A small-business owner based in Opelousas, Louisiana, claiming to have what he called a “very trustable source” within the United States Postal Service (USPS), says that layoff and small-town post office closures are coming to the already beleaguered government agency.
The warning comes from Ross Wager (@wagerbaits), who runs a fishing lure company called Wager Baits. He shared the information he reportedly learned from a postal worker in a TikTok video posted Wednesday that has since drawn more than a million views.
“They are going to be shutting down all the small little town post offices all around the country,” Wager claimed in the video. “So if you’re in a small town that has like a population of let’s just say 5,000, 10,000 people, right? You got a small, small, tiny little post office; they’re gonna shut it down.”
Wager claimed the plan was to consolidate services into larger post offices in bigger cities, increasing the commute time for rural customers. He also alleged that according to the post office employee he spoke to, “The next change is that they’re going to be cutting down the workforce.”
He wondered, “How are you going to put more work strain on that … post office branch and then cut back on the workers? I don’t understand their logical thinking on this one. Y’all thought it was bad before? Y’all, it’s about to get worse. Like, I don’t know what the small businesses are gonna have to do.”
Wager then surmised that USPS competitors like UPS, DHL, and FedEx might see more competition. He also assessed, “I don’t see this working out for the Postal Service at all. Like, your mail is gonna be taking longer and longer to get to your house.”
@wagerbaits Yall get ready … #postoffice #postalservice #unitedstates #problems #fyp #viralnews #news #notgood #conspiracy #usps #smallbusinesstiktok #wagerbaits #shipping #shippingorders ♬ original sound – Wager Baits LLC
While the news Wager described in his video hasn’t yet come out, there are indications that the Postal Service is having to cut corners. An article from Tuesday’s Cowboy State Daily revealed that the mail sorting previously done in Casper, Wyoming. will be moved to Billings, Montana, meaning that the entire state of Wyoming will be left “without a major mail processing and distribution facility.”
And in Tennessee, according to WBIR-TV, “The U.S. Postal Service said it may soon move some mail operations from a Knoxville distribution facility to Nashville.” It noted, “While the USPS said there will be no career layoffs as it works to modernize the postal service, some employees are still worried about losing their jobs.”
This comes on the heels of, as CBS News noted, a combination of a $6.5 billion loss for USPS for the 2023 fiscal year and a recent announcement that it would be hiking the price of a first-class stamp from 68 cents to 73 cents this summer. However, the USPS “tried to cushion word of the latest increase by noting that postage costs at home ‘remain among the most affordable in the world.'”
Commenters were alarmed by what Wager had to say.
“I work for the USPS,” one said. “They’ve been talking about closing small offices for years and they’ve been downsizing the workforce for years. I have over 36 years of service.”
Another, claiming to be the wife of a USPS worker, noted, “Workforce is skeleton at this point already.”
Someone with the same perspective countered, “The unions would put up a heck of a fight … it’s just not feasible.”
The situation left one commenter to marvel, “Every year the USPS riases their fees and every single year the USPS says they’re broke. Make it make sense.”
A USPS spokesperson responded to the Daily Dot’s query by saying, “The information being presented in this video is inaccurate and absent of anything based in reality.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Wager via email.
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