IT MIGHT BE OK TO PANIC A LITTLE
Last week’s report reflected dreadful performance which we tried to write off as an outlier, a bad week, but another bad week has us concerned here at the traffic center. While First-Class service performance was a little better than last week, it was still way below the YTD numbers, and those from a year ago. Last week and this week represent the worst First-Class performance since we’ve been doing this – nearly three years. 6% of First-Class letters were more than 5 days late. Even if First-Class Mail is not the class you use, performance this bad implies backed up facilities across the country. Even though Marketing Mail performance looks OK, we are only measuring that from induction at a delivery facility to delivery, and we are hearing anecdotal reports that there are growing delays getting Marketing Mail into delivery SCFs.
With the holidays upon us, we can only expect that First-Class and Marketing Mail will be pushed aside to deliver packages. This looks too much like the circumstances that caused a delivery meltdown in the winter of 2021. Of course, there were a lot more factors in play then – Covid-19 was at its peak, there was unprecedented absenteeism as a result, and an exceptional and unplanned jump in package volume as the whole world switched to ecommerce. We do not expect anything of that scale this year.
Still, we see service performance on an accelerated downhill course. We try hard to just report on what we have seen, and not to predict the future but it does seem likely that there are some bumpy months ahead.
