Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat is supposed to keep postal carriers from delivering the mail. But they’ve apparently given up on that whole gloom of night thing.
Throughout December and into the first week of January, my neighborhood in the City of St. Louis has been plagued by an absence of reliable mail service. Throughout the holidays, my house was lucky to get mail once a week, with delays that far exceeded what you might anticipate. A birthday card postmarked November 14 in Cleveland showed up on December 7. A tracked order “out for delivery” on December 11 finally made it out of the mail truck and onto my doorstep six days later — along with two weeks’ worth of holiday cards.
Frustrated by his own lack of timely mail, a neighbor who lives one block away, Dr. Robert Bruce, called the local postmaster. (Like many a retiree, Dr. Bruce is known to take action while people like me just complain on social media.) He was told all the previous day’s mail had been sent back to the post office “because it got too dark out.” The postmaster couldn’t explain what had happened the day before that, or the one before that.
It’s not only Compton Heights, where I live. A reader in Lafayette Square contacted me this summer to say that her part of the neighborhood routinely only gets mail a few times a week — something the U.S. Postal Service didn’t even try to deny when she called. “They said my route is an overtime route and therefore only serviced a few times a week,” she reported.
Reached for comment, the U.S. Postal Service did not directly address my question about what constitutes an “overtime” route (and all I could find online is that the agency has cracked down on carriers who need it to finish their work — to the point of apparently deleting hours those carriers worked, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity). To my great surprise, it also failed to deploy the excuse common to local government in recent years: They’re understaffed.
Instead, it issued this statement, “The Postal Service is committed to providing the best possible service to our customers and we are currently experiencing no delays in the St. Louis, Missouri, area. However for anyone with a service-related issue, we recommend they go to www.usps.com and click on ‘Contact us’ at the bottom of our homepage or utilize this direct web address: usps.force.com/emailus/s/. We are actively hiring in the St. Louis, MO area and interested applicants can get more information at www.usps.com/careers.”
It did not respond to my follow-up question asking what would explain the mail problems my neighborhood has been seeing if there are “no delays.”
U.S. Representative Cori Bush (D-St. Louis) has a different take. Her office told my neighbors it had been “hearing this issue all over the district.” But unlike the postal service spokesman, it did attribute it to the agency being “severely understaffed.” Bush said she had been in contact with the U.S. Postal Service over the past six months trying to get the mail service fixed.
Since I first reached out on this story last Friday, I’ve gotten mail for three straight days and so have my neighbors — something I attribute less to my own inquiries and more to my neighbors aggressively calling everyone from Bush to the local postmaster for weeks now. The end of the holiday rush has surely helped.
Sadly, I’m struck mainly by how little relief I feel. There’s one time of the year — and one time of the year only — when I eagerly check my mailbox. I suppose for every month but December, living on an overtime route wouldn’t even be so bad. But please don’t quote me on that; I know my neighbors would not agree.
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
