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Hub city woman continues to experience delivery issues

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LAFAYETTE — Ordering online is made to be convenient, but when things aren't showing up on time, it can become a hassle. During the pandemic, companies like Fed-Ex, UPS, and USPS warned customers of delays due to high volume. All three companies said recent winter storms also caused issues, but have since stated that deliveries are back to normal.

A hub city woman tells KATC She continues to have problems getting her mail and packages. Julie Prejean said she's still opting to order as much as she can online, but not every package makes it to her door step.

"I've got five different instances of packages, I never got it," Prejean said.

She said some packages will show as "delivered"for several days before they finally reach her door step.

"I'm sitting right here. The phone never rang, no one came, the package didn't either. I got it two days later," Prejean commented.

Companies like UPS offer access point locations where people can pick up packages. Fed-Ex offers package pickup at its stores. Prejean says she does not believe a porch pirate is to blame, but is hopeful steps like these keep her from losing more money.

"I haven't experienced it yet," she added. "I do have a couple packages coming from Amazon, they're going to the holding station."

If you get a notification that a package was delivered but you can't find it, you should contact the delivery service and the retailer. For other helpful linksclick here.

We reached out to Fed-Ex, USPS, and UPS for comment on shipping delays. So far we've heard back from USPS and Fed-Ex:

The United States Postal Service processed and delivered a record number of holiday packages for the American people under some of the most difficult circumstances we’ve faced in the past century — specifically more than 1.1 billion packages were delivered this holiday season amidst a global pandemic.

Throughout the peak season, the Postal Service, along with the broader shipping sector, faced pressure on service performance across categories as it managed through a record of volume while also overcoming employee shortages due to the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases, winter storms in the Northeast, as well as ongoing capacity challenges with airlifts and trucking for moving historic volumes of mail.

To recover and stabilize operations, the Postmaster General and the Executive Leadership Team took a number of specific action steps to help address the issues. Those action steps included:

Worked with union leadership to retain holiday peak season employees until operations stabilized.

We worked with union leadership to increase fulltime career staffing in key several facilities across the country, by more than 10,000 positions total, which will improve performance long term.

We continue to utilize employee overtime as necessary to stabilize operations.

We extended lease agreements on annexes to provide additional package processing and dispatch capacity beyond the holiday peak season

Implemented in August 2020, we realigned organizational reporting structures, providing greater visibility by the executive team into operations, allowing for quicker responses to issues

The Postal Service strives every day to provide excellent service to our valued customers and we apologize for any inconvenience that may have been experienced. We have returned to pre-peak operational conditions and we fully anticipate continued improvements in service performance.
USPS
We continue to make adjustments so that our networks can best deliver much-needed goods and services in this unique environment. Additionally, recent Winter Storms Uri and Viola had an unprecedented impact on operations at our largest US locations. We do extensive contingency planning for situations like this, and we are constantly assessing the impacts of the pandemic and making changes as necessary while also keeping team member and customer health and safety our number one priority.
Fed-Ex