If you depend on the U.S. Postal Service, you’ll want to pay attention to potential changes in delivery times.
It’s going to have the biggest impact on rural residents, explains Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany. He says the postal service’s new operational plan will save money — roughly $3 billion per year — but it comes at the expense of rural recipients.
“They’re trying to streamline the delivery service for the U.S. Postal Service, but I have real concern, along with a lot of other members of Congress, that they’re going to leave rural America behind,” Tiffany says.
For example, he says if you’re more than 50 miles from a processing location, such as in Milwaukee, Green Bay, or Minneapolis, you can expect an extra day for delivery. Tiffany says this poses a problem for people who pay bills or receive checks and medicine through the mail.
If you live within 50 miles of a USPS Regional Processing and Distribution Center, you will receive mail in the same amount of time if not faster, the USPS told Mid-West Farm Report in a statement.
The USPS also plans to eliminate afternoon pickup times in those areas. Tiffany says this has real world consequences, especially when there are existing issues with the timeliness of rural mail service.
“The postal service delivers chicks in some instances, and we’ve heard stories that if there’s been delays by the postal service, those chicks have died,” he says. “I’ve really heard it here in Northern Wisconsin in regards to some of the periodicals, like weekly newspapers, where we’ve seen significant delays.”
Tiffany says there’s not a timeline on if or when these changes will take place. He and 19 other members of Congress penned a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy about the impacts that longer delivery times will have on rural residents.
USPS respectfully declined Mid-West Farm Report’s interview request. Desai Abdul-Razzaaq with USPS Corporate Communications did provide a written statement.
“We still deliver and collect to 167 million addresses 6 days a week today and in the future. Any change is within the existing 2–5 day service standard. If you mail something from rural… it may take 12-24 hours extra but still within our service standards.”
For example — 2 might become 3, 3 might become 4, and so on.