Mail was delivered twice today

[kdonnel]

I certainly am not an expert in mail delivery but it really seems inefficient to go to every home on a route twice in a day.

Due to weather the mail did not run yesterday.

Today at 8:30am the mail was delivered and based on my Informed Delivery email it was mail that should have been delivered Wednesday.

At 1:30pm the mail was delivered again and based on the Informed Delivery email it was mail that should be delivered today.

I can only assume it was deemed easier to run the route twice rather than load the truck with both days mail? Or save today's mail to be merged in with tomorrow's mail and delivered at the same time tomorrow?

 

[china mom]

More often that you would think I get two USPS deliveries, one mail and one packages. Sometimes both mail and packages are on the same truck/same time, sometimes it is different trucks 30-60 minutes apart. It is not weather related. It seems like it is not the most efficient way of doing it but I am sure hey have their reasons.

 

[Imzadi]

Sounds like yesterday's mail was already sorted and probably they didn't want to have to take it out of the trucks and put it through the sorting machines with today's mail and put it all on the trucks. For them, it was more efficient (and less thinking) to just go through one bag, deliver it, and when done, do the other bag, than to sit in the truck and hand sort from both bags.

 

[sam_gordon]

Without knowing the process at the sorting center, it's hard to judge whether two deliveries is more efficient or not. It sounds like "not" on the surface, I agree, but was mail being sorted for the second run while the first one was in process? What's your normal delivery time?

 

[kdonnel]

What's your normal delivery time?

Normally mail comes sometime around 11am to noon.

So the first delivery was before by a few hours and the second was about the same amount of time after.

 

[sam_gordon]

Normally mail comes sometime around 11am to noon.

So the first delivery was before by a few hours and the second was about the same amount of time after.

Just a total theory, with nothing to back it up...

Assuming Wednesday's mail was (at least mostly) sorted and ready to go... they could either have the drivers sit and wait while Thursday's mail was sorted, or go send Wednesday's mail (which might help someone that was waiting for something to be delivered), and then come back and pick up Thursday's.

Again, not knowing how the sorting process works, we can just speculate.

 

[TippyThomas]

I have a friend who is a rural mail carrier and they said they would struggle to put 2 days worth of mail in their vehicle.

 

[tvguy]

I have a friend who is a rural mail carrier and they said they would struggle to put 2 days worth of mail in their vehicle.

That's interesting. How do they deal with days like Tuesday of this week? Monday was a holiday so Tuesday they had to deliver the mail that would have been delivered Monday, plus Tuesday's mail.

 

[tvguy]

Sounds like yesterday's mail was already sorted and probably they didn't want to have to take it out of the trucks and put it through the sorting machines with today's mail and put it all on the trucks. For them, it was more efficient (and less thinking) to just go through one bag, deliver it, and when done, do the other bag, than to sit in the truck and hand sort from both bags.

Not a letter carrier but this makes sense to me.

 

[TippyThomas]

That's interesting. How do they deal with days like Tuesday of this week? Monday was a holiday so Tuesday they had to deliver the mail that would have been delivered Monday, plus Tuesday's mail.

I'm not sure to be honest. I'll ask them and get back to you when they let me know.

Edit: pretty sure it had to do with the sorting issue mentioned above. They have only so much room for the totes that holds regular mail as well as all the packages. Pretty sure all the totes and packages would be too much for one vehicle.

 

[CAPSLOCK]

How do they deal with days like Tuesday of this week? Monday was a holiday

All the mail that arrived Sat/Sun/Mon would be sorted & loaded at the same time.
It's not a matter of quantity per se, it's the difficulty/inefficiency of unloading the trucks and re-sorting in a new batch.

Plus with the holiday, a lot less "new" stuff would have come in, since it wasn't collected Monday. So it's not really double the mail of a normal day.

 

[tvguy]

Edit: pretty sure it had to do with the sorting issue mentioned above. They have only so much room for the totes that holds regular mail as well as all the packages. Pretty sure all the totes and packages would be too much for one vehicle.

That makes sense. Monday and Tuesdays deliveries likely were sorted all at once.

 

[_19disnA]

Could be that the trucks were already loaded and ready for delivery when it got cancelled due to inclement weather. My guess is those trucks went out a day late and then the process starts over to prepare the next day's trucks. Unloading a truck that was already to go in order to add in the 2nd day's mail is probably less efficient.

 

[easyas123]

I have a friend who is a rural mail carrier and they said they would struggle to put 2 days worth of mail in their vehicle.

In our area it’s not uncommon for my local PO to ring our office to see if we can come pick up our packages, which we are happy to do. They can’t fit them all in the mail truck- we are in a rural area as well and I feel for the carriers- they struggle to fill the spots and they are run ragged and it’s not uncommon to see our carrier helping out the next PO over.

 

[cvjw]

We had snow a couple weeks ago and no mail delivery for 2 days. When the roads were safe for the mail truck, they delivered all our mail at once. Metro atlanta.

 

[seashoreCM]

Perhaps mail delivery began normally yesterday and was called off midday eue to the storm. Next day (today) some trucks that did not finish their routes yesterday began today finishing those routes, making your "first" delivery.. Due to some disorganization a different truck got loaded with the entire route with your street, did it, and made your "second" delivery. Only a few streets got two deliveries.

 

[focusondisney]

I have informed delivery too, I’m just south of Buffalo, you know…the snow capital of the world according to comedians. There are a few days every winter that the mail can’t get delivered. It’s happened twice in the last 2 weeks. We’ve never had double deliveries, both days eventually get delivered at the same time. I have family in 6 different suburbs & another in a rural area an hour away, as well as friends in a few other towns. None of them have ever mentioned 2 deliveries either. One sister is retired from the PO. I’ll have to ask her if she’s ever seen that happen here.

 

[tvguy]

In our area it’s not uncommon for my local PO to ring our office to see if we can come pick up our packages, which we are happy to do. They can’t fit them all in the mail truck- we are in a rural area as well and I feel for the carriers- they struggle to fill the spots and they are run ragged and it’s not uncommon to see our carrier helping out the next PO over.

Not USPS, but my mom's baby sister lived in a rural area. Mom would send Christmas gifts via UPS and UPS would call her sister and say the weather was too bad for them to deliver a package and that she had to come get it. Their depot was 30 miles away, via a snow covered, mostly unpaved road. My mom wrote a letter to UPS, She got a refund of her shipping fees and that local UPS office never again called, packages were delivered to the door step.

 

[amcnj]

Interesting. I have had days with no mail delivery due to weather related conditions, but never had a double delivery afterwards. Just one extra-big delivery followed. But it has been a while so I wonder if things have changed.

I do remember when I was younger my mother was talking with her sister and mentioned that the regular mail delivery used to be twice a day. That was before my time though.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Some of this is going to be based on the post office system you have in your direct area as in how many processing facilities do you have. We have multiple in my metro and how many deliveries can depend on that aspect.

Most of the time if we get double deliveries it's a combo of regular mail and packages. I'm sure the intent is to deliver the package with the mail but it's not always happening especially if the package went through a different processing facility before coming to my assigned local post office.

I'm sure that would have been the case on my most recent Amazon order from 10 days ago. It technically was shipped from Oklahoma to my metro through UPS but as a UPS SurePost which is where USPS does the very last part and actually delivers it to your house. Right at that exact time it was announced that UPS was discontinuing their USPS partnership and instead UPS would be the ones delivering it and they were. That package was sent to a UPS facility in a neighboring city so had the USPS partnership still been in place it would have then had to be sent to my assigned post office in my city in order to then be delivered to me. Technically it was delivered a day earlier than Amazon stated but had the delivery date been set as the day it actually got delivered it would have been sent to my assigned post office too late to make it for the normal mail delivery and a subsequent delivery by a post office truck would have occurred.

Around Christmastime it's not unusual for us to see more than one mail truck come around to deliver. It's often packages and regular mail but not always, things like letters get delivered even after regular mail. It's just them trying to keep up with the volume.

As for weather with winter storm Blair our mail in the metro was fairly messed up for a couple of days. Most people didn't get mail delivery for a couple of days in part due to the airport shutting down for a portion of a day, shutting down completely for the next day and then sluggish the following day. It was a lot of snow and mail wasn't likely to make it to the side streets until they got plowed which took a while. In addition even having cluster mailboxes presented an issue because you take 12 inches of snow then more snow piled up against the street due to the snow plow and somebody has to make sure it's kept clear. Our cluster mailbox is more or less on the border between our property and our neighbors property and we both unofficially ensure it's kept clear, it's usually whoever is out there first taking care of their own driveway and their portion of the side walk. For homes, like my mom's, that still have mailboxes attached to the house...well you probably weren't getting any mail with Blair for a week if you didn't ensure your driveway and steps to your door were cleared, heck even longer perhaps.