We have been doing a lot more shipping these days, and we are one of those small businesses starting to notice strange things from @USPS. #SaveTheUSPS #SupportSmallBusiness #USPSDelay

First of all, we were closed completely from mid-March to early July, and it took several weeks for our local postal carriers to notice we were open and resume delivering our mail.

Because of our limited schedule, the postal carriers don't seem to come by when we're actually open very often. So we get letters shoved under our security gate or we just don't get anything on most days.

We use @USPS for a lot of our outgoing shipping, and we have mostly been dropping them off at the post office a couple of blocks away. (This is one that has previously been on to-be-closed lists. That would be bad for us.)

Sometimes we'll actually catch a mail carrier on our block and hand off packages to them. The last two times we have done this, it has taken days for the packages to get scanned into the USPS facility in 90009, if they have even shown up there at all.

Last Tuesday we handed three packages to our carrier. Two of them got scanned in 90009, one is still MIA. One of those made it to the USPS facility in Las Vegas today (it is on the way to Henderson).

The other hasn't moved from 90009 since last Thursday. It's on the way to Hawaii. (How we wish we could have gone with it.)

We dropped off six packages last Wednesday and Thursday to our local post office. They have all been delivered already to places ranging from Santa Barbara to South Carolina.

We handed off three more packages to our mail carrier on Saturday. They still haven't been scanned. We dropped off three packages today – they have all been scanned at the distribution center already.

Is this all because of the new USPS Postmaster General who seems determined to screw up the mail just in time for mail-in balloting to be impacted? We don't know, we're just an art supply store.

But with our very tiny, limited view into @USPS operations, it is clear that something is screwed up and not in a consistent way. #SaveTheUSPS #SupportSmallBusiness #USPSDelay @hiltzikm @brittny_mejia

We already operate at a huge disadvantage to the logistical might of Amazon, and this is not acceptable.

Needless to say, we will at least be dropping off packages at our local post office ourselves instead of handing them off to get lost in the bowels of whatever is going in at 90009.