Business owner fears delayed mail could ruin him

MILFORD — The check is in the mail. For a long, long time, it seems.

Dan Thornberg, owner of landscaping business Total Lawn Care & More, said he’s been waiting 45 days for tens of thousands of dollars in customer payments that he was told were sent, but never arrived at his post office box on Pepe’s Farm Road.

Thornberg, 31, in business for 11 years, employs 10-15 workers and said he faces potential financial collapse if the checks don’t arrive soon. If not for the recent sale of a house and credit cards, he would be sunk, he said.

Thornberg, a member of the city Chamber of Commerce, has been trying to get answers from the USPS for 45 days, he said — only to be told by local postal officials that his mail may be in trucks of backed-up mail in Springfield, Mass.

But following an inquiry by Hearst Connecticut Media into the checks he is waiting for, the USPS customer relations department said it is taking a “deep dive” into his case, said Amy Gibbs, a regional spokeswoman.

“We are working through high volumes of mail in a global pandemic and we are exceedingly proud of the exceptional job our employees are doing (and continue to do every day) as they work around the clock to deliver mail,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs didn’t directly answer the question of whether there has been a high volume of complaints, but encouraged anyone having a problem to “reach out to us” using 1-800ASK-USPS or the website www.usps.com.

According to USPS data in its “Performance Highlights In FY 2020 Quarter 4” document, for the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, national “Single-Piece First-Class Mail” two-day performance was 88.2 percent on time and national three-to-five day performance was 72.1 percent on time. The two-day performance score was 5.8 points lower than the same period last year. The three-to-five-day performance score was 15.7 points lower than the same period last year.

That data for the Northeast area listed the “Connecticut Valley,” as 88.6 percent on time for two-day performance and 73.2 on time for three-to-five day performance.

Thornberg said he is grateful USPS is taking his woes seriously and trying to resolve the problem, but that doesn’t pay the bills and he said he questioned how many other business owners are in the same boat.

“I don’t want to be another casualty of COVID so I want to get the word out,” Thornberg said. While he understands the chaos caused by the pandemic, if the checks don’t arrive, “I fear I’ll have to close.”

Thornberg said if it had been March the situation probably wouldn’t be as dire, but it’s the slow season and he had just paid out thousands in Christmas bonuses to employees. He’s worried about paying his suppliers on time and the affect it could all have on the purchase of a new house in motion.

The scenario began to unfold more than a month ago when clients began contacting him to see why their checks for payment hadn’t been cashed. Thornberg said he was told repeatedly by the local postmaster that the checks likely were in backed-up mail at the Springfield hub.

Gibbs said that like everyone else, the USPS is “grappling” with a reduced workforce because of COVID-19 and “unprecedented demand,” because under the “Universal Service Obligation we accepted all volumes from all providers for every address across Connecticut and the nation.”

“This added to our challenge. To meet this unprecedented demand, we had to be flexible with limited resources,” she wrote in an email. “One processing plant might therefore help another work through any overflow. In some cases, mail has been diverted to facilities that can work through the mail more effectively.”

She had no comment or information regarding Thornberg’s individual case.

She praised the dedication and hard work of postal employees, saying that over the holiday season they put more than one billion packages into customers’ mailboxes, a “historic number.” Gibbs said “shippers across the board were challenged with airlifts and trucking capacity for moving historic volumes, causing temporary pockets of delays.”

Though she did not say that Thornberg’s mail could be in Springfield as he said he was told, Gibbs said first-class mail — a regular letter and a stamp — typically is processed through the Hartford facility and mail such as magazines and parcels would be processed at the Springfield facility.

“However, this is not a typical year,” Gibbs wrote.

She said the USPS hiring additional staff to support postal operations across the state

Thornberg, who started the landscaping business when he was 20, said 70 percent of his business is commercial and in one week he typically has 50 checks waiting at his P.O. box, but nothing of late except advertising flyers.

“I only have so much money,” he said. “If not for me selling the other house I couldn’t have paid the guys’ bonuses.”

Thornberg