Weekly US Mail Traffic Report – December 13, 2021
Not a great week, but no bottom dropping out at the peak of peak!
Postal performance dropped a little bit last week in most categories, but not the precipitous drop many in the industry feared. Most delays were concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Delivery in most parts of the west was very good. Los Angeles, Van Nuys, and Las Vegas were our three fastest SCFs for Intra-SCF Marketing Mail letters. Alas, Trenton, Portland, ME, and Boston were the slowest, with Trenton averaging 7.14 days from induction to delivery within their SCF service area.
First-Class Letters were on time 76.71% of the time based on previous delivery service standards, barely up from the prior week, and hovering near six-month lows. Still, no bottom dropped out. This is not using the new, slower standards. Against the new standards, First-Class letters were on time 86.28% of the time, a bigger drop. It probably means something, but we can’t figure out just what. First-Class flats kind of held their own with on-time deliveries 83.49% of the time vs the old standards, and 91.38% vs the new standards.
Marketing Mail Letters were on time 93.88% of the time, a slip from the prior week. Marketing Mail flats were delivered on time 86.72% of the time, a drop-off from week’s performance, although flats volume was very high. 5.32% were more than 5 days late.
Average Intra-SCF delivery time was 2.47 days for Marketing Mail letters, 2.52 days for Marketing Mail flats. This shows a slow-down for letters, from last week’s 2.19 days, while flats were a bit better.
Slowest SCFs for Intra-SCF letters, delivery week of 12/06:
· Trenton, NJ: 7.14 days
· Portland, ME: 5.85 days
· Boston, MA: 5.06 days
The fastest:
· Van Nuys, CA: 1.51 days
· Los Angeles, CA: 1.52 days
· Las Vegas, NV: 1.56 days
A letter from California to Maryland, on average, took:
· First-Class: 3.33 days
· Marketing Mail: 8.93 days
Meh. Overall, not so bad. We’ll settle for not-so-bad in December.
Map of the week:
Here’s a complicated one. This is average delivery days by date to each state, regardless of where it was entered, for Marketing Mail flats. I show this mainly as a comparison of East Coast vs West Coast. This map includes Intra-SCF, so it favors highly populated states where a lot of mail is being drop-shipped. Thus, the South and Plains states don’t look so good. Clearly the West is performing better than the East – at least in the last two weeks.
All figures based on qualified pieces tracked by SnailWorks. For more detailed information, subscribe to the SnailWorks newsletter.