But it wasn’t the buck hunt delaying the mail in Bemidji, a tiny town 100 miles south of the Canadian border where welcome signs are written in both English and Ojibwe and statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox tower in downtown. Since early November, Bemidji has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages — and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first.
The result has been chaos at the Bemidji post office. Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say. […]
When the proprietors of Patterson’s, a local haberdashery, saw their mail carrier, Jay, laden with Amazon packages, they said they worried about him — but also about the checks they were mailing to vendors. A local bookkeeper started driving 20 miles into town to visit the post office, her husband said, because “the mail can’t be trusted.”
Mark Fuller, a local engineer, said he worries about getting payments from clients on time. “If we’re waiting on, you know, [$50,000 or $80,000] or $100,000 and we’re paying 9.75 percent interest on the line of credit, that can be pretty impactful over time,” said Fuller, who prefers checks to electronic payments to avoid high fees.
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