Wednesday, January 27, 2021

USPS Shipping Notice - Update

There was some updated information that came out last week regarding the backlog situation at USPS. Higher level officials at several large sorting centers have admitted that there is still a very large backlog of holiday season mail parcels at many post offices, and that they are prioritizing new mail for processing and digging into the December backlogs as time and capacity permits. This means that new parcels shipped via USPS are being delivered more or less on time, with some spotty delays at post offices (like ours) that are still operating at above capacity. Orders that remain unsorted from back in December may take several more weeks to get sorted out and routed for delivery. My guess is that when the shipping crush hit mid-December, post offices and sorting centers dealt with it by just throwing the extra mail into trailers where much of it has stayed since then waiting for sort. So I have to continue to ask folks to be patient for both old and new postal shipments, especially if their tracking is showing no movement for long periods of time at a particular post office or sort facility.

The pandemic has shifted so much purchasing capacity online so quickly that it has created all kinds of logistics issues across the country. I was told by a logistics manager at a big trucking company we work with this week that truck freight is queing across the country and that there are currently 6 trailers of freight for every truck driver. Before the pandemic we were using two primary distribution sources to bring in new manga. Now we are using five sources. Unfortunately for Anime Home Video product the supply chain is based on single points of source depending on who-ever the studios use to distribute the product to market, and whatever stocking and shipping methods those sources use, and this varies widely for each company.

It's keeping us on our toes getting materials into our warehouse, but so far we're doing OK. :-)

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