Santa may be coming late this year.
An overwhelmed U.S. Postal Service has been struggling to deliver parcels for weeks, veteran employees said, warning that Christmas gifts may not arrive by Christmas as tens of thousands of parcels pile up at its processing facilities in Philadelphia.
“Don’t use the post office right now because we can’t deliver the mail,” said Laurence Love, an assistant clerk who manages mail sorting machines at the Philadelphia Processing and Delivery Center.
Facilities across the region are so packed with packages there’s barely enough room to walk, workers in Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley and South Jersey said. In Allentown there are about 10 trailers filled with mail in the parking lot, with no space to unload the items.
In Philadelphia, pre-Thanksgiving packages have been scattered around the facility, employees said. Last week, a mile-long caravan of dozens of vans full of mail waited outside the Southwest Philadelphia grounds for hours because there was no room to unload the packages.
People across the region say their items were scanned in processing plants, but never scanned. Packages have taken so long that customers are demanding refunds from already stuck companies struggling to survive the pandemic.
The widespread delays are caused by a massive staff shortage due to increasing coronavirus cases, long-term job losses and a liberal pandemic leave policy, combined with record vacation packages as more people shop online. In addition, private courier services such as UPS and FedEx, which similarly saw record numbers of packages, stopped the delivery service for some retailers, who have funneled even more packages through an already overwhelmed postal service.
The delays shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone – workers, union leaders and outside experts have been raising the alarm for months about an impending holiday disaster, but believe the agency has failed to prepare and hire enough temporary workers. which has exacerbated the backlog and delays.
“You don’t get your Christmas presents because we don’t have the people and the ingenuity to do it,” said Love, a 35-year-old employee.
The USPS also warned customers of a busier season, with the peak week of December 16-21, urging people to send gifts early. Still, it is a message to customers that packages shipped before December 18 can be delivered by Christmas, although businesses in the Philadelphia area have reported that packages already shipped on November 27 will not be delivered, without their status or location is tracked.
In response to a request for comment, the agency shared a press release citing record numbers of packages, a staff shortage due to COVID-19 and “capacity problems” with air and freight transport as reasons for the delays. USPS said it has hired vacation workers, expanded delivery and shopping hours, leased more vehicles, and expanded technology to improve package tracking.
“The Postal Service leadership team, unions and management associations are all working closely together to address issues and concerns that arise as we focus on delivering the holidays for the country,” the agency said in the statement.
Employees called the conditions inside embarrassing and borderline dangerous.
“You can’t even move, we have that much mail in that building,” said Nick Casselli, president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 89, of the Philadelphia factory.
“In 33 years I’ve never seen it so bad,” said Andy Kubat, president of the Lehigh Valley Area Local, of the Allentown facility.
Representatives from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently visited factories in Philadelphia and Allentown to inspect conditions, reports show. An OSHA spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The backlog comes at the end of a tumultuous year for the mail, after new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy made operational changes that introduced cost-cutting operations that led to widespread mail delays this summer. Those changes – some of which were intended to better situate the agency to deliver parcels amid declining letter mail volumes – were reversed in the fall after federal judges intervened before the election.
While it doesn’t seem like company-level changes are playing a role in the current vacation backlog, employees say the agency hasn’t prepared enough.
Workers warned of the impending holiday disaster in October, as the switch from funds to election mail delivery meant packages piling up. They never fully recovered from that, and then the vacation package tsunami hit, and now Philadelphia employees are concerned that it could take well into January to catch up.
There is no good data to provide a comprehensive look at parcel delivery, unlike letters, but reporting shows that the current delays occur across the country.
“It’s all over the country, not just Philadelphia,” said Casselli.
Philadelphia residents and businesses said they have seen packages in facilities in St. Louis and San Diego for weeks through the tracking system. In Cleveland, dozens of trucks were waiting in a row for 12 hours to deliver and collect USPS packages.
Each year, the Postal Service hires tens of thousands of seasonal workers to handle the vacation flow. In the early 2000s, Kubat said, the Allentown factory would hire a few hundred temporary workers. Since 2018, when the number of letter post decreased, the number of recruits has decreased drastically.
This year, despite early predictions of an inundated holiday rush, only 30 temporary workers were hired to work at the Allentown factory, he said, and retention rates are low. About 10 contract workers have quit in the past two weeks due to the grueling hours, Kubat said. “A woman stopped before her first day was over.”
“It’s too little, too late,” he said. “They kill them.”
Ray Daiutolo Sr., USPS spokesperson for the Philadelphia region, declined to provide information on the total number of temporary hires in Philadelphia. Casselli said the factory’s parcel sorting division has added just 48 temporary workers.
The peak of online ordering – expected to rise 33% year-on-year in November and December to a record $ 189 billion, according to Adobe Analytics – has soared as the peak of coronavirus cases takes hundreds of postal workers out of their jobs.
More than 200 postal workers in Philadelphia have tested positive for COVID-19 since Nov. 20, Casselli said. About 10 Allentown workers have contracted the virus in the past two weeks, said Kubat, who is going to be quarantined after being exposed at work.
According to daily reports from The Inquirer, more than 120 mailmen have tested positive since December 1 in the South Jersey area.
Small businesses already struggling are feeling the consequences. Sellers on sites like eBay and Etsy have said it takes more than three weeks for priority packages to arrive, and sellers say customers ask where their orders are.
Patti Lyons, the owner of Peace Valley Lavender Farm in Doylestown, said they’ve used the USPS to ship their handmade lavender-infused products across the country for 20 years. Delays this year, she said, are the worst she’s ever seen.
At least 40 packages shipped on December 3 have yet to be received by customers, she said, with tracking information showing the items registered at the Fountainville, Bucks County, office, or Philadelphia processing facility but never scanned to their next destination. Customer complaints come in daily, she said, and about 10 have asked for a refund.
Lyons said they have added UPS as a shipping option, although it is more expensive for customers. She said they will post a warning on their website about the delays, but they are concerned it might deter customers from ordering at all.
“We’ve already sent an email saying this is what’s going on, we’re really sorry and we need to be patient,” she said. “But they don’t get the packages from people with that.”
Susan Murphy, the creator of Jawnaments, the small company that makes Philly-inspired ornaments, said 327 packages she sent in the mail are in limbo. She dropped off some of the batch at the Fishtown Post Office on December 5 and the rest at the 30th Street location on December 11, but they have yet to be scanned into the system as if they were even being received.
“Anything I brought to the post office on December 5 or after is in large part AWOL,” said Murphy.
She said she receives a dozen or so emails a day from customers asking for their orders. At least one person has asked for a refund and threatened to write a bad review. Since then, she has added a banner at the top of her Etsy page warning people about the delays and that she cannot guarantee delivery by Christmas.
She tries not to blame the mailmen – she even took donuts to the Fishtown office this week to ease the stress of the employees – but said it’s hard not to get frustrated.
“We need reindeer and we need Santa to help the United States mail,” Murphy said. “I’ll buy Santa a Citywide Special as soon as he’s ready.”