Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412130030
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Around the nation in recent months, the mail has gone awry.
In Chicago and Washington, D.C., mail carriers stole pouches of mail, and in Southern Maryland and Northern Virginia hundreds of thousands of pieces of unprocessed mail were found stockpiled in trailers.
In response, an angry Congress has hauled postal officials in for hearings; 1,600 postal customer advisory councils have gotten active, and the U.S. Postal Service is rethinking decisions to downsize.
Despite all the hoopla, Roanoke's mail service appears to be relatively unscathed. Almost nine times out of 10, customers get what they pay for when they buy a 29-cent stamp, according to a spot check by the Roanoke Times & World-News.
On Oct. 25, reporters mailed 200 postcards from 20 mailboxes scattered through Roanoke's overnight service area, as defined by Postmaster Billy Martin. The test included Blacksburg, Richmond, Christiansburg, Catawba, Vinton, Salem, Roanoke and some other areas. Half the cards were computer-labeled, half were handwritten. All of the cards were destined for a Southwest Roanoke apartment.
The overnight-delivery rate was 87 percent: 175 cards arrived on time. As for the other 25 cards, 19 were delivered one day late; one gnarled and blackened postcard was two days tardy; and four cards straggled in three days off schedule.
One card mailed from a drop box at Staunton and 10th Street in Northwest Roanoke is still missing.
The score puts Roanoke five points above the national average reported earlier this year. But it's 10 points below the 97 percent overnight-delivery rate the post office boasts from its own tests, conducted Oct. 15 through Nov. 11.
Martin isn't satisfied.
"We're not happy with 87 percent. We want to be 100 percent," he said.
Once informed of the results, Martin said he erred when including Richmond in Roanoke's overnight-service area. Richmond-bound mail from Roanoke should be delivered overnight, but not mail traveling the other way, he said.
With Richmond removed from the results, the overnight-delivery rate climbs to 92 percent. That's 10 points higher than the national average and far above the sluggish 62 percent on-time rate in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., the nation's worst.
Martin also cited surveys showing that 90 percent of Roanoke region customers gave their mail service a thumbs up, compared to a national average of 85 percent.
But that doesn't mean Roanoke's mail system doesn't get its share of complaints - it does. The system just doesn't track those numbers.
"There isn't a set cut-and-dried method, but we want people to be able to come up to us," said Mary Rose Patton, customer relations coordinator. "People complain by letter, by phone and our carriers get stopped on the street. ... We don't keep count of the number."
They don't track the success rate of their tracers or the number of tracers filed either, Patton said. Tracers, which take about two weeks, can be put on all domestic mail by the sender 10 days after it is missing. Tracer results may tell what went wrong with the process, but they don't usually produce the missing mail.
A tracer was put on the RT&WN's missing postcard on Nov. 22, but nothing has turned up. And chances are nothing will.
Lost mail is the bane of the postal system.
"If you could answer [where lost mail goes], we'd hire you," said Don Kelly, manager of in-plant support at the processing and distribution center.
Mail gets lost for many reasons: sometimes ink comes off labels or labels come off, other times mail is misaddressed or letters get stuck together.
Martin also had no explanation for why in several cases in the test, nine of 10 postcards successfully reached their destination in one day and the remaining card arrived a day or two late.
Patton, however, offered that once the mail comes into the distribution center, it is intermingled. It doesn't matter whether the cards were mailed at the same time from the same box. Any one of them could get separated from the original group and wind up delayed.
But the bottom line, Martin said, is all of them "should get there the next day."
The crux of the procedure is in Roanoke's mail processing and distribution center on Rutherford Avenue Northeast.
If everything is done correctly, the sorted mail goes to the destination city's post office for their carriers to deliver to the intended receivers.
Despite the system's safeguards, this doesn't always happen.
Automation may save money - it costs $32 to work 1,000 letters manually compared to $2.30 to work the same number with automated equipment - but it isn't infallible.
The belts that power these high-speed machines can damage the mail - especially postcards and envelopes that aren't completely flat.
"If the mail gets damaged, we try to attach a letter to it, explaining what happened, and if something comes out of it, we'll hold it in claims," Martin said.
Also, mistakes happen.
Sometimes the wrong bar code gets sprayed on letters or operators of the machines sorting the handwritten letters miss-key the three-digit code on the mail . In either case, the result is delayed mail.
Operators are required to be 95 percent accurate. But that still means in one hour an operator can misdirect 135 letters without getting in trouble. With two eight-hour shifts and six operators per shift, that's potentially 12,000 misdirected letters daily in Roanoke alone.
During the holiday season, it will be the same old system, just more mail to handle - about 700,000 additional pieces a day.
"You don't pay less than 29 cents for a stamp during Christmas, so you don't expect less service. So, our service standards will be the same, but we do advise that you mail early," Kelly said.
The volume will rise mostly in first-class mail with holiday greeting cards. Because most of these cards are handwritten, clerks who work the sorting machines will bear the bulk of the burden.
The Christmas rush means 12-hour workdays and six-day workweeks for the clerks, said Kelly. He anticipates the system's peak volume on Dec. 19.
But those long hours may increase the chance of error and delays in service.
\ Slow mail service is what keeps some courier and messenger services in business, and in Roanoke there is no dearth of such services.
Errandboy is one of about 10 area courier services.
Part of Errandboy's core business is picking up area companies' mail from the post office before carriers can deliver it.
"Regular mail comes out around 12 or 2 p.m., and companies want to get the mail earlier in the day so they can respond to it in a shorter period of time," said Ed St. Clair, Errandboy's owner. He performs this service for people in medical professions or catalog businesses.
Martin said he's working with carriers to get the mail delivered sooner, but meanwhile businesses like St. Clair's are growing as people's perceptions remain unchanged.
"We're trying to change the perception that we're some bureaucratic government agency that doesn't care," Martin said.
That distrust of the mail system buoys courier businesses.
With a courier service a company knows when the mail will arrive, said Dee Taylor, supervisor for Southwest Virginia at Clemons Courier Services Inc.
"More and more people are willing to pay more for us or Federal Express or airborne mail because once something is in the mail, you have no idea when it's going to get there. But if you pay us you know it'll get there," Taylor said.
\ Few people give much thought to the mail system beyond retrieving letters from their mailbox or dropping them in the neighborhood collection box.
But that collection box is just the beginning of a cycle that begins about 3 p.m. and continues until the wee morning hours.
First, the mail is collected by the carriers and taken back to their post office so it can be sorted.
Local mail, like a Blacksburg-to-Blacksburg letter, is sorted there. What's left is trucked to the Rutherford processing center where the miracle of Roanoke's mail processing occurs.
Each day there, 1.8 million pieces of mail arrive. They travel in bins, over conveyer belts, down mail waterfalls, through electronic readers and sorters and hundreds of hands and finally into trays - a system worthy of the famed cartoonist Rube Goldberg.
The technological octopus roars as the mail whizzes through it in a blur. First comes the Advanced Facer Canceller machine, which postmarks and sorts the mail into three types.
"This machine saves a step from a year ago because the other machine we had couldn't sort, so all of the mail went to the multiline reader," Don Kelly, manager of in-plant support at the processing and distribution center, said.
Now only mail that can be read by computer goes to the Multi-Line Optical Character Reader, which puts bar codes on the letters and sorts big-city mail by ZIP code at a rate of 32,000 letters an hour.
Mail that comes in with bar codes, like credit card bills, goes to the Bar Code Reader. It separates the mail by ZIP code. However, the machine is able to sort Hollins, Blacksburg and Salem-bound mail by the street address and put it in the order that the carrier distributes it.
Handwritten mail goes to Letter Sorting Machines, where operators read addresses at the astounding rate of 3,600 per hour. Operators, whose accuracy is checked every couple of days, can stop the machine, but they cannot slow down the letter-per-second pace.
Mail that cannot be sorted on the machine gets done the old-fashioned way: by hand.
"That's the end of the line," Kelly said. "Less than 5 percent of the mail is done manually."
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by CNB