Sorry for the local flavor of this post, but we live in Brooklyn. When we order things from UPS the UPS guy does not ring the bell. Ever. We work from home, so we know he does this. We’ve seen him do it. When we complain, they tell us that he’s a 10 year veteran with no prior complaints. We’ve complained before, so we assume this is part of a standard script. It’s not just UPS that’s messed up in Brooklyn. The post office may be even more screwed up. We hardly ever get any mail. Even junk mail.
Apparently, we’re not the only ones.
According to The Gowanus Lounge, our whole zipcode might be messed up:
We always get misdelivered mail. Always. One day last week we got no less than 23 (yes, that’s twenty-three) letters addressed to other addresses — in a single mail delivery. We are on Dean, and the letters were to others on Dean St., Bond St., Hoyt St, and . . .Utica Avenue.
Something SERIOUSLY messed up is going on in Brooklyn.
And UPS is messed up everywhere: Reader Jarrod writes:
Does anyone else have a problem with Fedex or UPS not knocking on the door? I’ll often leave for work to find a door hanger stuck to the door. Even though I’ve been home and awake all morning. Sometimes they will drop off packages and not bother to knock to let me know it’s there.
No, Jarrod. We do not know. We’ve tried leaving notes. Any suggestions for how to get the UPS guy to actually ring the doorbell? Anyone else in Brooklyn not getting their damn mail? Let’s hear about it in the comments. —MEGHANN MARCO
Boerum Hill Thankful Pottery Barn Uses UPS [Gowanus Lounge]
(Photo: cmorran123)
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Local mail delivery ‘worst it’s ever been’
But improvements are on the way, vows Chicago postmaster
BY MARK J. KONKOL
Chicago Sun-Times Staff Reporter
March 11, 2007
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/291829,CST-NWS-mail11.a…
Some days, the mail arrives at Donald Lawson’s home in Beverly as late as 11:30 at night. His mailman shows up wearing a lighted helmet. That’s on the days when Lawson’s mail shows up at all.
David Allen has had delivery problems of his own. The Northwest Side resident suffered along with his dog Tiger when the German shepherd’s anti-diarrheal medication arrived 11 days after it was postmarked — from his veterinarian’s office only 15 blocks away.
He had to walk Tiger six or seven times a day in the snow till the medicine finally came. “I tell you, it’s no fun,” says Allen.
On the Southwest Side, it took three weeks for the mail to finally deliver a pension check that retired city worker Gerald Sullivan was waiting for, to pay bills and buy Christmas presents.
Then, just a few weeks ago, Sullivan’s wife, Jeanette, “thought someone was going to kill me, smash in the door or something,” when a light suddenly shined into her front room, where she was lazing in her pajamas.
“It was the mailman … at 9 at night.”
Most folks expect the mail when they get home from work. They expect local mail to arrive the day after it is sent, or at least before their bills are due or store sales begin.
But in Chicago, mail delivery has gotten so bad that in-town, overnight delivery ranks the worst in the nation, according to Chicago postmaster Gloria E. Tyson.
First-class mail sent between Chicago ZIP codes made it to the correct address the next day 91 percent of the time between June and September last year, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s most recent audit. Several cities reported making it 97 percent of the time, the highest success rate reported.
During that same period, 77 percent of local postal customers rated the quality of delivery as “excellent, very good or good,” well below the U.S. average of 92 percent, according to a post office survey.
‘Raise holy hell’
An informal survey of Chicago aldermen showed mail delivery woes affected people living in 38 of Chicago’s 50 wards. In fact, several aldermen have had mail trouble themselves.
Southwest Side Ald. Edward Burke (14th) said a check his daughter mailed to him from her West Loop home arrived two months after it was postmarked.
A 35th Ward resident stopped Ald. Rey Colon in the street while he was campaigning door-to-door last month.
“She said, ‘Hey, alderman, I’m glad you’re here. I have your mail,” Colon said. “It was the insurance bill from State Farm for the ward office. And I was on a totally different block.”
Northwest Side Ald. Richard Mell (33rd) had to call his local post office and “raise holy hell” after he didn’t get mail for four days in a row about two weeks ago.
“I chewed their ass out and they brought me all my mail in a bundle,” he said. “It’s sloppy work.”
Mell said he plans to call for public hearings on the mail delivery troubles at Wednesday’s City Council meeting to pressure postal officials to make immediate improvements.
A national embarrassment
And guys like Clifton Martin of South Shore, who says he sometimes doesn’t get mail for days at a time, are cheering him on.
“Something has to be done,” he said. “It’s out of control and the worst it’s ever been.”
And that’s saying a lot in Chicago, which was a national embarrassment for the U.S. Postal Service in the early 1990s.
During that time, customer satisfaction and overnight delivery here was the country’s worst. And postal investigators uncovered massive fraud and delivery problems, including:
• • An entire mail truck filled with 40,000 undelivered pieces of mail on the North Side.
• • About 200 pounds of burning mail in Englewood.
• • A cache of 2,300 pounds of undelivered mail hoarded in the apartment of a Northwest Side mail carrier.
Things started getting better by the late ’90s. Aldermen said they weren’t fielding as many complaints back then, and the percentage of successful overnight deliveries increased to 95 percent in 2005.
Big mail trouble became evident in 2006 when the delivery rate first sank to 91 percent. By the fall aldermen and congressmen say they started receiving spikes in mail-related complaints and those have not slowed.
Rep. Dan Lipinski’s Chicago office has fielded more than 100 complaints since February, and 35th Ward staffers say they receive at least 10 complaints of poor, late or no delivery every workday.
“I’m in a run-off [election] so I’m knocking on doors and one house after the other, everyone says, ‘Please fix my mail service,’” Colon said.
Tyson, who took the top Chicago postal job four months ago, says the entire Postal Service is aware of the problems in Chicago and help is on the way. Tyson, a New York native, said she’s ordered a review and overhaul of every aspect of Chicago’s mail system from carrier training, mail collection and automated sorting to transportation, delivery and post office management.
“The city of Chicago has spoken and the postal employees are taking action … And I’m telling them I want it done yesterday,” she said slipping into a thick Brooklyn brogue. “The current level of service is not where we want it to be.” Tyson said most complaints involve home and business delivery. Staffing shortages, injured mail carriers and routes that are not assigned to full-time carriers are at the heart of many problems, including customers troubled with misdeliveries, late-night deliveries and, at times, no delivery at all.
Tyson said routes that do not have a regular mail carrier will get one, additional full-time carriers are being hired and neighborhood post offices with a high percentage of injured workers on “light duty” will get staffing increases.
Another part of Chicago’s delivery troubles stems from not getting mail from the downtown processing plant to the neighborhood stations by early morning, which contributes to some carriers not making deliveries by the post office’s 5 p.m. goal.
Allen says he’s heard empty promises of better delivery before, having talked to post office customer service representatives more than 15 times in recent weeks. What he wants to know is when he’ll start getting mail regularly on time and before supper.
Tyson said she couldn’t answer that exactly, but she expects customers will notice things getting a bit better in “a week or two.”
What she does plan to do is reinstate neighborhood post office advisory committees to establish “real time” conversations with postal customers about their concerns. Similar committees were active in the late ’90s, but have since disbanded.
It’s driving folks nuts
Rep. Danny Davis (D-Chicago), who heads a congressional subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, says he’s made it clear to postal leaders that they have to “do whatever is necessary” to fix delivery problems.
“I’ve talked to the postmaster general and he assured me he’s aware of the problems,” he said. “If they need more carriers, they get more carriers. If they need more supervisory training they get more … I am aware, engaged, involved and working with the Postal Service to find solutions.”
Southwest Sider Janis Misovic says politicians better make sure the problems get fixed, because it’s driving folks in her neighborhood nuts.
“You want to live your life and not think about the mail, but it’s so bad. I don’t get bills on time … My payments arrive late … I get sale fliers after the sales are over … I’m continuously thinking about the mail,” she said. “And it screws up my whole life.”
Why is some mail late?
Chicago postmaster Gloria E. Taylor says sometimes it’s due to something postal workers call “looping.”
That’s when the automated mail sorting system puts the wrong bar code on a letter and it continuously gets sent to the wrong neighborhood post office.
This happens if a letter is sent back to the downtown processing center without a line being drawn through the incorrect bar code, which signals the letter must be sorted manually.
Until the bar code is voided letters will continue to go through that “loop.”
In New London CT if you have mail that must go out that day, you’re better off dropping it off at the PO because if the mailman doesn’t have at least 1 piece of mail (even junk) for your address, they aren’t stopping by your residence that day. Which is really really fucking funny because guess where they park every day to get out & walk around the neighborhood? Yep.
11201 in Brooklyn in dreadful for the USPS. Frequently I’ll receive notes that I have packages waiting – however, I too work from home and would have heard it if they rang the doorbell. (They didn’t.) Often times packages just go missing, as does mail and magazines. 2-3 times a week we’ll get a bundle of someone else’s mail. (FedEx Ground and UPS are great for my apartment since I have gotten to know the drivers and they know I am at home during the daytime.) There’s certainly something criminal going on at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn.
I pretty much done away with receiving mail but I also live in Brooklyn and have to say that our UPS guy is awesome. Everyone in the neighborhood knows him by name and he always stops if he sees you have a package (for dropoff). He also gives out his cell phone so you can call him if you have a pickup and will call you if no one answers the buzzer. The Fedex guy isn’t bad but the difference is that he goes out of the neighborhood while UPS seems to be around all day.
The Van Brunt USPS station in Park Slope, Brooklyn has made so many of my packages disappear that I’m starting to think David Copperfield works there.
Once, while tracking a lost ebay purchase, they told me that I had already come in, showed ID, signed for, and gotten the package – when I asked to see the signature, it turned out it was signed for & taken by someone I’d never heard of! Once I got past the surly woman at the window, the “manager” seemed as upset as I was, apologized profusely, and assured me that this matter would be turned over to the postal inspectors, and gave me his name & phone # if I had any further issues. I submitted the refund form he gave me, which I later discovered was never filed, and was the wrong form, anyway! Every time I tried to contact the “manager” I was told he was out on his mail delivery rounds. I gave up after 2 months.
We also received misdelivered mail on a daily basis, and change of address forms are virtually ignored. Things only got better for me when I moved to a doorman building.
Thanks for the advice about complaining to congressmen — I’d never thought of that — but I’m definitely going to do it!!!!
USPS 11231 Red Hook office leave packages on doorsteps without ringing bells as a matter of course. Same thing, when you complain? Substitute mail carriers…
Complaining never works, this is one time no ones come up with an solution. Even Consumerist is mute in the face of USPS…
I have a business making and selling high end art papers and my studio is literally right next door to a UPS shipping station, so the convenience is too much to pass up. I’ve been using them for several years with few problems. That is, until this past summer 2006. That’s when they started destroying my packages. For years, maybe 1 or 2 total. Since July: at LEAST 8. Would you believe 1 package from New York to Missouri got destroyed 3 TIMES IN A ROW. SAME PACKAGE TO THE SAME CUSTOMER. I called and complained and they blamed my packaging almost every time, which is really funny, because I use Uline shipping tubes. Like the name suggests, they are meant for shipping, but UPS would “suggest” that I use their triangular mailers. They are never long enough for the stuff I’m shipping. UPS says the tubes fall off the conveyor belts or something. Not my problem.
The 3rd time I shipped this one package, I wrote “Do not Crush, do not mangle, do not drive over with forklift, do not use as a baseball bat. This is the 3RD ATTEMPT to ship to this address. Your reputation is on the line!” Guess who’s package got destroyed a 3rd time? I got the package back and I hold onto it to show people, like it’s some sort of a sick trophy. I had to bitch loudly to 2 supervisors about it. The first one said change my packaging. I said fat chance and asked for another supervisor. The second one finally promised to ship it next day air and it finally got there intact.
The joke is kind on them in that I learned to insure my packages early on, so these packages end up making me twice the money (even 3 times!…) when UPS destroys them. Although I would gladly trade this in for having my packages get there in one piece the first time around. My customers would probably be happier too, instead of having to file claims and wait another 2 weeks to get their orders…
GDMFSOB UPS!
Meghann, You’re not complaining to the 800 UPS number are you? If you are, that’s a complete waste of time. The only people that can actually accomplish anything are at your local UPS package center or depot (it’s not a retail location – it’s where the trucks leave from).
If you talk to them, your problem will be solved IMMEDIATELY. They will simply tell your driver “This is the problem.” He will say: “Okay.” That’s it. Human to human contact, it still works.
You can get your package center from the 800 number. They will deny they can give it you, but they lie. They can and do give it out for difficult problems such as yours.
I run a small business that delivers products by USPS all over the world. In the US Brooklyn is by far our biggest trouble spot. Many times orders are simply never delivered.
I’m north of atlanta in Georgia.
USPS -5 out of 10: We have missed bills, and we get other peoples bills, but it happens only about once a month. I had a DVD from Amazon go all over Georgia, the post offic was tracking it and trying to figure why it kept getting misrouted. My address was correct on it, but it had hit my Post Office twice and was returned both times as “No such address”. To their credit, the person I talked to really seemed upset about how they were screwing up so bad. I swear that USPS is the only business model that as work slows, and the number of people depending on them lessens, they charge more and do worse work.
UPS- 3 out of 10: I haven’t had one knock yet. Only two ways to get the things delivered at home. If it REALLY expensive, then they will leave it in a mud puddle outside your door. If it is only moderately expensive, or waterproof, then the only way you can get it is to wait BY THE DOOR, and walk outside when they pull up. Otherwise, I just call the UPS company and tell them to hold it at the delivery place and I’ll drive to them.
So far, Fed Ex has been better for me.
Can someone get this thread over to UPS customer service to let them know there IS a problem, and that not ringing our doorbells may save them a minute each stop, it looses them a customer at most every stop. We know they are doing it, they aren’t fooling us.
i live in ft. greene and my ups guy is really nice. he always smiles and remembers my name. my postal worker, on the other hand, is a douche.
Brooklynbs, I feel your pain. I live in 11211 also. The service is so bad that I have any packages sent to me at work (partially because of my fear of them getting lost & partially because if they get sent to the post office, I have a bus ride and a loooooooong wait in line ahead of me).
The delivery person leaves nasty notes if names are not on the boxes, but still can’t stop delivering mail to the wrong building… or they just shove all our building’s mail into one apartment’s box.
Writing to our congressperson really is a good idea. Take a minute to do it here: http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Maybe if there are enough of us, something will actually change. Maybe.
Well I live in 11238 (for now many years) and the postmen are horrendous. Lucky for me I did receive last week a court order to demand back taxes (from 2001), which I had no clue about until then. Up until that point I did not even know that I had owed ANY money to taxes; now I can’t even go to find out why they decided this potential garnishing of my wages. I have also been a victim of identity theft, and I can guarrantee it came from my mail carrier.
I was sitting around one shabbat (Saturday afternoon) in a high-rise in the Bronx while the lunch dissuasion was the same complaint UPS, FED-EX and the Post Office just leave tags. Now on Saturdays everyone is home, they open the door to see the tag but no one knocked. Apparently about two weeks before one couple in the building was pissed about this, they ordered a package from ups and kept their door ajar, when the delivery guy came he had the tag ready with no package. The were obviously pissed, when they quested him, he said residences are generally not home so he doesn’t bring large packages on his truck that he’ll most likely have to haul back to the truck. Besides being stunned about his answer (I didn’t feel like doing my job), the package they ordered was a paper back children’s book from Amazon. The called UPS filed a complaint and told me at lunch they still see the same guy making deliveries in the building or rather coming around with slips.
You are probably aware that delivery problems can not be resolved at local level.
We are finally getting our mail delivery problems addressed after 7 years of delivery problems after contacting our Congressman and
Postmaster General Jack Potter
US Postal Service
475 Lenfant Place SW
Washington, DC 20260-0010
EMAIL: pmgceo@usps.gov
HIS DIRECT FAX: 202.268.5211
The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) waives sovereign immunity only for the acts or omissions of an “employee of the government while acting within the scope of his office or employment.
The postal exemption covers liability for lost or damaged mail. This exception has swallowed much of the liability the FTCA creates, leaving many deserving claimants without a remedy.
Mail carriers who throw mail down the drain and/or constantly delivering mail to wrong address should not be considered acting within the scope of their employment. Their actions cause substantial emotional distress and financial losses. Equity and tort principles justify an expansion of the USPS liability under the FTCA.
We are victims, and Congress needs to recognize us as such.
Get connected with other’s in your neighborhood having USPS mail delivery problems at Google group USPS Postal Reform
[groups.google.com]
Attention University of Maryland off campus students, graduate students or anyone who has had a College Park or Berwyn Heights Md. address since 2001
During past 7 years the College Park Md Post Office has caused 1000+’s pieces of 1st class mail, DMV notices, end of year financial statements, Jury Duty Summonses, credit cards and “Final Notice” certified mail notices, mail from university departments that were mailed to University of Maryland students and student organizations at addresses other than mine in College Park, Md that were either forwarded to my winter home in Florida or delivered to my home of 50 years on Norwich Road in College Park, Md 20740. Discussions between me and employees at College Park Md Post Office addressing their delivery practices was akin to listening to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello go through a rendering of “Who’s On First.”
Good luck,
Dennis Abe
College Park, Md 20740
[www.dennisabe.com]