In July 2023 the first Regional Processing & Distribution Center opened in Richmond, Virginia. The launch ran into problems, and mail delays have plagued the region for months. The Postal Service said it would learn from its mistakes and the next RPDC rollouts would go more smoothly. Another RPDC opened a few weeks ago in Atlanta. The mail delays have been worse than in Richmond, much worse.
There was an open house celebrating the new Atlanta RPDC in Palmetto during the week of February 21. That same week, service performance in the Georgia district began to drop, and it just kept dropping. During the second week of March, on-time scores had fallen to 25 percent. Here’s a chart showing on-time scores for First Class mail since the beginning of the year. (The data come from the USPS Service Performance Dashboard.)