Post office gripes? Please get in line

It's one of the last relics of pre-Internet life -- that little purgatory known as the line at the post office.

Across the city and beyond, harried customers queue up in sleepy stupors or fidgety snits, sometimes clutching deli-style numbers, waiting to be called up.

Most just endure the inconvenience, wondering why it often seems to take so long, but sometimes frustrations spill over.

In January, customers reportedly exchanged loud, angry words with clerks over the long wait at the Cleary Square Post Office in Hyde Park, in an incident that got the attention of Mayor Thomas M. Menino. In a letter written to the Boston postmaster shortly afterward, Menino said he was concerned over a shortage of clerks at area post offices.

"Long lines that routinely run out of the door and extended waiting periods are commonplace at Boston's post offices," the mayor wrote. "I have personally experienced these conditions at my local post office in Cleary Square. These circumstances are frustrating the public, fostering a hostile environment inside post offices and, in some cases, subjecting postal employees to threats."

The Postal Service acknowledges that the Cleary Square office has had its share of problems. "We've got management issues in that Hyde Park post office," says Robert K. Cannon, a spokesman for the Postal Service who attributes the situation to not having had a regular supervisor on hand. A supervisor was subsequently assigned to address the issues, according to Boston Postmaster Marsha Cannon. (Marsha and Robert Cannon are married.)

Things have been quiet at the Cleary Square office since the new supervisor was brought in, says Moe Lepore, president of the Boston Metro Area Local 100 of the American Postal Workers Union.

But throughout the area, customers are complaining and the postal workers whose job it is to work with those customers are feeling the heat, Lepore says. The Boston postal district includes the 26 cities and towns within the Route 128 belt, or everywhere with ZIP codes that begin with 021, 022, or 024.

"The men and women at the windows are taking a beating," Lepore says. An ongoing effort to cut costs and staffing has stirred up irritation, and sometimes outright hostility, toward postal clerks, he says.

A visit this spring by a reporter to the Cleary Square Post Office found one and sometimes two clerks serving a line that consistently held a dozen customers or more waiting about 15 minutes to get to the front. Similarly, at the Central Square Post Office in Cambridge that same day, about a dozen customers waited steadily in line for about 10 minutes to get to one of three window clerks. Once the line exceeded 12 people, a fourth clerk came out to assist.

Many customers get upset when they see only some of the available windows open at one time. "People think its postal workers, that they're lazy, in the back, playing Yahtzee," instead of helping customers, Lepore says.

The workload is daunting. For the month of March, 692,000 customers visited a post office in the Boston district to conduct 1.44 million transactions, according to Postal Service data. (An example of one "transaction" is someone buying a book of stamps from a clerk. Two transactions is someone buying a book of stamps and also mailing a package.)

At the post offices identified by Robert Cannon as the district's three busiest, that March tally translated into 22,139 customers and 51,920 transactions at the Fort Point office on Dorchester Avenue, 18,348 customers and 38,121 transactions at Harvard Square in Cambridge, and 10,371 customers and 24,343 transactions at the Milk Street office in the Financial District.

Meanwhile, the ranks of postal workers has shrunk.

The union, which represents the 3,000 clerks, mail processors, maintenance workers, mechanics, and engineers in the region, has seen its numbers dwindle over the last eight to 10 years because of retirements, dismissals, and voluntary turnovers, Lepore says. A decade ago, there were 4,000 designated clerks in the union. Now, he says, there are just 1,800 clerks.

Robert Cannon puts the total number of clerks at 1,884 clerks in the Boston district, including mail processors, window clerks, and other non carriers. The total number of window clerks is 705, he says.

The workers, Lepore says, "do more with less all the time. We're not asking for anything except to put more workers to work."

Marsha Cannon disputes the notion that staffing is inadequate and that wait times are unusually long at many Boston area post offices, saying staffing decisions are dependent on "a number of factors, chief among them fluctuations in mail volume and mailing patterns by the general public."

Demographic changes such as new construction or demolition in either residential or business areas, as well as competition from e-mail in the last several years, have had a "very significant impact" on business, she says. "This further translates into fewer sales and services associates needed at our retail windows at the same times and same places as they were formerly needed."

The Postal Service contracts with a consumer research firm, Maritz Inc., to conduct surprise, spot inspections at post offices in the Boston district to evaluate how smoothly things are running, Robert Cannon says.

A "mystery shopper" follows a standard itinerary of procedures, such as waiting in line, clocking the wait, checking to see whether clerks ask the required security questions, and whether clerks appear neat and in uniform. The firm visits about 75 percent of the post offices in the Boston area and does two or three visits per quarter, Robert Cannon says.

From Jan. 1 to March 30, Maritz found that 85 percent are served in under `five minutes. Nationwide, 80 percent of post offices meet that standard, Robert Cannon says.

And customer volume actually has been trending downward over the last several years, Cannon says, as the public has embraced the Internet not only to buy stamps but to send e-mail and conduct other electronic communications. "Fewer people go in the post office lobby now," he says.

Why the disconnection between what customers and window clerks say they experience -- long waits and frustration -- and what the research firm has reported?

For one thing, Robert Cannon says, there's been a "tremendous upswing" in passport applications since January, when federal regulations began requiring US citizens entering Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda to carry a passport. That has added to the workload and drained postal staffing resources. "We're being swamped with applications," he says. From October through December of last year, 20,549 passports were processed by postal workers in the district. From January through March, that number hit 34,433, he says.

Passport transactions, he says, take "much longer" than typical post office transactions, further compounding the perception that things are backlogged. Between photos and application processing, the typical passport transaction takes more than 12 minutes a person, Cannon says.

Also, customers without bank accounts often go to the post office to purchase money orders to pay bills.

The arrival of federal pension checks, veterans and disability checks, and Social Security payments, Cannon says, make the tail end and beginning of the month the busiest times, "no question."

Lepore says that with local union contract talks slated to be finalized this week , it does seem like things are getting a bit better. Though hiring agreements are handled on the national union level, Lepore says Boston postal officials are starting to get the message about staffing from customers.

Christina Pazzanese can be reached at cpazzanese@globe.com.