GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Small businesses are an important part of the West Michigan community. And many of them rely heavily on the United States Postal Service for local deliveries.
13 ON YOUR SIDE spoke to Lenny Sherman, the shipping and receiving supervisor at Baker Book House Co in Grand Rapids. He says they're seeing major delays in shipments, and that it's far worse now than it was at the start of the pandemic. He also says right now it's even a bigger challenge to serve customers, than it is during the holiday season.
"Its worse, definitely is worse," he says. "During the virus, people understood it was going to take longer, now that's kind of gone and now they're just impatient."
It’s a similar story in downtown Grand Rapids for Della Becker-Cornell, store manager at Oh Hello Paper and Gifts.
After being shutdown by the pandemic, they pushed products online.
"It was very difficult," she says. "You could see we had monthly subscriptions and things and you could see form that impact, the course of getting packages to where they needed to go just bottomed out. We still send lots by mail we just did a huge push of 200 packages being sent and I'm hopeful people will get them in a timely manner because they're face masks."
Despite a significant increase in cost, some small business say they will have to go with the alternative carriers, UPS and FedEx to continue to serve their customers. A cost that will impact a small business's bottom line.
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