LOOKING HARDER AT THOSE TERRIBLE FIRST-CLASS FLATS
Overall service performance continues to be mostly mediocre for First-Class letters, a train wreck for First-Class flats, and about the same for Marketing Mail - which is pretty good.
But, what about those flats? 13.5% on time? That’s terrible by any measure. We acknowledge it’s a small sample, about 14,000 pieces, but it tells a story.
About 8,500 of those pieces came out of Tulsa OK, destined for delivery points across the country. For those pieces, the fastest delivery time was 5 days, the slowest was 22 days (to Fresno, CA), and the median was about 7.5 days. 0.3% were on time. The only on-time pieces were to Guam and Alaska, where the standards are slow enough to consider them on time.
1,790 FC flats out of Kansas City, MO, did not fare any better – 0.0% on time, with 7 pieces taking an average of 42 days to deliver. The fastest were 5.0 days, the median about 7.5 days.
Personally, I would never mail anything with the tiniest bit of urgency as a First-Class flat. First-Class flats are broken. And political mail loves First-Class flats.
