100 miles south of the Canadian border, the tiny city of Bemidji, Minnesota “has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages” since early November, experiences the Washington Publish, “and native postal employees say they’ve been ordered to ship these packages first.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service tells the Publish that is not true, and that their service “doesn’t prioritize the supply of packages from Amazon or different prospects.”
However no matter’s occurring, the Publish experiences that “The end result has been chaos…”
Mail is getting backed up, generally for days, leaving native residents ready for checks, bank card statements, medical health insurance paperwork and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or 9 hours are stretching to 10 or 12. A minimum of 5 carriers have stop, and the submit workplace has banned scheduled sick days for the remainder of the yr, carriers say… Dennis Nelson, a veteran mail service, mentioned he received so pissed off watching a number of co-workers “breaking down and crying” that he staged a symbolic strike earlier this month exterior the submit workplace the place he has labored for greater than 20 years…
Bemidji isn’t the one place the place postal employees say they’ve been overwhelmed by packages from Amazon… Carriers and native officers say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state’s San Juan Islands.
The state of affairs stems from a disaster on the Postal Service, which has misplaced $6.5 billion up to now yr. The submit workplace has had a contract with Amazon since 2013, when it began delivering packages on Sundays. However lately, that enterprise has exploded as Amazon has more and more come to depend on postal carriers to make “last-mile” deliveries in harder-to-reach rural areas. The Postal Service considers the contract proprietary and has declined to reveal its phrases. However U.S. Postmaster Normal Louis DeJoy has mentioned publicly that “rising bundle quantity” — not simply from Amazon, however from FedEx and UPS as nicely — is essential to the mail service’s monetary future. In a Nov. 14 speech to the Postal Service Board of Governors, DeJoy mentioned he desires the submit workplace to change into the “most popular supply supplier within the nation….”
In larger cities, Amazon has its personal distribution community, which takes a number of the strain off the submit workplace. However in rural areas, the place carriers drive miles of lonely routes of their private autos, the association has precipitated issues. Within the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are fighting the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Publish reported in September, whereas mail carriers in Carbondale say they’re overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Different Minnesota cities together with Brainerd and La Porte have been hit arduous by Amazon up to now, carriers mentioned…
Partenheimer defended the submit workplace’s file in an e mail, whereas conceding “a lot work stays to be performed….”
An Amazon spokesperson advised the Publish “We work immediately with the USPS to steadiness our supply wants with their obtainable capability,” and “we’ll proceed to collaborate on bundle quantity every week and alter as wanted.”
