In issuing a new 10-year plan in March to overhaul the service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and chair of the Postal Service board of governors Ron Bloom acknowledged that the post office is not meeting its own service standards, and has not been for several years. Letters dropped at the central post office downtown had no apparent advantage for speed of delivery over letters dropped in residential building mail slots. Post Office delivered two dozen of our letters to points in the New England/Northeast corridor - and one to Tuscaloosa, Ala. A letter to Baltimore took as long as a letter to Hawaii (a week). In our unscientific sample, distance from Boston did not appear to be a determining factor of how long a letter would take. For every day the mail is delayed, “somebody’s not getting their money,” he said.
A late bill or a late payment can have a dramatic impact. Data on his site shows that more than 30% of first class mail is “transaction” mail - things like bills, payments, requests for donations. “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot,” he said. “It has gotten better since then, but it is still not back to where it is supposed to be,” Hutkins said.Īnd while we are only talking about waiting a few extra days or a week for a piece of mail, Hutkins says those wait times are not trivial. Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University English professor who runs the Save The Post Office website, said that since last summer the postal service “has been having trouble keeping up with their standards.” Postal delivery times began to slow around July and bottomed out in December. In April 2020, the USPS reported that in the Greater Boston area, around 98% of local mail was arriving within 2-5 days, and 97% of nationwide mail from the area was landing within 7 days, according to reports archived by the Save The Post Office website.įor our sample, about 89% arrived by April 12. These results are far below what the Post Office aims to achieve - or what it used to achieve. The results were better for mail within Massachusetts: All 10 of the in-state letters GBH staff sent arrived by April 8. As of April 22, there were still two letters that could not be accounted for. A letter to rural Virginia arrived April 13 a letter to Washington, D.C., took another three days. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window.īy Friday of that week, much of our mail had arrived, but there were still ten letters wandering around the country looking for their addressees. The Postal Service did not pass our test. The experiment was designed to recreate what might be the experience of an ordinary user of the U.S. The letters were addressed to residents of large cities, suburbs and small towns. Postal Service advertises that first-class mail - your average letter with a 55 cent stamp - arrives within “1-3 business days.” That is an official standard set by the Postal Service.Įditors, reporters and producers at GBH News sent nearly 100 letters from different places in the metro area at various hours on the same day to correspondents of their own choosing in 38 states, creating a random sample. It took 14 days for that envelope to make the trip. Nearly three weeks later, that letter has not arrived.Īnother GBH News editor sent a letter the same day to Berkley, Michigan, from the massive Fort Point Channel post office. The letter was addressed to a family member in Memphis, Tennessee.
Post Office in Central Square in Cambridge. On Monday morning April 5, a GBH News editor dropped a letter into a mailbox outside the U.S. Data visual produced by Lauren Jo Alicandro/GBH News
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