My experience with the postal service has been that it really depends on the situation in your local post office. I've lived places where I had zero problems with my mail for years, and other places where I had constant problems. It seems to be totally independent of whatever upper administration is in charge and more to do with if the local postmaster is any good at their job The worst ones in my experience were small towns in NY. I've been getting very good reliable service where I currently live in WV.
My personal experience is rather different while the local postmaster (mistress) does make a difference.
Here's an example... When I bought this house I inherited a PO Box and with the PO just across the street this was not much of a hassle. And as I shared before I used to get my newspaper in my PO box before I would have received delivery to a mail box. But that isn't the story about how local personnel can affect service. Over the years I had a couple gotcha's caused by not receiving mail delivered to my physical address. Years ago I received a notice that my house/property was being auctioned to satisfy unpaid taxes. At the time we were being taxed separately by the town and the county. I was paying the one tax bill that was getting delivered to my PO Box, unaware that there was a second tax bill that wasn't getting paid. Thankfully the auction notice was delivered into my PO Box and I responded immediately. I visited the tax collector's office and requested that they use my actual mail address.
Years later I had another glitch. For years my house insurance bills were addressed to my street address, and paid until a new postmaster decided to return the bill to the sender as undeliverable. I did receive the notice that they were cancelling my house insurance for non-payment, and got that corrected.
Over a year ago I Installed a proper mail box in front of my house and for the last year I have been diligently trying to correct mail addressed to my old PO Box address. I have also made a point of being friendly with the postmaster.
Here's an anecdote that I found amusing I recently changed the official address for my Social Security account. I was unhappy to almost immediately get a mailing from Soc Sec but it was just them checking with me to confirm that I was who changed the address (a good thing). But I still received mail at the old address a few times since then. I was having a friendly conversation with my postmaster explaining the recent brouhaha about DEI in government. When I complained to her about still getting Social Security mail to my PO box, she joked that it must be one of those DEI workers.
She is not DEI although tagging a couple woke boxes (black, woman, etc).
Back on topic I have identified my problem as occurring one level upstream at the regional sorting center in Jackson (maybe 50 miles away). The pattern of flaky deliveries are not suggestive of simple capacity overload but random with multiple papers showing up some days, and random papers sometimes over a week late. It looks like today is another swing and a miss so 0 for 3 since restarting my subscription
JR
PS: One side effect I have read 230 pages of the Harari "Nexus" book (about halfway thru), during the time I used to be reading my missing daily newspapers.
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