Leading up to the holidays and even after, readers called the Star Tribune again and again with one question: What’s going on with the mail?
People were going days, even more than a week, without getting delivery late last year. Some Minnesotans in Congress started pushing for answers from the very top of the U.S. Postal Service.
Meanwhile, Minnesotans like Bobbi Palmiter of Richfield did their own digging, starting with their carriers and the clerks they routinely see in their local post office branches.
“They all mentioned staffing,” Palmiter told me earlier this month.
It’s always been a hard place to work. The postal system is a perpetual motion machine. It’s the ocean. A wave lands, and the next one is right behind. It takes exceptional dedication to work in that environment.
During the pandemic, postal loads increased because more people ordered food and other products for home delivery. Now, with the retirements of baby boomers and other constraints in the labor force, an already tough place to work is having an even tougher time finding workers.