Well, this is nice to see. Delivery broke a troubling downward trend and turned in a week that was pretty good. Better than last week, and WAY better than last year.
First-Class letters were delivered on time 89.7% of the time, much better than last week’s 84.6%. On the same week last year only 81.5% were delivered on time, and most of that was more than a day late. We saw similar performance across all categories. December was pretty bad last year, and it’s not great this year versus YTD averages, but much better than last year. Better still, most of the later mail is one day late. Last year it was often much later.
Marketing Mail showed a similar pattern, not showing much of a holiday-related slowdown. Again, it is much better than last year.
We expect we’ll see some weather-related delays this week, but I think it is safe to say that USPS is not going off the rails this year, showing impressive year-over-year improvement.
I get so hung up in the week to week performance here, looking for trends, looking for problems, that it is easy to lose the big picture. The big picture is this: USPS service performance has improved greatly in the last year. It's easy to take pot shots at ten-year plans and network realignment, and improved service performance is not all there is to a successful organization. But PMG DeJoy deserves some credit for a good start.
