For days, Amy Gholson tracked a shipment of baby turkeys she ordered from an Ohio hatchery. She kept tabs online as the birds began the more than 500-mile trip to the Gholson home near St. Charles, Missouri, via the U.S. Postal Service.
The ten birds needed to arrive in two days to ensure they’d survive the trip. It was late March and temperatures were still low, making the speed of the delivery more crucial than usual. But the baby turkeys, or poults, hadn’t even left Ohio when progress halted.
“I was going to be able to watch these babies digitally, basically, and they went to the Cleveland distribution warehouse and they stayed there and stayed there,” Gholson said.
Postal Service delays have become more persistent in the years following the pandemic and a new 10-year plan put in place by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy aimed at ending billions of dollars a year in losses. Slowdowns in delivery are integral to the plan.
For days, the poults Gholson ordered remained at the Cleveland warehouse. By the time the shipment arrived, three days overdue, she knew what to expect inside the package marked “live birds.”
“I had already assumed they were dead. Our beloved mail lady just set a box of dead birds outside of our garage,” Gholson said. “I got home. I mean, you know what the situation was. A silent box is a dead box.”
Gholson said inside the package, the fledgling turkeys were as “stiff as rocks.”
