Jane Spooner, who lives with her husband in Woodstock, relies on a regularly scheduled UPS delivery of medical supplies that comes through the Woodstock post office and is delivered to their home mailbox. They’ve never had problems with delivery, which occurs every three to four months. But when the most recent shipment, scheduled to arrive before Thanksgiving, didn’t show up, Spooner went to the Woodstock post office to check on it. A tracking number showed that it had been dropped off — but it was unclear where.

The post office told Spooner that the missing package, or misdelivery, was not its responsibility, and that she would have to retrieve the package herself, Spooner said in a phone interview.

When Spooner, 80, went to the other location, the residents said her package had not been delivered. She ordered a replacement from the medical supply company but because tracking indicated the package had reached the right destination, her health insurance would not pay for the replacement. Spooner was out of pocket $250.

“It’s a timing thing; they only pay every three months. I talked to the (supplies) company, too. They said they were sorry, but that’s the way it is. Tracking showed it appeared here, but it did not,” she said.

Spooner wrote about her experience on the Woodstock Listserv, which is maintained, along with other Upper Valley town Listservs, by Vital Communities in White River Junction.

She is not the only Woodstock or Upper Valley resident to have registered frustration with the state of rural mail delivery in the Upper Valley, given that people are dependent on the USPS for consistent delivery of bills, payments, medication and Social Security checks.

Some post offices, such as Sharon, according to a Nov. 30 story in The Herald of Randolph, temporarily paused home delivery. In a reporter’s mid-December visit to the Sharon Post Office, a worker said that mail was being delivered that day, but said she was otherwise not permitted by USPS management to talk to the press and gave out a contact name and number for a regional USPS office in Maine. (The contact is retired from the postal service.) The Sharon Town Clerk wrote in an email that inquiries about whether home delivery had resumed needed to be directed to the USPS.

Steve Doherty, a spokesperson in Boston for the USPS, wrote in an email: “With the surge in holiday packages, many of our employees are working additional hours to make sure that customers receive their letters, cards and packages. That means that there will be variables in the normal delivery schedules. It’s not unusual for customers, this time of year, to see their carrier arriving earlier than normal or later in the day, even into the evening hours.”

Most complainants spring to the defense of their mail carriers and postal workers; it is the national performance of the USPS that is at issue.

“People appreciate their carriers,” said state Sen. Alison Clarkson, the Democratic majority leader of the Vermont Senate, and a Woodstock resident. “They’re our connection to the greater world. They bring the world to our post boxes. They’re hugely important because they’re enabling commerce.”

Postal reform

In Spring 2022, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law the bipartisan Postal Service Reform Act, which was intended to buttress the USPS financially and guarantee mail delivery six days a week. The act also required that the USPS develop a public “dashboard” to track service performance, among other requirements.

Problems have persisted nationwide, however.

At the end of this summer, the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted that the USPS’s revenues have not covered its expenses for more than 15 years. (The USPS is not a federal agency; it relies on customer sales for funding). Before Thanksgiving, the USPS announced that it had suffered a net $6.5 billion loss in the fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, according to Reuters. There are continuing declines in volume for First-Class Mail. The widespread use of electronic mail and the disruptions of COVID-19 have dealt blows to the USPS.

Another salient factor is the dominance of Amazon and UPS, both of which have an arrangement with the USPS in which they deliver to a post office, and the post office then delivers a package to the home mailbox — the so-called “last mile.” This has increased the strain on post offices and carriers.

“Mailmen work six days a week and sometimes on Sundays. They’re overwhelmed beyond imagination; they need help,” said Roy Weaver, a retired postal worker who lives in Canaan and was running an errand earlier this month to the post office.

Businesses have also been affected. Melissa Partridge, the owner of Granite State Hobbies on Pleasant Street in Claremont, depends on the USPS to deliver business and personal mail to the store. Partridge has nothing but praise for her regular mail carrier. Although UPS and Federal Express do not always deliver when scheduled, she has no complaints overall, she said in a phone interview.

Last month, however, she noticed that she was not receiving mail daily, she said. After a week, her regular mail carrier reappeared, with Partridge’s mail, and explained she had been moved temporarily to another route. But during that interim, Partridge’s mail had not been delivered and there had been no notice to that effect.

Staff shortages

In an April 2022 op-ed for the Conway Daily Sun, U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., wrote that complaints by New Hampshire residents had resulted, she wrote, in an investigation by the USPS Inspector General “which found that the main cause of postal delays and poor service in New Hampshire was a lack of permanent staff.”

The Vermont Congressional Delegation — Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt. — released in February a letter to the USPS Board of Governors and a second to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, both of which began, “We write with great concern regarding the ongoing staffing crisis and resulting mail delays at United States Postal Service locations across Vermont.” (This was well before the summer flooding in the state, which has left the Vermont capital still without a post office. Montpelier residents must drive six miles to Barre to pick up mail)

There are 243 post offices in New Hampshire, and 266 post offices in Vermont, which has roughly half the population of New Hampshire. Job postings for Dec. 13 showed 18 open positions throughout New Hampshire, including in Canaan. In Vermont, there were 35 open positions statewide, including in South Royalton, Taftsville, White River Junction, Windsor and Woodstock. Postings are updated daily. In both states, an assistant rural carrier begins at a little more than $20 per hour; a full rural carrier at a little more than $25 per hour. Employees in the latter category are eligible to contribute to a Thrift Savings Plan, similar to a 401K, and they are covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System.

Doherty of the USPS wrote that, given the low unemployment in the region, many companies, including the USPS, are scrambling to hire and retain workers.

“We are aggressively advertising our hiring efforts and hosting job fairs at sites across the region to walk prospective employees through the application and onboarding process. This is not for the holiday season, but beyond,” Doherty wrote.

Regardless, postal workers, who are unionized, seem to be caught in crosswinds.

In May of this year, six U.S. senators, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote to the postmaster general demanding that the postal service delay implementation of the Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System (RRECS) “until the system’s serious flaws are rectified.”

In development for years, RRECS is supposed to deliver greater efficiency and economy by electronically tracking not only how much mail a carrier delivers daily but also every activity associated with the daily route. This can include, “the number of delivery stops, distance walked outside of the vehicle for businesses or other non-curbside deliveries, miles driven and several other factors,” Doherty wrote.

The system’s rollout had been delayed a number of times because of glitches which, postal workers said, led to numerous inaccuracies in tracking their daily work, and so to significant cuts to their pay, according to a story in Government Executive, a federal government newsletter. (City mail carriers are paid by the hour and get overtime; rural carriers are paid an annual salary based on the volume of mail they deliver in a year.)

Such inconsistencies mean that it is harder to retain and recruit rural postal workers, many of whom, Roy Weaver, the retired postal worker, said, also have to use their own vehicles to deliver and pick up mail — a significant expense.

Regardless of customer complaints and Congressional fulminating, it’s unlikely that quick, easy solutions to the USPS’s long-standing challenges, which are under the microscope during the high-mail-volume holiday season, are imminent.

On Friday, Spooner received the original package of medical supplies in the mail, three weeks after the tracking had indicated it was delivered.

“It amazes me how the tracking said it was delivered when, in fact, it never left the P.O.,” she wrote in an email. “Now I have to try to return it to the company and hopefully get refunded the money we had to pay for replacement supplies.”

Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.