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U.S. Postal Service

    OVERBURDENED

    Post Office Staffing Problems Delay Outer Cape’s Mail

    A crush of Amazon packages has made matters worse, carriers say

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Residents and business owners from Provincetown to Eastham are reporting issues with mail delivery, with some saying they are waiting days or weeks to receive their mail.

    A mail carrier cart on Commercial Street in Provincetown. (Photos by Elias Duncan)

    Seven current and former postal workers told the Independent that the slowdown has gotten worse in recent months. They attributed it to staffing shortages and an ever-increasing volume of Amazon packages.

    “I was really surprised to see no mail three days in a row,” said Ron Singer, who operates the Flying Plumbers in Provincetown. “I know they’re short-staffed, but if they’re going to skip three days in a row, I think they should offer an alternative, like letting us pick up mail at the post office.”

    Singer, whose plumbing business depends on the regular delivery of invoices, statements, and checks, says he’s noticed sporadic delays in mail delivery since the summer.

    “So many things have been lost,” Eastham resident Greta Perry wrote on her town’s community Facebook page. Perry says she’s been receiving her neighbors’ mail, and now they keep getting hers. Sometimes, she doesn’t get any mail at all.

    A town employee in Provincetown, who asked not to be named to avoid damaging the town’s relationship with the post office, said residents have been rushing to town hall to pay bills in person at the last minute, with some saying they had received their bills a month after the postmark date.

    All seven post offices between Eastham and Provincetown have “We’re Hiring” signs prominently displayed in their lobbies. The Provincetown Post Office has an entire table covered with recruitment materials.

    Recruiting materials at the Provincetown Post Office.

    The Independent’s inquiries to local postmasters were redirected to a U.S. Postal Service “corporate communications specialist,” Stephen Doherty, who did not respond. As previously reported by the Independent, postal workers are instructed not to speak with the press.

    The seven postal employees who did speak to the Independent — including three current carriers — said that demanding and draining working conditions, coupled with low starting pay and a lack of affordable housing, make it a challenge to hire and retain letter carriers on the Outer Cape.

    “We are insanely short-staffed,” said one current Outer Cape carrier. “Few people are willing to work a thankless job that is tiring and somewhat dangerous.”

    Another current carrier said that outdated infrastructure and delivery practices make an already difficult job harder and described the delivery trucks, some of which date to the early 1990s, as “death traps.”

    “These wouldn’t pass a Massachusetts inspection, but they don’t have to since they are federal vehicles,” that carrier said.

    Cheryl Andrews, a retired dentist and former select board member in Provincetown who took a job as a mail carrier at the Provincetown Post Office for extra income, said the agency’s training for that job prioritized efficiency above safety and service.

    “We were told to look through the mail in our cart as we walked to avoid pauses and exchanges with customers,” said Andrews. “I tried it, and I tripped on the asphalt and cut my hands.”

    Andrews said the volume of mail that carriers are expected to deliver and the allotted time for delivery are mismatched. “Overtime was frowned upon, so I had to go as fast as I could to deliver mail,” she said. “The pressure was intense.”

    “It’s really a very toxic environment,” said a mail carrier who works in Provincetown. “They shame you, they blame you, and then they throw you in a truck and say, ‘Here are the boxes, have fun.’ ”

    According to that carrier, understaffing has led post office management to unduly pressure carriers into completing long routes at an unsustainable pace — and to criticize new hires who struggle to keep up. Provincetown’s carriers are told to prioritize speed over service, including by marking mail or packages as undeliverable if the delivery requires additional walking time.

    Hiring Challenges

    The housing crisis on the Cape, which is displacing many year-round workers, is also taking a toll on post office employees.

    A flyer advertises two open letter carrier jobs.

    Bonnie Tibbetts, a mail carrier at the Wellfleet Post Office, recently announced on her town’s community Facebook page her decision to move to New Hampshire because of the lack of affordable housing on Cape Cod.

    “I have talked to some wonderful people who offered rooms, but I just couldn’t make the finances work,” Tibbetts wrote. “I hope the Outer Cape figures out housing so that hard working people in the service industry can live in or near the communities where they work.”

    Kathy Kolbridge, a former Provincetown postmaster, said it was challenging to hire and retain staff on the Outer Cape because of uncompetitive pay, lack of affordable housing, and unpredictable hours for new hires who might have second jobs. The starting hourly wage for mail carriers is $19.50.

    “It’s just really hard for people to get by on a postal job out here,” Kolbridge said. “And you often have to work weekends, Sundays, and in some cases holidays when you’re just starting out.”

    Some of these problems are not unique to Cape Cod. The Postal Service is the second-largest employer in the U.S. and is losing 59 percent of its “noncareer employees” each year, according to a 2023 report by the agency’s Office of Inspector General.

    Postal workers are categorized as either career or noncareer employees. Noncareer employees, including “city carrier assistants” in Provincetown and “rural carrier assistants” in Wellfleet and Eastham, are temporary and don’t get the benefits provided to career employees. Their work schedules are often irregular, and they typically earn about half as much as their salaried counterparts.

    Most mail carriers start out as part-time noncareer employees. Opportunities to become a salaried career employee vary by post office — but Outer Cape employees said they had to wait a year to even be considered for a career position, even when their post offices were understaffed.

    The Postal Service has had a years-long strategy of relying more heavily on noncareer employees to reduce labor costs.

    Amazon and the USPS

    In rural areas across the U.S., post offices built to hold and deliver letters and just a few parcels a day are also struggling to keep up with the volume of online shopping deliveries — especially Amazon.com packages.

    A Postal Service delivery truck outside the Eastham Post Office on Route 6.

    Buildings don’t have enough space to hold all the parcels, and older delivery trucks designed for flat mail are too small to transport them all.

    “Literally, the physical structure of post offices is set up mostly for delivering letters,” said Kolbridge.

    Periodic changes to Amazon’s contracts with the Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx mean that rural post offices can suddenly find themselves responsible for all of Amazon’s deliveries, according to a November 2023 Washington Post report.

    In Provincetown, that happened in 2016, said former carrier Jane Corbin.

    “All of a sudden we started getting all these parcels, but we didn’t have enough people to deliver them,” Corbin said. “We were overburdened with parcels.”

    “Amazon came, then Covid came, and package delivery exploded,” said Diane Johnson, a veteran clerk at the Provincetown Post Office.

    Parcel volume increased just as U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy began closing distribution centers in 2021, Johnson said, leading to mail getting stuck in warehouses and delays becoming commonplace. “It felt like we were all working with one hand tied behind our backs,” Johnson said.

    Carriers in Wellfleet and Provincetown also said that postmasters had instructed them to prioritize Amazon parcel delivery over letter mail — another practice that the Washington Post found was common in rural areas, although a spokesperson for the agency denied it.

    In summer, when the Cape’s population swells with part-time residents and tourists, everything gets worse.

    “It’s pretty common to find pallets of Amazon boxes left on the loading dock or in the sorting area,” one current carrier said, “because there isn’t enough labor to deliver all these things.”

    APPOINTED ROUNDS

    USPS Worker Shortages Slow Outer Cape Mail Delivery

    Local post offices strain under ‘last mile’ load

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Mail service on the Outer Cape has been plagued by delays in the past month, many customers report. Sources both inside and outside the post office say the delays are the cumulative result of loss of staff and systemic problems in the U.S. Postal Service.

    Multiple postal customers in Provincetown told of significant delays in mail service over several weeks in July. David Maril, who lives in the East End and runs the Herman Maril Foundation from his home, said that he went four days without a delivery at one point.

    “I’ve never seen anything like that in Provincetown,” Maril said, adding that several of his neighbors described similar lapses in their service when he asked them about it.

    The Provincetown Post Office. (Photo Ben Glickman)

    Scott Pomfret, who lives in the West End, said the mail has been “sporadic and comes in bunches.” In early July, Pomfret did not receive mail for at least six days, he wrote in an email to the Independent.

    According to a Provincetown Post Office employee who asked not to be named because postal workers have been warned not to speak to reporters, the delays were caused by a temporary shortage of mail carriers. There are four carrier routes in Provincetown, and typically five carriers. But for several weeks in July, this worker said, the post office was operating with three carriers — and, for one day, just two — to cover all of the routes.

    “Look around at all the people in Provincetown and imagine two people delivering the mail,” the worker said. “It’s impossible.”

    Jane Corbin, who retired from the post office after 31 years and now works at the Surfside Inn in Provincetown, confirmed that she had heard the same explanation from a contact inside the Provincetown Post Office. When carriers are unable to work, others have to pick up the slack, both Corbin and the anonymous worker said.

    The Independent contacted the postmasters at all seven Outer Cape post offices (in Provincetown, North Truro, Truro, Wellfleet, South Wellfleet, North Eastham, and Eastham) to ask about staff shortages and delivery delays. All seven said they were unable to speak to the press. Several said that was a longstanding rule in the Postal Service.

    But according to Stephen Doherty, the manager of communications for the Postal Service’s northeast region in Boston, postmasters are not forbidden to talk to the press. Rather, he said, it’s just that “they don’t have to.”

    Two memos distributed to postal workers in August 2020 instructed them not to answer questions from journalists. The memos, which were obtained by the website vice.com, said that postal workers should “avoid the temptation to ‘answer a few questions,’ ” and instructed employees to refer reporters to regional representatives like Doherty.

    The delivery problems in Provincetown occurred because one carrier was injured and another had a family emergency, Corbin said. These setbacks appear to have happened in a setting where capacity is already strained.

    According to the unnamed worker, the job is hard even when the post office is fully staffed. For one thing, Provincetown, like many rural places, relies on the post office for “last-mile” delivery of privately shipped packages (like those from Amazon).

    That means that Provincetown postal workers are responsible for delivering an added 1,500 to 2,000 packages per day, according to the anonymous worker. During the pandemic, there was a boom in Amazon deliveries — the company reported a 44-percent increase in items sold in the first quarter of 2021.

    Doherty said that staff shortages are widespread throughout the Postal Service. Retaining workers is challenging because of the inherent difficulties of the job, he said. Workers have to undergo extensive training and pass drug and driving tests.

    Corbin said that mail carriers often work 12-hour days and have to work holidays. Consistent with the Postal Service’s famous creed — “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” — postal workers have to walk miles daily in all weather.

    “It’s hot. It’s humid,” Corbin said. “You’re exhausted” in the summer.

    According to Doherty, post offices in Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, and Orleans all have staff openings. When there are shortages, he wrote in an email to the Independent, the Postal Service is “typically able to flex our resources and move people to where the need is to ensure that all of our Outer Cape customers receive the First Class level of service they’ve come to know and deserve.” And, he added, they are currently carrying on an “aggressive hiring campaign.”

    Local post offices here are not immune to the effects of the housing crisis. At the Provincetown Post Office, the anonymous employee said, there’s high turnover, partly because workers have trouble finding affordable housing. The employee described almost having to quit because of the difficult housing market. This person reported having to spend 60 to 70 percent of monthly income on rent now. With rents on the rise, the problem has only gotten worse.

    “This is a perfect example of what happens when a town becomes overpriced and unaffordable for the very people who work for it,” the source said.

    The Postal Service has experienced widespread mail delays this year, with 78 percent of first-class mail parcels arriving on time in the first quarter of 2021, compared with 92 percent in the same period last year. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a 10-year overhaul plan for the Postal Service in March that would slow down mail across the country.

    Despite the problems in the Postal Service, it remains popular with the public. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, 88 percent of those polled held favorable views of the USPS in 2018, 90 percent in 2019, and 91 percent in 2020.

    News reports of beleaguered postal workers may have helped. Following the winter holidays, National Public Radio reported on record-breaking late deliveries, but also on the overload on staff.

    On Monday, communications manager Doherty was busy trying to calm furious residents of Kennebunkport, Maine, where mail delivery problems provoked a blistering attack by Selectman Mike Weston, reported in the Portland Press Herald.

    “No mail delivery for a week,” wrote Weston. “Maybe no mail next week. The excuse — one person on medical leave and one on vacation. No provisions now for coverage. Local postmaster called district management and asked for help and told we were on our own. This is the chaos that the postmaster general has foisted on customers.”

    The Independent conducted surveys of customers at the Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham main post offices to gauge if the problems in Provincetown were unusual. The results varied: in Truro (where mail is not delivered and is placed in P.O. boxes), nearly 40 percent of respondents reported recent problems; in Eastham, 33 percent. In Wellfleet, however, just one respondent of 14 said that new issues had arisen in the past one to two months.

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