Your Mail Is Going to Slow Down Dramatically Starting October 1

If it takes three days for a letter to reach your mailbox now, starting on October 1 it may take five days for the same letter to get where it's going. The Treasure Valley is in an area that will be the most negatively impacted by the new slowdowns.  Great!

I got an email from my bank this week with the heads up that US mail delivery is about to slow down because of a restructuring by the US Postal Service.  My bank said the "revised service standards" will create a delivery window of up to five days instead of the average three, and we should allow extra time for mailed payments including online bill-pay if paper checks are involved.

The main pieces of mail that will be affected are first-class letters and flat envelopes, and all fifty states will be affected.  The areas that will be impacted the most are states west of the Rockies, Texas, and Florida, according to the Washington Post.  Yay us.

When I entered the Boise zip code 83701 in the Washington Post's interactive map, it said 16 percent of mail sent from Boise under the new plan will take the full 5 days to get where it's going, and the rest will arrive sooner.

So, if you mail a credit card bill payment to North Carolina on a Saturday, it may not get there until the following Friday and could be credited on that following Monday (nine days later) because of delays and weekends.  No more procrastinating to say the least.

Most of us might be sending payments electronically now, but those day-making letters from Grandma with the twenties inside could take a lot longer than usual to reach us.

If it's "snail mail" now, what are we going to call it starting October 1?  Sloth mail doesn't quite have the same ring, but it may feel that way.