EDITORIAL: Mission undelivered: ‘prompt, reliable, efficient service’

This is an editorial and an apology. The apology should come from the United States Postal Service, but they don’t do apologies. So we are apologizing on behalf of the USPS for shoddy mail service that can result in this newspaper being delivered to its subscribers late or not at all.

How shoddy can that service be? Here’s one example: Subscribers in Belgium, Cedar Grove and Oostburg did not receive the April 11 issue of the Press. The freshly-printed papers were delivered on time to the Port Washington post office on Wednesday, where they were to be picked up, as is the usual procedure, by a private contractor hired by USPS and trucked to the outlying post offices for delivery to subscribers Thursday.

The newspapers were picked up, but never delivered. The explanation was that the driver did not have a pallet jack, and apparently was not interested in removing the boxed newspapers manually, and decided to leave them on the truck and take them to the Milwaukee postal hub.

The Milwaukee USPS facility is where newspapers go to die. Time and gain, addressed copies of the Press have been shunted off to Milwaukee and never seen again. Also never seen has been any sign of accountability for failing to perform the service a customer has paid for.

We don’t blame our local post offices for this, nor should anyone. The postmasters and their staffs work hard to give the public and mailers like Ozaukee Press good service. But like postal customers, they are at the mercy of an enormous quasi-government institution that claims to be both a business and public service but can’t manage to perform either function well.

While the decision makers in this lumbering organization hide in the cubicles of bureaucracy, their representatives in local post offices are left to deal with complaints about mishandled mail.

Local post offices hear from subscribers when their newspaper is not delivered. The Press hears from them too. After the April 11 debacle, telephone calls from subscribers came one after the other. Though the calls kept the office staff busy for several days, we welcomed these inquiries from readers about their newspaper.

Subscribers deserve to know why the newspaper they expect to arrive at their homes every Thursday didn’t show up, and we appreciate their calls—which with few exceptions are polite and understanding—as indications of the value they place on their community newspaper.

The Ozaukee Press policy for undelivered newspapers is to issue a refund to subscribers in the form of a subscription extension. The USPS policy for failure to deliver is to never refund the postage fees we pay in advance.

As the quality of USPS service has declined, its prices have climbed, with repeated double-digit increases. In July, mailing prices for newspapers will increase by another 10%. In an indication of peculiar USPS priorities, the price increase for marketing mail, also known as junk mail, will be only 7.7%.

These comments reflect a newspaper’s perspective, but everyone has a perspective on the Postal Service. Businesses, health-care organizations, nonprofits, government entities and, especially, individual citizens sending or receiving first-class mail have all experienced the deterioration of what was promised to be “prompt, reliable and efficient services to patrons in all areas.” The quoted words are from the USPS mission statement.

Mail service in the U.S. once came close to living up to that statement. Its failure to do that in recent years coincides with its leadership by Louis DeJoy, who was appointed postmaster general by President Donald Trump in 2020.

Judging from his actions, DeJoy’s mission appears to be the complete privatization of the postal service. As though the USPS were a fast-food franchiser dealing with growing operating costs, he ordered distribution center shut-downs and letter carrier cutbacks as part of a 10-year austerity plan that intentionally slowed mail delivery.

In a quest to compete with UPS and FedEx and fulfill a contract with Amazon, DeJoy’s postal service gives priority to package delivery at the expense of other mail, while at the same time putting added pressure on local post offices.

The postmasters, carriers and other workers at those community post offices give the best service they can under those circumstances, and that includes dependable delivery of Ozaukee Press except for those isolated incidents when their efforts are sideswiped by USPS management miscues. We will continue to work closely with them to keep Press editions from being sucked into that void of lost newspapers in Milwaukee.