Amazon.com provided the U.S. Postal Service in Cheyenne with a forecast of how many packages were incoming this past weekend, a spokeswoman for the company has told Cowboy State Daily.
Coupled with USPS staff shortages, an influx of packages forced the closure of three post offices in Cheyenne to the public.
A perception that Amazon just dumped more than 13,000 packages in Cheyenne without warning isn’t true, the online retail giant says.
“As one of our third-party delivery partners, we are in touch with USPS regularly, and we give the Cheyenne Post Office a forecast of the number of packages they would be receiving from us over the weekend,” Amazon spokeswoman Alisa Carroll told Cowboy State Daily in a prepared statement.
“We rely on third-party delivery partners like USPS to help deliver packages to our customers and are grateful they were able to assist us during the recent snowstorm,” she said.
Asked how many packages were in the forecast to the Postal Service, Carroll said in a subsequent email, “It was not an unusual amount of packages, and on par with what we have delivered to that PO before.”
Carroll refused to make an on-the-record comment responding to a statement by a Cheyenne postal worker indicating Amazon would not be making doorstep deliveries in Wyoming until May 1.