As Christmas approaches, a local business is worried gifts they shipped won’t make it to their customers in time because of shipping delays.
“Gracie’s Doggie Delights” in Watertown says nearly half of all their packages sent by the United States Postal Service (USPS) have been delayed.
“Gracie’s Doggie Delight’s” is run by Gracie Jagler, a 23 year old woman with Down syndrome, and her family. They say this is the busiest time of year for their company.
To avoid any delays, the company informed customers of shipping deadlines put out by the postal service. Most of the packages still not delivered were sent before the deadlines.
Recently customers started contacting them.
“We’ve been getting dozens of emails, 'where’s my stuff, do you think it’s going to make it?'" Says Gracie’s dad, John Jagler.
A digital shipping manager they use estimated that 41.6% of the packages they sent via USPS have been delayed.
Jagler says “the dogs might not know the difference but our customers will. Even though it really wasn’t on our end, we might have lost some customers because of that.”
TMJ4 News has been hearing from a number of viewers with the same shipping issues. Many of their packages are taking longer than expected to be delivered, and a lot of them are sitting at the USPS facility in Oak Creek, WI or listed as “in-transit” for days if not longer.
Last Wednesday, TMJ4 sent 2-day Priority Mail packages to our sister stations in Madison, West Palm Beach and Phoenix to see how long they’d take and if they’d get stuck in Oak Creek.
The Madison package was delivered on time, last Friday. It didn’t appear to go through Oak Creek.
The Florida package was delivered late Monday afternoon. It and the Phoenix package did go through Oak Creek, spending about 2 days there before moving on.
As of Monday night the Phoenix package was still listed as “in transit.”
We reached out to USPS to find out why these packages are stuck at the Oak Creek facility. Here's what USPS said:
"The Oak Creek facility processes packages in the Milwaukee area.
The U.S. Postal Service, similar to the broader shipping sector, continues to face near-term pressure on service performance across categories as it manages through a historic record of holiday volume this season. This negative impact is compounded by the temporary employee shortage due to the COVID-19 surge, as well as ongoing capacity challenges with airlifts and trucking for moving this historic volume of mail.
The Postal Service’s 644,000 employees continue to work diligently to address issues and remain focused on delivering the Holidays and beyond for the nation. Amid the historic volume, the Postal Service continues to flex its network, including making sure the right equipment is available to sort, process and deliver a historic volume of mail and packages this holiday season. Our entire Operations team, from collections, to processing to delivery, worked throughout this past weekend and continues to work around the clock to address the historic volume. We are accepting all volume that is presented to us which is adding to our challenges."
