Where is it? Complaints grow about Post Office deliveries
TYRONE, Ga. - A growing number of complaints have people asking the same question these days: how much can you trust the Post Office to deliver important packages on time?
The Inspector General for the United States Postal Service is now tracking performance numbers for regions across the country. The Atlanta Region has a long way to go.
That doesn’t surprise Deborah Clemons.
"As far as my business is concerned I’ll never send another package through there," she said.
A Fayette County small business owner says the US Postal Service lost hundreds of shipments of her homemade butter but refuses to take responsibility.
When your business is butter, your product can’t be sitting for days in a postal warehouse.
Working out of her Tyrone home, Deborah created Infusion Blends, a line of flavored butter products that she sells through TV appearances on QVC.
In February, Good Morning America featured her products as part of Black History Month.
The online orders poured in like a series of tidal waves.
"Every couple minutes refresh," she remembered. "Oh My God! Look we done sold more!"
An appearance on Good Morning America during Black History Month generating huge sales for Deboral Clemons' butter business. But she's spent the months since trying to track down missing shipments.
Her email subscribers went from 800 to more than 9,000.
She decided to use the Post Office to ship all that butter — two-day priority delivery plus insurance in case anything went wrong.
Lots went wrong. Call it a complete butter meltdown.
Customers complained the shipments didn’t arrive within the two-day window, requiring Deborah to give refunds because the packaging had melted and the butter could have spoiled.
She had dropped off a pallet loaded with boxes of butter. But hundreds never even arrived.
"It’s a pallet," pointed out Deborah. "Where is it?"
An example of a pallet full of butter products Deborah Clemons says the USPS lost or delivered late.
A lot of Americans are asking the same question. Where is it? What did the Post Office do with their packages? And will the problem ever get fixed?
A recent US Senate hearing tried to find answers. Sen. Chris Coons from Delaware said it’s the biggest category of complaints his office receives.
"I’m from a small state of about 900,000 people," Coons said. "I’ve gotten 3,500 messages in the last year complaining about delays in postal delivery."
A blind woman testified her braille reading material took months to arrive.
A Baltimore business owner failed to get important purchase orders.
"In a particular egregious example, a union office in Oakland, California, mailed an order form on February 25 and we received it June 10," explained Karen Meyers.
The Post Office Inspector General seemed frustrated, too, blaming some of the delays on cutbacks in overtime and widespread management changes by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
"Change at the Postal Service is very difficult to implement well," said Inspector General Tammy Whitcomb.
This map from the Inspector General plots performance ratings for regions across the country. The darker the blue, the worse the performance.
Her office is now plotting performance issues on a map, dark blue being the worst. The Atlanta Region is one shade lighter, not as bad as the Maryland, Delaware and D.C. area but trailing most of the rest of the country.
"I don’t understand how they’re allowing this essential service to go under like this," said butter businesswoman Clemons.
In her case, the Post Office required she file individual claims for each missing or late box, but then denied 145 of them because it disputed her proof that she had dropped them off in the first place.
She says another 78 claims were only partly paid.
The FOX 5 I-Team emailed the Post Office’s Atlanta Region lots of questions. They delivered a one-sentence answer:
"We take these matters seriously and are working closely with the customer in an effort to resolve the matter."
But like everything else in this case, Deborah said the Post Office still hasn’t followed through.
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