Gone Postal

You don't have to dig very far through the headlines lately to find some form of media discussing the problems that the the USPS is having with getting the mail delivered in a timely manner. You are bound to see a wide array of opinions as to whether the problems are acceptable or not, whose fault it is, and whether it will get any better in the foreseeable future. With this piece, I'd like to take a few moments to explore those questions based on my own experience with the Postal Service in this wild year we call 2020. Let's start by being fair that the USPS is currently experiencing incredibly high volumes of mail that must be processed daily that everyone was completely unprepared for. I don't think that a year ago any of us could have guessed how much the months ahead would change our lives as a whole. We have become reliant on the USPS now more than ever for many reasons. Businesses have closed and jobs are disappearing due to downsizing in order to stay afloat, leading to creative income production. People who led busy lives filled with Little League games and PTO meetings are now stuck at home with Zoom schooling and grocery deliveries, so they're bored and shopping in their pajamas. Then there was the election... The election has been completely ludicrous no matter what side of the aisle you are watching from, with the Postal Service front and center of that whole circus. I could go on, but I believe we are all well versed in what difficulties the year has brought to many of us.

There is clearly nothing "normal" happening in the world right now so it stands to reason that shipping companies in general might be a little backed up. I don't believe anyone is contesting that much, but instead I believe it is how it is being handled as a whole causing the upset amongst postal customers. I'd like to share a little bit about my experience as a postal consumer over the course last half of this year, as it led me to take a closer look at the problems in question. The deeper I delve into the full customer experience, the more frustrated I find myself becoming. With that said, I will try to exercise diplomacy as best I can in the spirit of fairness, but I unfortunately can't promise too much on that end based on what I have witnessed.

I was amongst those that lost jobs over the summer due to layoffs. When most people think of what it means to lose a job their mind immediately goes to the obvious problems that these kinds of things bring about in regards to bills and income, but commonly overlooked is access to benefits like insurance. That was the hardest hitting part for me, personally, as I have had ongoing health issues for years and losing access to my medication in the middle of a pandemic was certainly less than ideal. What does any of that have to do with the postal crisis? Well, losing insurance forced me to seek out alternative means of affording my meds and I had to rely on companies to ship them to me. Enter the USPS. At this point, when I ordered I had full confidence in the USPS. Despite the warnings of those that were vocal against them in regards to ballot collection for the election, I hadn't personally had any over the top poor experiences so I wrote those concerns off as just another divisive narrative spoon-fed to us by the media. I was wrong.

I knew that things would be shipped a little slower as we were starting to see shipping delays across the board. Completely understandable, so I ordered well in advance of depleting my supply of medication on hand and waited... and waited. When I got down to less than a week's supply I started trying to reach out to someone in the Postal Service, anyone really, to see what was happening with the package. It had been tracked to have shipped the day after I ordered but there hadn't been any movement since. If you have ever personally dealt with a postal issue, I'd wager that you know exactly where this is going. You see, any of the USPS customer service numbers you can readily find just send you into an endless loop of automated menus. When you ask to speak to a representative it just reroutes you to another series of automated menus. After about an hour of trying to annunciate enough for the machines to somewhat understand my responses only to get nowhere, I decided to search for a better way to contact them and finally found the number to my local post office. When I called, I let the phone ring for several minutes. There was no answer, no voicemail... nothing.

At this point, I'm sure you can imagine my frustration. However, when you're trying to track down your medication and you factor in prescription regulations, what can you really do but press on with your quest? So, press on I did... It took some time, but eventually I was able to find an email to use to contact someone and have them call me back. I entered my information and the next morning I received a call. The person on the other end of the call sounded terse and it became clear pretty quickly that he felt my medication wasn't really his problem. When I enquired about why there seemed to be no tracking updates, I was told that sometimes the scans get missed but it was probably still in transit. Probably... Okay, thanks buddy! That definitely fixed everything... Again I was left to wait. Are you noticing a theme yet?

It wasn't until the day after I ran out of my medication that I finally saw it had updated to "Out for Delivery". I cannot explain to you the sense of relief I felt. However, when the mail was delivered for the day my package was not amidst the bills and junk mail. When I went back to check the tracking, thinking maybe they had just forgotten to drop it, I saw that it had updated to "Delivered: in / at Mailbox". Um... excuse me? At this point I was livid. I asked my neighbors when they got home if they had received it by mistake and they all had assured me they had not.

I was not about to jump through the same hoops for answers at this venture, so I went to social media to try to see if I could get somewhere. I found the official Facebook page for the USPS and scoured for some link or post about finding help with lost packages. There was nothing. I messaged them using the built in feature only to find out later that it isn't even monitored, which would explain why the inquiry was without a response. During all of this, I was scrolling through the posts and noticed one about their top notch Customer Service. The irony of the whole situation was all too much for me at this point. I just wanted to make sure I could eventually access my package, so I left a comment briefly explaining the situation and asking for help from anyone anywhere who might have had a similar experience. With it being Facebook, naturally I assumed there would be a troll or two. That is just the reality of tech age culture. What I was not expecting, however, was the immediate barrage of insults and assumptions slung my way in response from self-proclaimed postal workers. Now I have been in the workforce for the past two decades and I can guarantee you not a single employer I have encountered would take very kindly to me representing their company in this way as an employee. In fact, for every single employer that I personally know of this would be considered a fireable offense so I was definitely taken aback to see some of the comments posted so boldly to the public page of their employer.

Once the shock of the unexpected bullying wore off, I began to process that these were the people I was paying to provide a service that I clearly was not getting on any acceptable level. That realization only exacerbated my level of dissatisfaction as a customer... At this point I was more determined than ever to find some place to discuss my grievances with someone in management, but the only thing I could find was an unofficial group named USPS Customer Service. Thinking it was legitimate, I began to scroll through the posts quickly learning that it was little more than a handful of postal employees that enjoyed condescending to the disgruntled and desperate postal customers that wandered in seeking help. After my experience on the official social media, I wasn't about to speak up with this group so I just accepted that my package was lost and prepared to face managing my health with no medication and a "blocked" list newly loaded with USPS employees.

Imagine my surprise and confusion when my package arrived in my mailbox the very next day. And they all lived happily ever after, right?... HA! We're only just beginning. You see, I was honestly so disheartened by the behavior I was witnessing from the employees that I decided to stick around in the group as a silent observer. I was so in disbelief that employees were permitted to conduct themselves so aggressively with customers that I became fascinated with learning about a business model that would allow for this. I recall my earliest observation within the group being that none of the employees ever seemed to want to hold the Postal Service accountable for its own shortcomings. Every negative experience that a customer brought to the group was immediately deflected and blamed on the customer or even other shipping services. There was no kind of ownership whatsoever and it almost seemed like any criticism of the entity was taken as a personal attack on them. It has made me wonder more than once if they are trained and encouraged to behave this way.

As the election drew to a close, I noticed the number of complaints being brought to the group began to increase drastically. As that happened, the number of employees joining the group increased in kind bringing with them attitudes that left much to be desired. I, myself, had started a new business and was beginning to have more frequent shipping troubles of my own when sending out orders to customers and it was all coming to a head. I began speaking up initially on behalf of other frustrated customers, which went over with the postal workers about as well as one might expect. I just felt like if people are paying you to provide a service that you simply are not providing... the least you could do is treat them with a little respect and dignity instead of shaming them for feeling frustrated with the situation. From what I can tell that is not a popular belief amongst this particular group of workers. I would love to think that this group of employees I encountered is the minority, but based on my scrolls through the comment section of their official Facebook page, I would wager that is not the case. In fact, even before the pandemic I began opting for remote or drop off services when available because the customer service was so bad in my local post office. That is not even considering how sluggishly the line moves when you don't print your own label and must wait for service. Efficiency and friendliness in the store locations just seems to be a rarity for the most part. I even had to chuckle when I was researching the term "Going Postal" for the title and one of the related commonly asked questions that popped up on Google was "Why are postal workers so rude?".

I feel like it is a valid argument that postal workers are feeling overwhelmed and stressed this year, especially in the months leading up to the holidays. Between the election, the normal holiday rush of packages, and now a pandemic I can see how it would certainly be overwhelming. I also think it is fair that we consider the burden that the broken system as a whole is placing on the individual employees, but that is a topic to get into in another article. The thing I think that postal employees seem to be missing, though, is how much of a burden 2020 has placed on most of us. We were all affected in some way or another. I would love to see, as a customer, more appreciation from them that they still have a job, while many are struggling to find work. They should likely be even more grateful that they have the kind of union protection that would allow them to disrespect their clientele so publicly and not find themselves in the unemployment line. That is not the norm, and certainly wouldn't be the case if they were working for one of the private shipping services.

At the end of the day, your customers don't care how stressed you are or how much you hate your job. If it is that bad, you certainly have the right to move on to employment that is more suitable to you, but in the meantime please consider that exercising empathy with the customer standing in front of you will go a long way in getting that customer to empathize with the struggles of your job. If you continue to bully them, they are going to take their business elsewhere regardless of the cost. People pay for quality and if your business model is already struggling to stay afloat, I promise that treating your customers poorly, being careless with their deliveries, and not honoring your refund policies are not the ways to remedy that.

The truth is that there really is no clear-cut cause as to why our beloved postal service is in the shape it is now because there are just too many contributing factors to choose from. The postal entity has become broken from the highest levels of management to the clerks and carriers and the customers are starting to notice. It is hard to say if things will get any better anytime soon or if this is the beginning of the end for the USPS. The one thing I do know is that waging war on your consumer base is no way to save your sinking ship and I certainly hope that postal management will institute better training in customer service for its employees before the damage done is irreparable. This pandemic should be looked at as a great opportunity by the USPS as a whole with many of us now relying on ecommerce and remote work to make a living. It was literally their year to shine, but instead we got customer blaming, contract undermining, and general hostility from this great entity while companies like Amazon, FedEx, and UPS began to step up their game. I think, if nothing else, that should all give us pause when considering whether we support a government-backed monopoly on first class mail or whether we would like to see the regulations loosened so private shippers have more room to grow and expand. At this point, it might be wise to remember that as consumers that our money talks and proceed accordingly. At the end of the day we have a choice to accept poor service or take our money where the experience is better.