or package was 2.4 days. It is one of the goals of the USPS’s 10-year plan to have delivery goals that are 95% of the benchmark. Ten years is not only a long time, but also a long time for an organization as troubled as the USPS.
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The USPS soon will issue its financial figures for its most recent fiscal year. No one who watches this should hope that the numbers will improve from recent quarters. In the first quarter of the calendar year, the USPS lost $648 million on revenue of $19.8 billion. No plan has been put forth that will reasonably improve that. Without question, the problem the USPS has is that its expense and its employee bases are too high.
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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says he plans to lose 50,000 employees to attrition over 10 years to reach his goal of “break-even.” He added that over this period, 200,000 USPS workers will retire. That means he will need to hire people to fill these jobs. However, what is not clear is what will happen to wages, particularly in an inflationary period.

Americans have expressed criticism about delivery times. It appears this problem will get worse.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.