What if anything can I do about a bad local post office?
Partially a rant, but I'm actually looking for help.
I'll preface this with I live in a smallish town (less than 50k people) like an hour outside of a bigger city. Our town used to have 2 post offices, but one burned down in a fire years ago and it's closed "indefinitely" under repairs. Most people believe it's never getting done. That leaves our one post office insanely busy with long lines.
I work in a customer service position and I fully empathize with the workers there. I've never had bad experience beyond some understandable grumpiness. It seems like we can't keep mailmen either because the person dropping off the mail for my neighborhood changes monthly.
So the problem:
I moved into this place 5 years ago. I immediately noticed that mail here was especially bad. Deliveries showing up later than normal, packages sitting at that post office scan for long times and only moving after complaints, my mail being frequently delivered to neighbors and theirs being delivered to mine.
It was COVID times so I understood things weren't running as smoothly. But it's been 5+ years now and if anything it's gotten worse.
I live in an apartment with a mail room. I'd say about 25% of the packages I order are marked as "delivered in mailbox" but aren't there and only a portion are delivered to my house later by a neighbor.
Our neighborhood next door is full of "looking for package" posts.
My mom sent me my childhood Nintendo DS via mail a year ago and it showed delivered but never showed up no one in my neighborhood ever came forward. I opened a missing mail case and even talked with our Postmaster (who was incredibly apologetic) but I never received it which bums me out to this day. (I hope whatever asshole kept my package enjoys my DS)
On the other end of the spectrum, I run a small Etsy business on the side and lose a lot of money because of this post office. If I drop a package off in the drop off bin, it's a gamble if it'll get the initial scan within 2-3 days. The lines are so long, but if I wait in them and bring it to the front, I get that initial scan but sometimes it wont move for a week from that location. My apartment doesn't have an outgoing mail area, but there is one of those blue bins nearby. I've learned the hard way that dropping things off in there could mean days or weeks of not getting scanned.
I've opened cases and cases and talked to the post master and talked to neighbors, but nothing is ever done. Our Postmaster seems like a nice guy who's doing his best, but it's at the point where I wonder if it's worth driving an hour each way once a week to bring my mail to the neighboring town. I've told all my family to ship UPS or Fedex because they at least mostly arrive. I pay extra from online stores to ship without USPS if it's an option.
Almost everyone in our town I've spoken to has agreed it's incredibly frustrating, and I know a few who have gone full Karen on the post office only for nothing to be done.
Is there anything that can be done here? Is this just the quirks of living in a smallish town? I'm at the point of not wanting to use USPS at all which is a bummer because their rates are by far the best for my area both outgoing and incoming. I don't feel any anger to any of the employees there, I think most of them are doing the best they can but they probably need to hire like 2x what we have with the other location being under repairs.
Has anyone had any luck with improving their local post office? Is there a way to complain higher or gather some signatures or something? I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but I'm at my wits end here.