LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — Delivery delays sit at the center of growing frustrations for businesses and customers who hope the United States Postal Service can sort through the issues sometime soon.
Jeremy Rice, co-owner of House by JSD, noticed delays really start to pick up in December.
“We have an online store. We handle artificial flowers, and we ship them literally to people all across the country,” Rice said. “We always know in the last season, last quarter of the year, there’s going to be some delays. The second week of December we started noticing major issues with hundreds of orders that were going out, all shipped through the USPS, and they were just stuck.”
“We’ve heard from some that, again, these were meant for a memorial service, some of these were meant for a wedding, some of these were made for a special occasion. There’s just lots of questions, and, this is not supposed to work this way.”
In one of the more extreme examples, Rice shared the journey of a package that was shipped out to Mount Vernon. Tracking history shows the package was picked up at House Floral by USPS on Dec. 9, but it wasn’t scanned into the Lexington facility until Dec. 24.
Tracking said transit to the next facility began on Dec. 28, but it took two more weeks for the package to arrive at the Mount Vernon post office, where it was finally delivered on Jan. 14.
“We shipped it like it was supposed to. It’s picked up by our postal carrier, and then it just goes to Nandino where it gets scanned, and then it just sits,” Rice said. “The thing is, we know that they have to be there. They’ve not been scanned anywhere else.”
While LEX 18 heard from businesses and customers who have shared their frustrations, a USPS employee who asked to remain anonymous also reached out to us and added some more insight.
The employee said in a message, “mail gets processed and then pushed to the side and left to be forgotten.” The message later added, “we still have mail from December that hasn’t been touched and there are no plans to work it.”
Rice added, “the frustration on our part is when we read comments from the postal service that, we know there were some problems, we’re trying, we got those fixed. Everything’s moving along. It’s not moving along.”
“So far this month, we’ve shipped 119 packages via USPS through the 15th of this month. Of those 119, 61 of them are delayed.”
Rice has asked for a solution, and he has received the same answer.
“You need to call your congressman. If you’re in our area, call Andy Barr, call your representative, let them know that there’s major issues going on because someone needs to raise a flag, and someone needs to figure out what’s going on and get this taken care of.”
LEX 18 is also working to obtain an updated statement from the postal service.
