Its important to note that the purpose of the article is to take an isolated incident of one strangely misguided manager and/or management labor dispute turning into false accusations, and turn that isolated incident into a stage for national policy discussion. By doing that the source becomes a propaganda outlet instead of a journalist outlet, unfortunately.

Possibly, if you shipped a product thru that one individual post office, it might have arrived a day late. Not surprising you haven't noticed the problem, because there isn't one.

The stop of overtime at USPS, in the middle of a surge in online shopping, is real. The lack of staff right now due to COVID but also due to lack of hiring, is real. Every other carriers is hiring like crazy, but not USPS. The problem is real. The fact that the OP anecdata did not experience any delays is totally irrelevant to the conversation.

Is there any inherent problem with the USPS over-hiring now and needing to let people go later? Is it somehow not possible for them to easily reduce the workforce after this, temporary, surge?

I've noticed delays in getting items shipped to me via USPS. One shipment took several months. Just because you do not perceive an issue does not mean one does not exist.

Having something take several months is not what is being discussed though. That is not an example of slow shipping, that is an example of something being lost or misdirected.

While the article is simply a local report about a local issue, it got reported because the USPS is intentionally slowing down mail delivery nationally, under a new boss who was appointed to wreck the agency:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...

I also run a mail order business with "statistically significant" order quantity sent USPS. I've been tracking delivery times. For several weeks around July 4 more than 10% of packages were seeing >2 week delivery times. However it has since returned to normal.

I expect delivery times will go sideways again in Q4.