As we are about the break for the long holiday weekend, I wanted to post a notation regarding the situation with USPS. As of today there are reports of millions of parcels that are being delayed due to both overwhelming capacity shortages, and workforce losses due to the pandemic. Yesterday the USPS reported that nearly 20,000 postal workers are currently out due to COVID. This has created a historic backlog at USPS facilities around the country.
We can't even get Priority Mail parcels across town inside our own zip code right now in less than 5 or 6 days. Our regular postal carrier says the local PO here is so jammed they don't think they will be able to get out from under for weeks. This is the story in most of the rest of the county as well.
Needless to say a lot of parcels are going to be late this year.
If you have been trying to track a package from our facility, it is only showing 'acceptance' but no other scan data, rest assured it definitely went into the postal system. None of these parcels are being scanned normally. Some parcels are not being scanned at all between shipment and delivery. We currently have several hundred USPS economy parcels in limbo with many being up to several weeks in transit that have not yet been delivered, some not yet being sorted. USPS is so loaded down all of these parcels are sitting in trailers at the local or regional sort hubs waiting their turn for routing. Economy shipments have been de-prioritized over priority shipments, and even those are way behind. Some early economy shipments from around the Black Friday time frame clearly went into trailers to wait for sort capacity to become available, but it never did. We have in-bounds from vendors that shipped USPS economy mid-Nov that still haven't arrived, and it's clear some of these 10-14 day economy packages may take up to 2 months to be delivered.
But I think most of these parcels will finally begin to move after Christmas as capacity becomes available again. I know the folks at USPS are working very hard. For the rest of us, we will just have to be patient and wait for them to clear up this historic backlog. For new orders on the store, think about choosing our UPS or FedEx Ground options for shipping unless your not concerned about delays in transit. In any case, there is nothing we can do about the USPS issues at this point, and I sincerely apologize to anyone who felt like they ordered early enough but still did not get their order before Christmas. We worked very hard to get everyone's order shipped as quickly as possible and it's disappointing to us that some of those parcels still may not arrive on time.
But rest assured, those Anime parcels will arrive soon enough, and we'll look back on all this someday and laugh and remember when the pandemic reminded us all that Christmas is about more than just getting stuff in the mail.
We wish all of you a safe and Merry Christmas. We'll see you back on Monday!
