Postal Fiasco Over Tickets Gets Licked

They call Karl Malone the “Mailman,” but ol’ Doug’s the guy who delivers.

At least when it comes to Katie and Erik Koeppens’ six-month battle with the U.S. Postal Service over the belated delivery of five Seahawks tickets by Express Mail.

(Suggested new slogan: “When it absolutely, positively doesn’t matter when the heck it gets there.”)

Last Thursday I told you of the Koeppens’ marathon effort to get the Postal Service to refund $184.65 for the tickets that were sent from Spokane to Seattle, arriving a day after the game. The Spokane Valley couple had to buy five more tickets to watch the Oakland Raiders beat the Seahawks 27-21 on Nov. 24.

Twice denied by Postal Service potentates in St. Louis, the frustrated Koeppens gave me a call. “I know without your article we would never have got the money back,” says Katie.

Give me a mailbag and an Uzi. I’m going postal.

The ink was still damp on the newsprint when Spokane’s mail managers decided to overrule the national claims department.

Can you say “Touchdown”?

“I am not going to make excuses about the service you received in this case,” wrote Bob Hammerstad, the Postal Service’s area customer relations coordinator, to the Koeppens.

Although the delay was due to the November ice storm, “in accepting your package we also accepted the responsibility of delivery.”

The Koeppens are reasonable people. They know weather can play havoc with mail delivery. What blistered them was how arrogant Postal Service bureaucrats repeatedly denied that the delay caused them any loss.

“Since this merchandise (the tickets) was not lost or damaged,” ruled claims supervisor Milton E. Webster, “no indemnity can be authorized …”

Oh, yeah?

Thursday afternoon, a money order for the full amount was hand-delivered to the Koeppens’ home. Thank the Lord it wasn’t sent via Express Mail overnight service. That could’ve taken weeks.

Sorry. Another cheap shot.

“I won’t deny that they (the Koeppens) got the short end of the stick,” says Hammerstad, who adds he was unaware of their situation until I called.

Hammerstad, a 19-year veteran with the post office, called me after the column asking for a “more balanced” view of his employer. He especially didn’t care for my remark that the Koeppens should have “taped their tickets to a tortoise and pointed the beast due west.”

According to Hammerstad, who sounds like a very sincere guy, Spokane’s mail crews successfully process 1.5 million letters a day. We are consistently ranked among the nation’s best for postal service.

To prevent a repeat of what happened to the Koeppens, the area’s Express Mail recently chartered a private jet for daily pickup and delivery. Prior to this the Postal Service contracted with airlines, which meant the packages were subject to more delays.

Hammerstad says he’s as steamed as anyone by the claims adjusters’ rubber-stamp treatment of the Koeppen case.

“Those people in St. Louis, I’m sending them a copy of the column. I’ll put ‘You deserve this’ on the front of it,”’ says Hammerstad. “I can’t believe they caused this and we’re the ones who are eating it.”

Maybe I was bit harsh. But the Postal Service needs a wake-up call and I don’t think the problem is all back in St. Louis.

Keeping the competitive edge is vital to businesses whether it’s Wal-Mart or Federal Express. The common sense rules of customer service are often harder to find inside a bloated, government-subsidized bureaucracy.

Case in point: One of our newspaper librarians recently called the downtown post office to order a new zip code directory. A postal worker told her whenever he needed a zip code, “I just call UPS.”

Sorry, Bob, it’s hard to put a good spin on that one.

, DataTimes