Postal Service facing delivery, financial problems

Dejoy looking at cutting plane use, hours, price hikes

William Pietri, a software engineer in San Francisco, put careful thought into his Christmas box for his family in Michigan, jamming it with tastes from around the world and other gifts: Indonesian ginger candy,

Mexican saladitos con chile, Korean honey butter almonds, a puzzle that was almost impossible to find.

But about three months later, the package has never arrived. According to the U.S. Postal Service, it is still “in transit, arriving late.”

Pietri, 51, is left to guess at the cause.

Months after an election that thrust problems at the Postal Service into the national glare, the beleaguered agency has failed to restore its target delivery times. In middecember the agency delivered as little as 62 percent of first-class mail on time, the lowest level in years, according to Postal Service data. The rate had rebounded to 84 percent by the week of March 6, but remained far below the agency’s target of about 96 percent.

“It hasn’t really gotten better as much as we would have hoped at this point,” said Dave Lewis, president of Snailworks, a company that tracks commercial mail and has found that delivery now takes four to five days, after years of averaging 3.5. “It just seems that the Postal Service just hasn’t come to grips with this and hasn’t been able to dig themselves out of it yet from the problems they had in December.”

The delays are compounding problems at a American institution already teetering under widening financial losses, polarizing leadership and questions about what the Biden administration will do to right the ship.

Already the postmaster general, Louis Dejoy, is completing a soon-to-bereleased plan to stabilize the agency’s finances over 10 years that is expected to prioritize reliability and cost effectiveness over speed.

Dejoy’s report is expected to propose eliminating the use of planes for the first-class mail service to transport letters and other flat mail in the contiguous United States, according to someone familiar with the planning. It is also expected to propose lengthening the agency’s standard delivery time for first-class mail from within three days to within five days.

Among other ideas under consideration: shuttering processing facilities and reducing some post office hours. Dejoy told lawmakers last month that price increases would also be part of the strategy.