Government affairs
Talking Points: Door Delivery
Customers and small businesses overwhelmingly prefer door delivery over cluster boxes.
- The USPS currently allows patrons to convert to cluster boxes, but few customers want them. The GAO recently found less than one percent of businesses and only 0.1 percent of residential customers opted for cluster box delivery.
- Although the USPS has been soliciting customers to convert to cluster boxes, postal regulations make it very clear: customers and property owners have the right to retain their existing mode of mail delivery.
Letter carriers are the eyes and ears in the communities they serve.
- Many letter carriers are the only contact home-bound patrons have, frequently responding to accidents and illness. Letter carriers even participate in a voluntary program to help monitor the well-being of elderly and disabled mail patrons.
- Due to the nature of letter carriers’ jobs, many are often the first to arrive at the scene of a crisis, or even recognize that there is one.
- The Cities’ Readiness Initiative prepares letter carriers to deliver lifesaving drugs to residents during a biological attack.
Quality service is extremely important to maintaining USPS revenue.
- Reducing levels of service can have an immediate impact on revenue and threaten viability of many small businesses.
- If the levels of service were slashed, customers would likely respond by reducing their use of the Postal Service.
- The expected drop in revenue would actually cause the Postal Service to lose more money than it would save.