不管你是priority mail还是first class，都会有delay，而且不知道会delay几天。很多regional processing center都满了。我上周四寄了两个first class包裹，周五就卡在纽约这边的processing center了，没动静。
Twitter 上的USPS worker说 NY, Philly, Kansas City, Joshua 都有严重的backup，其他地方也有。
Washington Post 刚发了个article：
A historic crush of e-commerce packages is threatening to overwhelm U.S. Postal Service operations just weeks before Christmas and runoff elections in Georgia that will decide control of the U.S. Senate, according to agency employees and postal industry tracking firms.
As Americans increasingly shop online because of the coronavirus pandemic, private express carriers FedEx and UPS have cut off delivery service for some retailers, sending massive volumes of packages to the Postal Service.
That has led to widespread delays and pushed the nation’s mail agency to the brink. Postal employees are reporting mail and package backlogs across the country, and working vast amounts of overtime hours that have depleted morale during another surge of coronavirus infections nationwide.
“We’re really gridlocked all over the place,” said a Postal Service transportation manager in Ohio, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “It’s bad. I’ve never seen it like this before.
“UPS and FedEx have shut us off. Nobody can keep up right now, but we don’t have the luxury of turning people down. They’re sitting on so much mail right now that it’s almost one day at a time in these facilities.”A letter carrier in Detroit reported that colleagues around the city were assigned two eight-hour routes each day last week to make up for missing employees and pallets full of undelivered boxes. In the first two week of December, nearly one out of every five work hours within the entire agency was an overtime hour, according to public payroll data.
A letter carrier in Philadelphia said supervisors were rerouting employees to facilities all over the city to try to dig out from growing backlogs.
“I don’t think anyone, including the post office itself, knows just how bad delays are,” the Philadelphia carrier said.
The agency, which shared a news release on Monday night in response to a request for comment, is bracing for even more volume. It warned employees in a statement, “Peak season to peak this week.”“We thank our customers for their continued support, and we are committed to making sure gifts and cards are delivered on time to celebrate the holidays,” Kristin Seaver, chief retail and delivery officer of the Postal Service, said in the release. “We continue to flex our network including making sure the right equipment is available to sort, process and deliver a historic volume of mail and packages this holiday season.”
E-commerce sales are expected to reach $189 billion in November and December, according to research by Adobe Analytics, up 33 percent compared with the same period a year ago.
To prepare for the influx, some retailers have advertised shipping deadlines to encourage customers to make their purchases early and allow ample time for packages to arrive by Christmas Day. The Postal Service encouraged customers to do the same, and hired more than 50,000 seasonal workers, added transportation and packaging tracking, and expanded Sunday deliveries for cities with especially high volumes, the agency wrote in a statement.
But the tidal wave appears to have caused delays even in the delivery of first-class mail, such as letters and bills. The Postal Service told Congress that only 78.9 percent of first-class mail was delivered on time during the week of Nov. 28, well below its internal goal of 96 percent. (The agency reports performance data on a two-week delay to more accurately process the figures.)The Postal Service logged 94.8 percent of packages through handheld bar code scanners that track an item’s progress through the mail system for receipt to delivery. But a Washington Post investigation in October found that postal workers and supervisors routine falsify those scans — one of few package-related performance statistics the agency makes public — to boost performance statistics.
Commercial delivery services including Amazon, UPS and FedEx rely on the Postal Service for the “last mile” shipping of its packages to save money, or ensure delivery on Sundays or to rural areas. Those packages frequently end up in the same delivery trucks carrying other mail processed through the Postal Service, which could contribute to delays. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Post.)
Postal analytics firm Late Shipment wrote in a 2020 holiday shipping report that massive hiring sprees from private shipping firms will not be sufficient to combat expected delays. From April through October, packages shipped through FedEx and UPS’s express delivery services nationwide were delayed at rates on par with or higher than during the 2019 holiday season.