Published: Tuesday, Jan. 08, 2013 / Updated: Monday, Jan. 07, 2013 03:58 PM
Be grateful for USPS
Be grateful for USPS service
This letter is in response to Jules Giglio, a fellow resident of Indian Land, and his disappointment in his letter carrier and delivery time.
Jules, if you only knew what happens behind the scenes of the Postal Service, you’d be a lot more grateful for your carriers and your mail. Your mail runs late because of all the new people who have moved into Indian Land in the last decade or so. There are many, many more houses to deliver to than there used to be. And since the cost of stamps rises slowly, but the cost of fuel, payroll, and other expenses rises quickly, adding the number of additional carriers needed probably won’t happen any time soon.
Carriers usually don’t get to leave the station until after 9 a.m. to make sure that they have received all of the day’s mail from the distribution center in Charlotte. The Charlotte Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC) handles all mail for all the cities and towns within a 50-mile radius of Charlotte. In a normal day, about 1 million pieces of letter mail, flat mail (magazines), and packages go through the P&DC.
Mail for local stations such as Fort Mill (which also serves Tega Cay and Indian Land), Rock Hill, Clover, Lancaster, Chester and others are sorted overnight and dispatched twice to the local stations; once at 4 a.m. and the last at 7 a.m. The carriers in the local office then take the mail for their route and merge in all the second and third class mail that is dropped off directly at the station.
If one of the huge mail sorters in Charlotte goes down during the night, it is a mad dash to get Electronic Technicians to make repairs. Sometimes these repairs are just minutes long; other times, it can take hours if the repairs require tearing into the massive machinery to replace a broken or worn-out part.
Any time you have a machine down, the mail isn’t getting sorted, which adds to the time before the sorts are completed and dispatched to the local post offices for delivery. If your local station gets their mail late, then the carriers cannot hit the streets until after that mail arrives. The Postal Service runs an extremely tight schedule to make sure that every piece of mail that comes into the mail stream each day is sorted, routed and dispatched in a timely manner.
But, sometimes, things happen to throw a monkey wrench into that schedule.
The next time you get frustrated with your mail or your carrier, look at it this way: for 45 cents, you get someone to come to your house, pick up your piece of mail, and deliver it to anyone else in the country within two to three days. Almost every plane, train, and bus that leaves Charlotte, will carry mail. I don’t care what anyone says about the Postal Service, that’s the absolute best bargain you will EVER see!
Karen Smith
15-year USPS veteran
Indian Land