The USPS is “primed and ready” for the peak holiday season, it stated in a press release on Monday – and it used “exceptional service” and “extraordinary service” to describe what customers of the Postal Service could expect during the 2024 holiday rush “thanks in large part to the investments and strategies identified in its 10-year Delivering for America plan.”
It also said it had made holiday shipping easy for customers, specifically pointing to USPS Ground Advantage, which it said “provides a simple, reliable and more affordable way to ship packages this holiday season in just 2-5 business days across the contiguous United States,” and Priority Mail, which “offers a price that is on average 35 percent lower than similar competitor services” during the peak season. “Priority Mail is part of our package offering that provides a fast and affordable way to deliver mail to every address in the United States,” the USPS stated.*
Steve Montieth, USPS Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, said: “Both USPS Ground Advantage and USPS Priority Mail are priced lower than competitors, meaning customers can save more this holiday season. So, ship early and enjoy your holiday season.”
The press release also highlighted some key Delivery for America initiatives – USPS included details in the release on the following capabilities:
- Using 83 revitalized sorting & delivery centers;
- Implementing 506 new package sorting machines;
- Increased daily processing capacity to approximately 60 million;
- Moving more than 95 percent of volume via more reliable ground transportation;
- Hiring 7,500 seasonal employees;
- The initial release of the new next generation delivery vehicles.
The announcement also pointed visitors to the main USPS.com homepage which has now been taken over by holiday marketing and includes links to pages such as key holiday ship-by dates.
*11/25/2024: Updated after the USPS revised its press release to make a clarification.
Yea, they already failed with two shipments of mine two weeks ago. Both Ground advantage and it took 14 days to be delivered. One going to CA. miss-shipped to 3 other P.O. in 3 different States before arriving. One going to Washington State got lost and then finally showed up yesterday.
It is now taking 2 – 3 days for all packages to show up as arriving at the sort center when the sort center is 1 1/2 hours up the Interstate, and were not even in December yet. Just more BS from the USPS.
We are seeing reports of packages being delayed all over the country, starting on the 19th we’ve seen stuff just disappear out of the system and not return.. especially around Phoenix and Indy but not limited to just there, the Palmetto facility in GA has been skipping scans on 2/3rds of packages.
Dejoy was just grilled by Senators 2 days ago about the poor performance by the USPS and while they where grilling him he covered his ears to block them out, prior to covering his ears Dejoy said he was satisfied with a 75% on time delivery rate and that 75% was much better than it was when he took over.. that was a lie.
I was just reading up last night about major USPS delays and they are happening all over the country, I can’t believe no one is reporting on this more, no network coverage at all other than local stations in multiple cities, Dejoy has single handily destroyed the USPS now.. it can’t be fixed, the new sort centers he’s installing all over the country are garbage and some have broken within a day or so of going live, he said he wanted to slow down First Class/Ground Advantage to 5 days average delivery time and transport everything that was not priority or express by truck in order to do so and he has.. combine that with the broken sort centers = total disaster.
The new facility in Palmetto, Ga that they are forcing almost all GA mail to go through broke on day 2, packages took over a month to start moving with trucks backed up for 3-4 days trying to get in to get unloaded/loaded as they had to do all sorting by hand and of course skipped as many scans as they could in doing so, since the roll-out break down the sorter has broken at least three more times that I know of (according to the manager of the main office in ATL) and they could not even go back to using the processing/sorting systems that were working when it initially broke because on launch day of the new sort center they already had teams in the old facilities the same day ripping out all the old equipment and scrapping it…