"New scanners" are actually old scanners that hadn't made it to every location yet. The hand-held scanners they use haven't been changed for several years. Those are only used by sort facility employees as they load and unload trucks and the actual mail carriers delivering to your box or door. As far as experience and training, the window clerks are the least-trained people in the entire USPS. There are a lot of factors at work within the USPS. When you go to the window/desk in a location, that person is the bottom of the line in the USPS. Think of your local grocery store and the cashier when you are checking out. They only have to know how to deal with things like coupons and food stamp programs. The "cashier" at the PO has 30-40 different ways something can be shipped and priced! They don't always know exactly what they are dealing with unless they have been there for a long time.
As for shipping times slowing down, this is actually a good thing. It will speed up the daily mail and keep USPS costs down so they aren't spending so much money on a daily basis to get the mail delivered. This needs to be explained, so here you go...
If you live near a sorting facility (like I do), you might get your mail delivered every day before noon. But if the office delivering to you is far from the sort facility, they have to wait for the first shipment of the day before the carriers can leave the office to start delivering mail. So my example is THIS... my mail comes from an office 20 minutes away from the sort facility and gets delivered as early as 10am. My Mom works at a major office 20 minutes farther away from that same sort facility and usually can't even leave to start her route until after I've already received my mail at home. She has to wait for that truck bringing mail from the sort facility to stop at every other delivery office between the sort facility and her location so she can sort and load that mail in her Jeep and get on the road. By keeping the carriers from having to wait on that mail-drop, they can get on the road earlier with what they have from the late drop the night before and have your mail in the box sooner that day. USPS was paying carriers to stand around with nothing to do at many locations across the country waiting for that mail-drop. Now they can get on with their work as soon as they have things sorted without waiting for more mail to be dropped off and sorted into the mail they sorted when they got there. This will actually speed things up overall while saving the USPS a bunch of money paying people to do nothing. Sure, your envelope or package that should have been on the early shipment will be delivered a day later. But you'll get it earlier in the day the next day! They need to slow down shipment times to get delivery times faster and save lots of wasted money.
Lastly, price increases are more for them buying products to work more efficiently, cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Have you seen the Mercedes Mail vehicles? Why does the USPS need Mercedes vehicles??? I didn't know until my Mom needed to borrow one when her 1997 Jeep fitted with right-side-drive broke down on the route this week. The office let her use one that day AFTER she was quick-trained how to drive it. Those things are extremely efficient. If it comes to a complete stop, the engine shuts off immediately after automatically putting the transmission into Park. That saves a bunch of fuel, power and emissions in cities where a driver is getting out to deliver a bunch of boxes at once whether they are cluster boxes (like apartments or trailer parks) or a walking strip of businesses. USPS is doing a bunch of stuff to limit its costs while still being a productive and reliable company that people want to work for with the limitations forced on USPS by the government. USPS has trouble keeping employees because of the government interactions, even though they are not run by the government. It hasn't been mentioned in this specific thread but has been mentioned in many previous threads about the USPS. The USPS is required to keep a retirement fund for every employee that could possibly work there for up to 50 years from now. I think it was backed down to 25-30 years from now a few years ago, but they still have to keep funds available for all retirement plans for the future. That ALONE is why the USPS seems to operate in the RED all the time and never gaining positive ground. The USPS has fantastic benefits for employees and I've seen it through my own experiences without ever working for them. My Mom has survived a propane explosion and breast cancer thanks to the medical plan that the USPS offers to their employees. Without those plans, my Mom might not have survived either one, physically or financially.
Instead of fussing about mail getting to your box a day or two slower, think about the long-term employees that have dedicated their lives to getting your mail to you every day! This reply is not directed to any single person replying in this thread, but to anyone reading this thread. My Mom still tries to recruit me to join the USPS after 20 years of trying, but I still want nothing to do with all the bureaucracy and red tape involved in that job. The pay and benefits are really nice, but it is not the job for me. My job is something that the majority of you would not want to do either, but I like it and I'm sticking with it. Just think about what people have to do and go through before you complain about their service!
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Largest total PC card collections by Team, then Athlete (as of 3/22/24):
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