Multiple stories on impact of USPS slow down on rural America

These stories have been popping up for several days now, and I'm going to work through in the order in which they appeared or, if several appeared on the same day, the order in which they came to my attention.  Three of the four stories feature the death of baby chicks, shipped by mail and dying because of delivery delays.

The first is by the Portland Press-Herald (Maine), dateline New Sharon, population 1407, with the headline, "Chicks shipped by mail are arriving dead, costing Maine farmers thousands of dollars."  Here's the lede:

Last week Pauline Henderson was shocked when she picked up a shipment of what was supposed to be 800 live chicks from her post office in New Sharon. 

Henderson, who owns and operates Pine Tree Poultry, a family farm and chicken meat processing facility that specializes in chicken pot pies, said all 800 chicks sent from a hatchery in Pennsylvania were dead.

“We’ve never had a problem like this before,” said Henderson, who has been running her farm for five years and regularly receives shipments of live birds. 

“Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said Wednesday. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.” 

The second story is by the Los Angeles Times, and it isn't especially rural focused.  The headline is "‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks," and the dateline is Tehachapi, population 14,414, in the Inland Empire.  Laura Nelson and Maya Lau report.  Here's an excerpt that touches on the rural implications of goings on at the U.S.P.S., which I've already written about here last week:

Processing plants serve more than 1,000 California post offices, some of which deliver to far-flung, rural addresses that could be faced with high delivery costs if serviced by private mail carriers.

* * *  

The delays were particularly tragic for live animals, including baby chickens and crickets, that are transported through the U.S. Postal Service. Usually, mail handlers say, they can hear the birds peeping and rustling around in their boxes. 

This month, one worker said, she found a box with air holes in a pile of packages. Instead of hearing the gentle sounds of baby chicks, she heard nothing. 

Workers sometimes see shipments of crickets jumping around inside their packaging, said Eddie Cowan, a mail handler and the president of a local chapter of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union. Now, he said, “you can see in the packages those crickets are dead.”

Jack Healy's story for the New York Times on August 21, 2020, also featured baby chicks.   This story is also out of Maine, this time the coastal town of Thomaston, population 2,781.  An excerpt follows:

Rhiannon Hampson thought she would hear a cacophony of cheeping when she went to her post office in coastal Maine to fetch a delivery of newly hatched chicks. But the cardboard boxes addressed to her poultry farm were silent. 

“We could hear a few, very faint peeps,” Ms. Hampson said. “Out of 500, there were maybe 25 alive. They were staggering. It was terrible.” 

This is what happens when the mail suddenly becomes unreliable in rural towns and stretches of countryside where there are scant FedEx or UPS deliveries, and where people rely on the post office as an irreplaceable hub of commerce and connection.

The final story does not feature baby chicks.  But it does feature rural small businesses.   This story is by NPR's Kirk Siegler and is out of Wisconsin.  He includes a quote from Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at Rand Corporation: 

More for many folks who live in rural areas, their only daily contact may be the mail carrier. 

A further excerpt follows: 

A recent study [Davis] led at the California-based security think tank showed that the Postal Service ranks high in terms of federal institutions that the public has trust in. In an era when, generally, faith in institutions seems to be eroding, this doesn't go unnoticed.

* * *

"If our mail isn't right, what other connections are we going to lose?" says Rich Judge, an organizer with the newly formed left-leaning group Rural America 2020. 

His group is fighting everything from the recent tariffs facing farmers to threatened shutdowns of post offices and routes in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

Judge runs a small communications business from his home in rural Sauk County, Wis., where, he says, small businesses and family dairy farmers are getting squeezed, working longer hours while also seeing their profits and savings decline. 

"You're telling people who already have to work harder than they did 20 years ago, 'By the way, we're going to impede your progress even more by hamstringing the Postal Service,' " Judge says.

You'll find many posts about post offices--and photographs of rural ones--here on Legal Ruralism.  Just type "post office" into the search bar.