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Saving the Post Office
Post offices give away small, cardboard scales to help customers determine how much postage their mail needs.
(By Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post)
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This is the Postal Service that no one wants to lose.
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At its most basic level, the Postal Service needs to keep as many customers as it can, and a good place to start is by tackling its legendary customer-service problems. Although users of many rural and suburban post offices rarely see the kinds of hassles that are routine in urban locations, city dwellers are familiar with the maddening pace of two clerks plodding through a 20-person line.
At these especially busy locations, Day said the agency is trying to keep wait times down by rescheduling staff lunch breaks, once routinely taken during the midday rush, and splitting some shifts in two. Individual postmasters are tracked based on such performance criteria, too, with independently measured wait times at individual offices factored into pay and promotions at the end of every year.
"Unfortunately, we know, looking at the numbers, we do have pockets of problems," Day said. "But the good news is we're aware of it; we do hold people accountable. That's where we really force the issue of restaffing and rescheduling."
With 38,000 retail offices nationwide, this effort is notoriously slow going. That's how, even on the Monday before Christmas -- a day touted in a Postal Service press release as the busiest mail day of the year -- there were only two clerks serving customers at 6 p.m. at one of the District's main post offices, the Friendship branch in Northwest. The line snaked out the door.
Day said that in such circumstances, the branch manager should be out in the lobby, sorting customers' needs in line and helping where possible. On the other hand, managers inclined to do this are somewhat limited in how they can pitch in because, under union rules, they cannot open an empty clerk station and start serving customers.
William Burrus, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said the Postal Service has institutionalized long wait times by cutting staff sizes, following the model of the private-sector retail industry.
"They could provide a two-minute wait max, if they wanted to," Burrus said. "But they don't want to because they know the American public will accept a delay. They've become accustomed to it."
One area where Day and Burrus agree is in the way Americans view postal employees. Surveys show that most of them hold postal workers in high regard. Even Tornga, after his 52-minute wait in line, offered up an unprompted compliment.
"Once you get up there, the people are perfectly nice," he said. "It's just crazy how long it takes."
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