Islander reaches out to help ease Vashon Post Office woes

A problem that had reached a breaking point last year — a steady increase in package delivery to Vashon Post Office that had ballooned to close to 2,500 packages per day during the peak holiday season— has now been addressed in a significant way, thanks to islander Ericka Turnbull, who works for Amazon.

A thorny problem that had reached a breaking point last year — a steady increase in package deliveries to Vashon Post Office that had ballooned to close to 2,500 packages per day during the peak holiday season— has now been addressed in a significant way, thanks to islander Ericka Turnbull, who works for Amazon.

Turnbull’s actions, in late February and early March, have resulted in at least one quick solution to some of the problems facing Vashon’s understaffed post office — a significant reduction in Amazon’s cap for daily deliveries to the Vashon Post Office.

Turnbull, who moved to Vashon from Seattle’s Capitol Hill in 2020, is a 12-year employee of Amazon. She works for the company as a technical program manager, overseeing software developers.

She had known about Vashon’s problems with postal delivery because she’d experienced them firsthand, she said.

“I saw the postal trucks at night, still delivering mail,” she said, adding that her own mail carrier had quit their job eight months ago.

As an Amazon employee, she said, she had wanted to help but didn’t initially know how to, as her position with the company does not interface with Amazon’s shipping team.

Then, in early March, she said, she suddenly found what she called “the keys to the kingdom.”

One morning, she said, she was scrolling through an internal email chain in which employees throughout the company swap questions and seek solutions to problems they encounter in their work.

In a phone interview, Turnbull recounted how she had read, in the email exchange, about a capacity problem in Galveston, Texas that had a striking similarity to what was happening on Vashon.

The thread revealed a contact on Amazon’s shipping team who was working on the problem — a person Turnbull quickly reached out to.

That person then coached her through the process of what was needed to request a specific zip-code investigation that pertained to Vashon.

Following those instructions, Turnbull then submitted a request for the investigative report on March 8 — which, amazingly, resulted in an almost immediate resolution.

On a Vashon social media page on March 9, Turnbull shared the results of the investigation: Amazon’s cap for packages to be delivered to Vashon’s post office had been reduced to 500 per day, down from 1,200 packages — a 58% drop in the per-day volume.

Packages beyond the cap are now going out via other means, such as UPS and FedEx — companies better staffed to support those volumes, Turnbull said.

A USPS spokesperson declined to comment, saying that the agency does not discuss its business arrangements with private companies.

But a source who is knowledgeable about local post office operations did confirm that Amazon was now regularly delivering a lighter volume of packages to Vashon’s post office than it had in the past. However, the same source said that the post office is still severely understaffed.

Despite these ongoing staffing issues, Turnbull said she was thrilled that she had been able to make a difference, working from the inside of Amazon, for her community.

“I was shocked out how quickly it could be resolved,” she said, calling her intervention “a lot lucky and a little resourceful.”

Turnbull also said that there are still several things that community members can do to further reduce the number of packages coming to the island each day from Amazon — efforts that will reduce further pressure on delivery workers and also have a positive environmental impact.

Her suggestions include consolidating Amazon orders instead of placing orders one at a time. Amazon Prime members, she added, also may choose an “Amazon Day” delivery for their packages — an option that holds all of a customer’s packages to go out on one specific day of the week.

“Beyond that, don’t forget to support our beloved community by shopping local,” she said.