If I want to send a letter to the postmaster at my local main post office, do I have to put a stamp on it?

Believe it or not, they prefer email ;)

https://emailus.usps.com/s/postal-facility-inquiry

Good luck.

Thanks. And bah. They’re getting a letter, on paper, in an envelope, with a signature. And a stamp.

To bad you can’t just write:
Take me to your leader.

This reminds me of having to pay taxes on unemployment and social security. It’s already money from the government.

I’d put a stamp to be sure. It sounds like you are doing just that. I hope you get a well thought out response. Please update us.

I don’t know your local main post office but you can copy in the Postmaster General for added effect. He is a Trump appointee, in charge of running the service down, but presumably he takes some interest in what his customers have to say.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy
USPS – Headquarters
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Washington DC 20260–0010

This article in the Guardian newspaper might interest you.

I would hand deliver it, since you might have to go to the PO to mail it anyway, since there are so few mailboxes around any longer.

Thanks for the suggestions. I did go ahead and put a stamp on it, an old “forever” stamp that I bought for a lot less than current first class rates. Seems silly, though, because it’s going to go to the main P.O. for sorting, and someone can just walk it into the boss’s office.

Depending on the response (or nonresponse) I get, I’m thinking of sending a copy to the local newspaper. Not giving up too quickly on this one.

@Jeruba Do you mind telling us what the letter is about?

@JLeslie, no. I am asking for the letter carriers to be reminded not to leave first class mail sticking out of the mail slot, easy for anyone to grab. There have been many brazen thefts of mail around here, envelopes as well as packages: people coming right up to someone’s house and stealing the mail. Neighbors have even captured that on their door cameras.

The carriers typically double the catalogs and magazines and advertising flyers over, with the envelopes folded inside, and leave the whole works sticking four to six inches out of the mail slot, ready for grabbing. They should instead make sure that the envelopes go all the way in first—the checks and bills and important notices such as tax documents. Then they can stuff the junk mail anywhere they want.

I have a basket for packages and magazines, but they usually don’t use it.

The main thing is the envelopes. Once someone stole an incoming check from us that was worth more than $900, and we got it back only because we knew someone who knew someone who lived on the street—i.e., homeless. We were lucky.

I have many times asked individual carriers to do this, make sure the real mail gets inside, but there are different ones all the time and they don’t remember. And one of those times, the guy snapped at me, “Don’t tell me how to do my job!”

So I’m taking another tack.

When I did that (wrote the postmaster to complain about the appearance of the local facility), I got a couple of nasty phone calls in reply from the postmaster. And of course nothing was done.

I’m not sure it’s effective to contact them in the first place.

Just before my father died he was living in an assisted living facility. As soon as they knew he had died, the post office started throwing away his mail, and they refused to forward his mail to my house. And the assisted living center refused to even snatch it out of the trash and save it for me.

Eventually I was able to contact everyone who had been sending him mail, but it was a nightmare for a while.