Rural Sellers May Lose USPS Transit Time as of April 1st

[tsme35]

Looks like another USPS time change, I just made it by 1.5 miles.

"That’s because under the USPS service standards changes, “any post office that is 50 miles or more from a Regional Processing and Distribution Center will no longer have afternoon mail pickup,” it explained."

 So if you outside the 50 mile mark, the mail you put in the box or drop off won't go out on a truck until the next day. If you live in Wyoming, the whole state does not have a sorting center.  I'm adding E commerce link, 

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2025/03/28/rural-sellers-may-lose-usps-transit-time-as-of-april-1st/

 and the link showing the sorting centers provided by the "save the post office" with interactive map showing PO within the 50 miles:

https://www.savethepostoffice.com/understanding-the-new-usps-service-standards-and-how-they-apply-to...

[oaktoncardinal]

Yup, this has been the reality here in Virginia since mid-2023 (I believe we were the first area to change to the new routine).  USPS used to run a pick-up/drop-off mail run in the very early morning and ran again in the evening to pick-up mail collected that day and drop-off additional mail.  USPS decided that with the inflation we were experiencing in the previous administration that this was unsustainable and that costs were undeniably climbing quickly.  They scaled back to one run per day.  Guess what.  It's okay.  When I post a letter or package it is picked up from my mailbox as normal and waits overnight at the post office to make the trip to our Mail Distribution facility in Richmond VA.  It adds roughly a 12 hour delay in the progression of the mail sorting.  It cuts the costs of moving the mail for this process by 50%, a laudable cost savings.  Personally I am fine with this new processing schedule.  We need to embrace change to keep costs down.  Everyone seems to complain when postal rates increase and rightly so but we also need to embrace and encourage cost savings.  It did take a minute to wrap my head around the new schedule but really, it's okay... and I am very happy that the USPS is looking for more ways in which to save (all of us) money.

Oh, and let me tell you this.  All of my local post offices are closed on Saturday.  Closed ALL DAY on Saturday.  That was done in the 2009-2016 time frame.  My post offices close at 4.30 during the week and you know why?  Because I live in a rural area.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

I'm not following what this means.   The PO won't have an afternoon mail pickup?  What does that mean.  My PO is >50 miles from the Regional Sort Center & has been for years.  IDK what you mean by "pickup".  Who's picking up what?  My PO sends trucks every night to the Sort Center in the big city an hour away.  All the PO's in my city of almost 1M do that.   What pickup is involved?  

[chapeau-noir]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

I'm not following what this means.   The PO won't have an afternoon mail pickup?  What does that mean.  My PO is >50 miles from the Regional Sort Center & has been for years.  IDK what you mean by "pickup".  Who's picking up what?  My PO sends trucks every night to the Sort Center in the big city an hour away.  All the PO's in my city of almost 1M do that.   What pickup is involved?  

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Many post offices now have two pick ups a day - morning and afternoon - to take mail to the local sort center. If your post office is more than 50 miles from the local sorting center, they will not be picking up the mail in the afternoon, just the morning.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

@chapeau-noir  Thank you!  I guess mine has been that way for about 4 years since they consolidated sort centers.   The trucks go after hours cuz they usually don't arrive til after midnight, so next day for scan purposes.  

ETA: The USPS never fails to surprise me.  I found out I was on a "rural route".  My subdivision alone has 800 houses.  When I questioned that, I was told that quite literally the entire north half of our city, north of downtown, is a rural route.  The city is almost 1M people now.  When I questioned why that was, well that's when 🤕  (I guess we don't have head explode smiley).  A lot makes no sense. 

[tsme35]

My PO will still have an afternoon pick up, told the mail lady and she wishes they didn't. When they run the route, if their not done by 5pm, they have to run back to PO and dropped off what they have before the truck gets there, then go back out and finish the route.  Without having to go back, she'd be done an hour earlier on the busy times of the year. It makes sense and anything to hopefully cut back on anymore rate increases.

But I posted for the sellers that watches every tracking number, so they won't be surprised.

[greatmidwestcoin]

All the other delivery companies have been doing it this way since forever. People survived. If this doesn't work for you, then you have freewill to mail with UPS or FedEx.

[a_c_green]

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@chapeau-noir wrote:
Many post offices now have two pick ups a day - morning and afternoon - to take mail to the local sort center. If your post office is more than 50 miles from the local sorting center, they will not be picking up the mail in the afternoon, just the morning.

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Our town (population a little over 28,000) used to have two trucks collect from the post office each day: one mid-afternoon and the other early evening. Ever since either Covid or a contract dispute (depending on who you ask at the PO), the earlier truck was eliminated and it's now the evening truck only.

I liked getting stuff out in the morning because I knew it would be collected and going through the sort facility by late afternoon, which means it would be on its way out of the Chicago area to [wherever] overnight. The evening truck wouldn't reach the sort facility until after midnight (I'm not sure if it had exactly the same route as the earlier one), so packages wouldn't leave the Chicago area until later the next day.

Still, if we're going to have just one truck collection, I'd rather have it be in the evening, so everything mailed that day will actually be in the mailstream that day, and not languishing overnight in the local post office for a truck that won't be there until the next day (or Monday).

[gator08041971]

Our Regional is about 200 miles or so away with an intermediate center about 100 miles away.   They make a pickup for mail incoming early in the morning, and a run to take collected mail out late afternoon.  So that IS two trips.  If I don't get an item on that truck for the outgoing mail, it won't go out till the following day at the same time.   However our mail carrier meets with the carrier from the smaller center and they do a mail transfer somewhere in the middle.  That includes all the other post offices in the same area.  This happens every morning and every afternoon.

In rare cases, there is no transfer if the bridge is closed for weather. (Mackinac Bridge, MI)

I don't think that will change for us, but I can get why it would for some situations, especially if they are sending out mail twice a day.  We are in fact only sending once per day, and have been a long time.  I guess its just different for our area.

We also still have Saturday post office service, but only from 10-11:30.

[chapeau-noir]

I'm used to not having Priority Mail Express delivery at our local PO (too far from the processing center). We'll continue to have the second pickup, though, as we're only about 36 miles from the local sorting center, but TBH, I never counted on it. 

[bandrhome]

So glad I live a few miles from a major PO sort center! Ole school one since the 70's. All the smaller ones route to it.

I can drop packages 24 hours a day.(well ones that fit in the bin box) They empty it until 7 pm Mon-Saturday.

Im actually a few miles from the PO, UPS and Fedex. The UPS is a major sort center as well. Can only drop off till 11 am Mon-Fri though. Rest has to be a pickup or a UPS store.

[slippinjimmy]

They won't have the late pick up but you can still get an Acceptance scan at the local Post Office if that matters. I know that some P.O.'s are not so good on the scanning and rely on the Processing Facility to do that. If that is true for anyone, they need to use Scan sheets and/or put pressure on their local Postmaster to change their ways.

[gator08041971]

I make sure my packages are scanned when dropped off, and if they collect from my mailbox, the driver is pretty good about scanning them when taking them out of the box.

I actually educated our postmaster at our office about making sure my packages get scanned, since eBay relies on that to make sure I'm fulfilling my commitments with regard to shipments.

To date, I have never been pinched for not shipping on time.  I was looking at defects the other day, either all 0s or 100%.   And 2 returns out of 165 sales in the past year.  Though I can't pull up any data on those for some reason.

Yes, I'm a small seller, but I sell pretty regularly.  Had 4 yesterday, which was abnormal, but I wasn't complaining.  But I average a couple sales a week.  This isn't my main gig.

[lakefor94]

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@oaktoncardinal wrote:

Yup, this has been the reality here in Virginia since mid-2023 (I believe we were the first area to change to the new routine).  USPS used to run a pick-up/drop-off mail run in the very early morning and ran again in the evening to pick-up mail collected that day and drop-off additional mail.  USPS decided that with the inflation we were experiencing in the previous administration that this was unsustainable and that costs were undeniably climbing quickly.  They scaled back to one run per day.  Guess what.  It's okay.  When I post a letter or package it is picked up from my mailbox as normal and waits overnight at the post office to make the trip to our Mail Distribution facility in Richmond VA.  It adds roughly a 12 hour delay in the progression of the mail sorting.  It cuts the costs of moving the mail for this process by 50%, a laudable cost savings.  Personally I am fine with this new processing schedule.  We need to embrace change to keep costs down.  Everyone seems to complain when postal rates increase and rightly so but we also need to embrace and encourage cost savings.  It did take a minute to wrap my head around the new schedule but really, it's okay... and I am very happy that the USPS is looking for more ways in which to save (all of us) money.

Oh, and let me tell you this.  All of my local post offices are closed on Saturday.  Closed ALL DAY on Saturday.  That was done in the 2009-2016 time frame.  My post offices close at 4.30 during the week and you know why?  Because I live in a rural area.

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Rural here as well. Only one of the 2 post offices I use are open on Saturday.  Both used to be open on Saturday,  but that changed a year or so ago.

Not saying I frequent any post offices other than a rare occasion. 

[kalyoth]

There is a shipment from each local branch to the regional processing sort center for USPS normally twice a day: once in Am & another in PM. They are eliminating one of those dispatch for routes 50+ miles away from that regional facility.