Beth Nolan’s shipping costs have doubled in the past six weeks. Her company has spent so much on delays by the U.S. Postal Service that she said she recently had to fire an employee while another worker turned the wall of her kitchen into a giant calendar filled with notes on mail routes and parcel status.
Nolan’s small business operates outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and helps train nurses caring for dementia patients. By pivoting her business online, her company now sends its materials to nursing homes across the country to help health care workers meet state requirements and continue their education.
But the accompanying materials, needed for these nurses to stay consistent, need to be sent by mail and often arrive five to seven days later than expected – or longer. Nolan said these delays came because her company was nearly 75 percent back to where it was prior to the pandemic.
“Most of us took pay cuts, we fired 10 people, but we had been doing it for almost two months and saw the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, “and then the delays began to happen. . ”
Nolan is one of many companies across the country hit hard by the Post Office’s delivery delays, which received widespread attention due to allegations that the Trump administration had orchestrated the delay in obstructing voice mail efforts.
The National Small Business Association asked its members this week to see how many such delays there were. Sixty percent answered that they encountered serious hurdles in a service that was previously relatively reliable through the coronavirus pandemic.
Industry experts have pointed to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for introducing a number of new policies – bans on overtime and postal carriers taking extra routes – which they say are likely to have helped cause the delays. A close ally of the president, DeJoy stopped that policy, saying he intended to cut costs, on Tuesday after widespread pressure.
As for the motivation behind the delays in delivery, small businesses in the United States are seeing them impact on their bottom line, especially after many were forced to go online because of the pandemic. The postal delays are an extra hit during an already severe economic crisis, and the fallout is widespread.
Nolan said the Trump administration needs to do something to address these delays because it is an additional blow to Americans across the country, including the health care workers it serves. She said she is preparing a shipment to a nursing home in Indiana that has lost 60 of its residents to the coronavirus and that she could drive for hours to make sure she receives it, instead of delivering the package to the Postal Service.
“It’s like another paper cut for her,” she said of the nurses with her. ‘This does not have to happen. COVID was nobody’s to blame, but the answer and these delays are sure. ”
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Began an investigation by the Postal Service Holdup on Aug. 6, asking for the victims to share their complaints. The senator’s office said it received more than 7,300 responses from all 50 states: 690, or about 9.5 percent, were from small businesses facing challenges due to the delays.
“It’s clear that the policy pursued by Postmaster General DeJoy has hurt people who use the Postal Service as a lifeline for daily needs, including small businesses in Michigan that have customer complaints and are losing profits due to delivery problems and delays. , “Peters said Wednesday, promising to pressure the postmaster general as he testifies before the House of Representatives on Friday.
Small businesses have been hit the hardest
The health and wellness company of Cassidy Lavender is sure to look beyond the effects described by Peters. She has been producing natural beauty products and selling them through her Lavender Thorne company in Texarkana, Texas, for the past year, but since March she has done most of her business online when stores that carry her products close their doors to shoppers.
She said she noted that her packages would not appear in the tracking for a week or more after they were handed over to the Postal Service, and then they would often be stuck in the agency’s hub in Shreveport, Louisiana. A few weeks ago, she drove the nearly 75 miles to Shreveport with 20 packages in the hope that she could shuttle through them after customers complained about delayed or molten products.
Lavender estimates that it has cost her company about $ 10,000 so far to cover the delivery of the postal service, and it has forced her to turn entirely to private shipping companies. While those companies are more expensive, Lavender said they can not afford the delays and it costs that it is necessary to thank unlucky customers who receive their packages late.
“Not only do we lose money for shipping if it is not received on time, but we also compensate for the Post Office’s error,” said Lavender, who hopes to return to service once the delays are resolved. , sei. ‘We just want happy customers, and I’m the kind of person who goes after it – when it’s not there on time, when it melts or is damaged in any way – I take a new product and spend the night with it. ”
The stakes are high for these companies, as many rely on the Postal Service to reach employees and suppliers, as well as their customers who help them stay afloat during an unusual economic crisis.
The postal service is the most common method of shipping for businesses, with 65 percent of members of the National Small Business Association using it over private shippers. That number rises to 70 percent for companies with five or fewer employees, the advocacy group said.
“Unfortunately, USPS delays have disproportionate consequences for the smallest companies that typically use the USPS more than their larger counterparts,” said Molly Day, vice president of public affairs for the association. “The USPS, while certainly not far from perfect, has a leveling effect on commerce, ensuring that even the smallest, home-based businesses can serve and access their customers.”
‘A Foreign Catch-22’
For retail businesses dealing with the loss of customers in brick-and-mortar stores, Postal Service supplies have become their economic lifestyle. The delays seen by small businesses can create major problems, from cash flow to negative reviews on late deliveries, over which they have very little control.
David Swider owns The End of All Music, a record store in Oxford, Mississippi. As coronavirus cases grew, he closed his shop to every walk-in customer and put all his efforts into moving his entire inventory online. It paid him off, allowing his business to remain superficial, but he worries.
He said the deliveries he sent went down for the most part from March to the end of June, but he began to notice major delays six to eight weeks ago. Parcels he delivers to the postman may not have added a shipment number to them indicating that they have arrived at the local post office for more than a week, and it is constantly growing.
A turntable he sent a few hours south to a customer in Jackson, the state capital, took five weeks to arrive. Meanwhile, a $ 3,000 shipment of CDs he returned to a vendor at a Kentucky distribution center for a month disappeared. He said that when he called about it, an exhausted postal worker told him that the Postal Service was supported with deliveries, but could not give him details about the thousands of dollars of merchandise.
“He was, ‘I feel very confident that your package is not lost, but it’s probably at the bottom of a massive pile of things,'” Swider said. “And that was all he could tell me.”
Swider said record stores like his can not afford to have customers pay more for shipping or their margins become harder to see. They can certainly not pay their customers to get impatient and turn to services like Amazon that have cut deals for faster shipping.
“It’s kind of weird Catch-22,” he said, “because it’s when I increase my shipping prices that I lose customers. But if it also takes five weeks for a record they bought, I can get them too. “So what’s the better way: cheap or reliable? The bottom line is that the post office has been both things for a long time.”
Beyond the bottom dollar
But even small businesses of larger size that had a strong presence online shopping prior to the pandemic, cannot compete with large retailers without the help of the Postal Service.
Powell’s Books, an independent bookstore, has owned an online store since 1994. It had to close its store in Portland, Oregon, to shoppers because of the pandemic and has remained viable because it could grow its already substantial shipping business.
But with online retailers like Amazon already able to undercut them on book prices, CEO Emily Powell, the bookstore’s founder’s grandmother, said Powell’s will have trouble retaining customers when it comes to raising shipping prices on them or theirs. forcing to deal with nebulous shipping delays.
The delays in the postal service are not just a matter of margins, Powell said, but the ability of American communities to survive the pandemic and the shifting economy.
“The USPS is absolutely a lifeline, not just for us, but for every small business in America,” she said. “This idea that they will be undermined in one way or another means that this country has really chosen to move away from a local, small business and support everything else. And that is disturbing for me personally, for my community, but also for our economy in general. ‘
