International Mail Service Suspensions

This is part of DeJoy’s wider cost-cutting plans that were approved in March and are coming into effect now. The are transitioning towards ground transportation vs air mail, increasing postage costs, reducing office hours, automating some processes, and more. It’s all to mitigate a projected $168b loss over the next 10 years. This wouldn’t be needed if they weren’t mandated to pre-fund their retirement accounts or buy separate health insurance, but that is up to Congress to fix.

Japan postal service stopped shipping to most of the world last year and are still (I believe) not fully back to world-wide shipping. Supposedly because of JAL contracts and a lack of commercial flights on which they'd usually piggyback.

&gt; Effective October 1, 2021, the Postal Service™ will stop selling international postal money orders destined to Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, as well as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A customer who wishes to purchase an international postal money order destined for these countries must do so before October 1, 2021.<p>I know there&#x27;s a lot of talk in this thread about commercial flight disruptions and supply chains, but what&#x27;s up with this? That&#x27;s almost the entire non-US Caribbean that you can&#x27;t send money to through USPS.

They have also suspended deliveries to Australia.

This is just cost control.<p>I just had FedEx deliver a package from the US to Australia, it took 48 hours (and four days for the warehouse in Sydney to send me an email about customs inspections fees) and cost US$32 for several kilos of electronics. So freight is expensive but the expense depends more on the volume of the shipper.

This is due to supply chains choking. Lack of truck drivers, containers spots on air cargo. If they is choice to pick up food or mail, I guess is other contractors and logistics partners are picking transporting food and medicine instead of mail.

The linked article focuses on New Zealand because it&#x27;s from a New Zealand publication, but service is actually being suspended to 22 countries.<p>It would probably be better to link to the USPS notice directly, which is mentioned but unfortunately not linked to in the RNZ article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.usps.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;service-alerts&#x2F;international&#x2F;welcome.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.usps.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;service-alerts&#x2F;international...</a>

do we need the USPS anymore?

It said military and diplomatic mail would not be affected, unless noted.<p>What a joke.

&gt; It said this was due to &quot;impacts related to the Covid-19 pandemic and other unrelated service disruptions&quot;.<p>I think it is time that the causality of the pandemic is re-evaluated. Covid-19 didn&#x27;t cause any significant loss to the workforce. The cost-benefits analysis of the public-health measures needs a serious update.

So, something I’ve been wondering here. USPS cites an unavailability of transportation as the reason, and apparently rental car companies are having a rough time of it as well.<p>Is there a lot of deferred maintenance on vehicle fleets that’s catching up to us now? Lack of parts? Maybe some tie to the chip shortage of all things seeing as how automobile manufacturers are also having to shut down plants due to a lack of chips?

Peak oil predicted this sort of thing, given whats also happening in the UK atm with petrol availability and natural gas prices, this is smelling more and more like the 70s only without an OPEC to bribe our way out of it.

That&#x27;s not news worthy! I&#x27;m from the US, living in NZ, and let me tell you, unless the delay is more than 6 months, the average time it takes won&#x27;t change significantly. My mother still sends me b&#x2F;day cards and has learned to send them on my b&#x2F;day, but for the following year !