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POST FALLS — Pat Thyssen said her U.S. Postal Service mail delivery has been extremely problematic for the past several weeks.

“All of my neighbors are having issues,” said Thyssen, a Post Falls resident for 22 years. “We’ve never dealt with this before.”

After their longtime carrier retired at Christmas, Thyssen and her neighbors noticed frequently inconsistent delivery times. They'd sometimes receive abnormally large batches of mail after receiving none for several days, Thyssen said.

Thyssen’s complaints don’t stop there.

Thyssen, who’d never had issues getting her packages delivered, received written notice that a package she'd been waiting for was too large to be delivered. She was instructed to go to the Post Falls Post Office at 405 N. Greensferry Road and pick up her package inside.

Thyssen arrived at the Post Office Saturday morning at 11 and there were about 40 people waiting in line, she said. Many of them were holding the same package pick-up notice she had.

“They are so overwhelmed,” Thyssen said. “I got up to the front of the line and the lady said they had 10,000 packages sitting in the back that they have to sort through.”

Sometimes the packages can be found, and sometimes they can’t, Thyssen was told.

The Postal Service employee said Thyssen's package was out with a carrier and she could expect delivery Saturday. Arriving home, Thyssen spoke directly with her mail carrier, who said the package was not on the truck.

Further, the carrier said there wasn’t room for all of the packages needing delivery and that it was not the carrier's fault, Thyssen said.

So Monday, Thyssen returned to the Post Office and after waiting in line again, retrieved her package.

A man she stood next to in line told Thyssen that his wife, along with 12 other postal employees in Post Falls, had recently quit. The Press couldn't confirm that statement despite several attempts to contact a local postal spokesperson.

“I understand that the world is screwed up right now,” Thyssen told The Press. “But this is supposed to be a government-funded agency and should have its act together.”

In a semiannual report from Tammy Whitcomb, Acting Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service, performance issues were acknowledged.

“For example, we looked at service performance of single-piece First-Class mail in 17 districts,” Whitcomb said in a September 2021 report to Congress. “We found service was impacted due to a variety of problems, including insufficient operating capacity to handle the increase in parcels and an inadequate number of employees to run the machines.”

The USPS also “conducted an audit on the service performance of all mail across the country over an 18-month period,” according to Whitcomb’s statement.

“Using postal data, we identified the most common root causes behind the service failures,” Whitcomb said. “These included insufficient capacity, staffing shortages, routing errors, and mail not being fully sorted when it arrived at the delivery unit.”

A December news release issued by the Postal Service states that the “postal network continues to run smoothly nationwide,” and the average mail delivery time stands at 2.7 days.

Ernie Swanson, an Idaho contact for the U.S. Postal Service based in Seattle, responded to the Post Falls delivery issues.

“Portland District Manager Bill Schwartz says he expects the Post Falls Post Office to be current as of Tuesday,” Swanson said. “He says there have been staffing issues at that office along with an unusually high volume of parcels.

“Employees from other nearby post offices are being sent to Post Falls to assist and to keep the office current. Members of senior postal management are also assisting at Post Falls.”

Statistics show that the U.S. Postal Service handled about 128.86 billion units of mail during 2021. According to Postalhiringcenters.com, the U.S. Postal Service is hiring in all zip codes. Starting pay is about $21 per hour; the average annual salary is $72,320. They onboard about 1,500 new hires weekly.