| December 2007 | |
USPS takes 7 days to deliver newspaper 30 miles
In the past I have written that the United States Postal Service no longer cares about giving good service to small town newspapers as customers. But I have never had a statewide forum in which to vent my feelings until now. After reading David Lewis’ column in the Nov. 2 Pilot Point Post-Signal about terrible delivery service to area subscribers, I got my dander up again. You see, just a week or two before, we received a completed publication watch for a subscriber in Bowie, 30 miles away. They checked on two issues, skipped a week and then did two more. You can only guess what might have happened to that other issue. The delivery time was four days, six days, four days and seven days. But this does not take into consideration the fact that we deliver the papers to the local post office the day before publication, so actually they missed their stated one-to-seven-day delivery standard for one of the issues. The customer service rep wrote to me that there was no delivery problem. I wrote him back that six and seven days (actually seven and eight) to deliver a newspaper 30 miles is unacceptable, and I have received no further response. Wonder why? It would be great if the one-to-seven-day standard was upheld in some cases, but most of us are aware that the seven-day standard may not apply to subscribers in certain locales. (I will note here that the switch from bags to tubs did help slow complaints for some far away subscribers. But those within about 100 miles seem to see their service deteriorating instead, especially when it has to go through certain regional mail centers.) NNA postal guru Max Heath forwarded my concerns to some of the higher ups he knows in the USPS, none of whom have attempted to contact us or have their folks get in touch. David’s story in Pilot Point was much the same, with USPS taking several days to deliver papers just a few miles. Oh, and the issue that contained his column took more than a week to get to Henrietta — a two-hour drive. It seems David’s problem is in the same regional delivery center in Fort Worth as our problem. And he’s getting pretty much the same lack of sincere response. But the story is repeated across the country, whether your papers go through Fort Worth, Houston or St. Louis. They don’t seem to know what the problem is in these black holes, and they do not care — if they are to be judged by their lack of real action. When they do respond at all, it is seldom more than lip service, but much of the time they don’t bother to respond in any form or fashion. Can you imagine what shape your business would be in if you kept raising rates but lowering service as USPS has done to newspapers? And then would not respond to legitimate complaints? Bankrupt comes to mind. It is such a shame, because most of us have great local postal employees. (It should be noted that when the newspaper got to the Bowie PO, it usually went out that day.) But once you get outside the local level you seem to become mired in one of the most cumbersome, unresponsive bureaucracies imaginable. David let his readers know they can now get the paper online. But that’s not a real solution, he says, because most people would rather read a “paper” than a computer screen. No matter what action USPS takes, it will not be enough to soothe all the complaints and lost subscribers our industry has endured. In the meantime, I love democracy, but if a dictatorship could make the mail run on time, it sure sounds tempting.
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