Rocky Mount neighborhood sees delay in mail deliveries as USPS faces issues with holidays looming

WRAL News took those concerns to USPS, which says it’s facing a number of issues heading into the holiday season.

“Not had any mail, that’s what it’s been,” Louis Best said.” Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, nothing.”

Louis Best is fed up: starting on October 8, Best said his Rocky Mount neighborhood on Bishop Road near North Carolina Wesleyan College didn’t get any mail delivered for the next seven straight days.

“I don’t have anything else to do, so I said, ‘Let me investigate,’” Best said. “This is the whole neighborhood, I went around the corner and talked to my other neighbors, and they were wondering what it is.”

Best said he eventually got the phone number for the post office carrier annex in Rocky Mount to ask where his mail was, but he was hung up on each time he called.

“I called back again, I’m a persistent old fella,” Best said. “He finally got around to saying, ‘We don’t have enough carriers to bring the mail.’”

“I said do what?” Best continued.

Best said the post office in Rocky Mount told him that a driver shortage was keeping them from bringing the mail, an issue the retired Vietnam veteran had never experienced before.

“They got problems? Everybody’s got problems, with inflation gas is up, groceries is up, everything’s up,” Best said. “But the mail’s supposed to still come when it’s supposed to come, period.”

WRAL News went to the annex to ask whether they were having a driver shortage in Rocky Mount, and they directed us to the postal service’s statewide office in Charlotte.

“This has been an extraordinary year of unprecedented challenges given the COVID-19 pandemic,” a spokesperson for USPS told WRAL News. “As a result, staffing was occasionally impacted in some areas, including Rocky Mount.”

“The Postal Service has contended with huge increases in package volume coupled with equally dramatic declines in letter mail,” the statement continued. “The nation’s logistics supply chain has been upended by surging demand combined with disruptions—some extremely serious—to the surface and air transport industries.”

To account for those setbacks as the holidays approached, the spokesperson for the postal service said the agency was in the process of hiring 40,000 additional workers to help manage the peak shipping season, and that the postal service was prepared to deliver for the holidays.

After his mail finally came on Friday night, Louis Best hoped the company’s work would pay off.

“If they bring the mail that’s fine, but don’t go a whole week and don’t say nothing to anybody,” Best said.

Along with those 40,000 employees being hired for the holidays, the postal service said it would open new package sorting annexes across the country – including in North Carolina – to deal with the surge in holiday shipping.