NOT SUCH A GREAT WEEK. YOU EXPECTED ONE?
In the least surprising news of the week, Postal Service performance was pretty slow last week. Only 78.3% of First-Class letters were delivered on time. That’s the worst number we’ve seen since April. Even worse, more than 5% were more than 5 days late. First-Class flats were even more grim, with more than 24% delivered more than 5 days late, or as the Postal Service might call it, Performance +5.
Things weren’t a lot better on the Marketing Mail side of the house, with only 91.2% of Marketing Mail letters delivered on time – the worst performance we’ve seen this year. Marketing Mail flats fared better but were still considerably off YTD averages.
None of this should come as a surprise. The system carried an enormous amount of mail – most of it political. We expect that non-political, non-ballot mail was occasionally pushed aside to allow the timely delivery of election related mail. So don’t scold your letter carrier.
Two things worth noting:
•Thing 1: This poor performance was not experienced by vote-by-mail and absentee ballots. From all our indicators they flew through the system as if on a magic carpet.
•Thing 2: We did not observe particular trouble spots – no dysfunctional facilities that we could identify. Slower performance was widespread.
