USPS promises to fix postal problems
Throughout the entire month of December, irritated customers voiced their frustration with the postal service. Many not seeing their mail delivered on time. Others waiting on medication.
“My mother, her medications have been arriving late too,” said Pam Marlow, a 31 year resident. She says her mother’s medicine arrived a week late. “She’s 90, she definitely needs the medication.”
A Bellingham family who relies on the postal service to receive their paychecks say they hadn’t received one throughout the entirety of December.
“We really need those checks because we live paycheck to paycheck so we can’t have one or two missing like this,” said Sarah Hutchinson. “It’s just creating too much of a hardship on our finances.”
These problems stem from staffing shortages impacting post offices all across the state.
“The Postal Service is not immune from the staffing challenges and hiring challenges that nearly every industry across the country and even across the state is facing,” said Kimberly Frum with the USPS.
That carrier shortage placed endless deliveries on the shoulders of understaffed post offices; carriers fighting through blistering winter conditions to get as many items delivered as they could. The majority of them are averaging 14 hour shifts.
Though with the holidays over, USPS expects these delays to be nearing an end.
“Volumes have started to level off and operations should be getting back to normal soon, if not already in some areas,” said Frum.
Outside of delivering mail in a timely manner, Frum says their number one priority remains filling these vacancies.
“One of our goals this year in the next few months is to hire up to a thousand new employees,” said Frum. “We are actively hiring and have been aggressively hiring since last year.”
The USPS is hosting multiple job fairs across the state, meeting with prospective employees who may be interested in securing a federal job. For those unable to attend, the USPS is updating job postings every other Tuesday.
To view job postings with the USPS, you can visit their website, or visit your nearest post office.
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