As Christmas approaches, the Buena Vista branch of the U.S. Postal Service is already well into its busiest season, delivering packages late into the night.
When asked what locals can do to help BV’s drastically understaffed Post Office do their jobs efficiently, postmaster Kari Trail answered without hesitation: “Check your mail. We have shelves and shelves of packages that sit for weeks if not months because people don’t come to pick their mail up. Same with their P.O. boxes – they’re overflowing.”
Helping postal employees cycle those packages out makes the back room of the building on Brookdale Avenue less congested and makes it easier to find packages, she said.
“Out on the routes, the biggest thing that I can ask – that I would beg for, almost – is to please put house numbers on your house and your mailbox,” Trail said. “That is a must: If we want to deliver accurately and efficiently, we need to know where you live. In particular, numbers that are clearly visible from the road at night.”
Mondays are the busiest day for the Post Office because they do not deliver on Sundays, with a typical volume of over 3,000 packages. On other days, the volume is lower, but it’s not low.
“Last year (Dec. 5), we had 1,450 packages, so I’m guessing it’s going to be around the same, if not a little higher. And it’s me and three people delivering it. That’s upwards of 500, 600 packages per person per day. Fourteen-to-sixteen-hour days. Generally by the end of the day when it gets dark so early it is very hard to find homes,” Trail said. “I’ve worked in several offices and this is the highest volume I’ve seen with the least amount of employees to carry that volume.”
The Post Office in Salida hosted a joint hiring event on Saturday, Dec. 7, as that office is having similar staffing issues, “although not as drastic as here.”
The volume of mail that the city of 5,900 people receives is also “significantly lighter” than in Buena Vista, she said.
Trail said that, ideally, the Post Office would have six carriers, six rural carrier associates and two assistant rural carriers.
“So, I would need 12 people to be fully staffed,” Trail said. “I have four clerks, five including (a temporary holiday clerk) and I have one carrier that actually works for me.”
The other carriers are here on a detail from Colorado Springs that ends at the end of December.
Deadlines for Christmas shipping
Shipping deadlines to get your mail to its destination by Christmas are:
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Dec. 18 for Ground Advantage or First Class
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Dec. 19 for Priority Mail; Dec. 21 for Priority Express.
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Dec. 9 for international mail for First Class/Priority Mail, Dec. 16 for Express.
Local shipping services ready to support holiday rush
Just north of Ace Hardware at 29805 Highway 24, Alison Peticolas, Natalie Lewis and Karen Howlett at Mailboxes hope that they can help ease some of the load on the Post Office by offering a third-party way to send and receive mail.
“In addition to everything that they do, we have printing, we package packages for people, we ship UPS and FedEx,” Lewis said.
You can sign up for a private mailbox at Mailboxes, a service just for packages or “you can have individual packages sent to us,” Peticolas said.
“So if you were to come in and say, ‘I’m getting a really important package,’ we would take your name and your email and put it in our system and when that package came, you would get a text and an email from us. … You pay $3 a package for us to receive it and then $1 per day for storage if it keeps staying here,” Peticolas said. “One of the advantages of getting packages here is that it doesn’t matter if the package is going UPS or the Post Office, both UPS and the Post Office or both UPS and Fed Ex. It’s going to land here because all three of them deliver here.”
Mailboxes also expects business to be “solid” between now and Christmas – 2.5 times any other month, Lewis said.
The Holiday season mail rush is “federally overwhelming, not to mention that we locally do not have anywhere near the resources,” Peticolas said. “Whatever we can do to help balance out serving a community that is much bigger than what our post office can handle.”
