YUCK WITH ASTERISKS - A ROUGH WEEK FOR FLATS
Thanksgiving week is a weird one. There is one holiday and one sort-of holiday. That’s one asterisk. We also had a very small sample of First-Class flats – only about 27,000 for the week. It was well distributed and, we believe, a representative sample, but we’ll throw an asterisk on that one too.
So, asterisks aside, first class letters continued along at the mediocre rate they have been at, with 91.4% delivered on time. This shows a continued deterioration from summer highs of 95%, but still not terrible. Do remember, that this performance is against a standard that was lowered in October 2021. Against the old standard, less than 80% of the mail would have been on time. Marketing Mail letters continued to look good against standards, with 96% on time.
But flats…oh my. Only 77% of First-Class were delivered on time with almost 12% more than 4 days late. Even Marketing Mail flats were well off their average, with 92.4% delivered on time. For First-Class flats, we’ll tag on that asterisk.
On the positive side, we don’t see any evidence of localized system breakdowns. Mediocre performance was largely seen across the board, so I guess there’s some kind of comfort in that.
