The USPS Lewes Post Office/Warehouse is not delivering mail and prescription drugs, and not even the postmaster seems to care. If you have recently tried to get delivery of a controlled substance prescription drug, you understand that these packages must be signed for.
That means someone must be home in order to get your critical medication delivered. Now, here are some things you can do to get your critical delivery even if you are momentarily away from your front door when the USPS worker comes to your door. Unfortunately, none of these solutions work and the Lewes USPS and Lewes USPS Warehouse could not care less.
First, if you are not home and miss your delivery and you get a note from the post office that they tried to deliver your package, you can (should) be able to call the post office. I dare you! If you call the Lewes Post Office, you will be advised to call the Lewes USPS warehouse in Dewey Beach. The phone number is 302-227-8241.
No USPS associate/employee answers this phone number. I dare you to call it. You will either get no answer or a busy signal. You cannot leave a message. There is no voicemail. There is no backup number.
If you get frustrated and call the Lewes Post Office, they will tell you that they know that nobody answers this phone line and there is nothing you or they can do about it. You can speak to the postmaster at the Lewes Post Office and he cannot do anything about it. It has nothing to do with them moving to a new location.
This has been going on for months and months. The postmaster will simply tell you to call the complaint line. The Lewes Post Office and Warehouse have different postmasters. They operate independently and they basically seem to have nothing to do with one another.
Now, you might opt to just drive over to the warehouse on Coastal Highway and pick up your package. However, you are not allowed to talk to anyone there unless you call first and speak to an employee at the warehouse. But since you cannot ever get through to the one phone line they have you are told again to please call first.
Now you can go back to the Lewes Post Office with your tracking number, but they really can't tell you where the package is. They may tell you it was returned to the sender. If you are waiting for a critical prescription you are in real trouble here.
Another thing you can do (in advance) is to sign the little brown document the post office has, giving the post office authorization to deliver your packages without being home. However, the warehouse and local carrier pay no attention to this and they simply try to deliver the package and when you are not home, they just take it back again to the warehouse that you cannot get in touch with.
It's as if this post office has never had a system to handle this simplest of all transactions.
The Lewes Post Office and Warehouse simply do not communicate with each other. When you are at wit's end, the Lewes Post Office will admit they do know how to use email to communicate with the warehouse.
Well, I pray that all of you getting controlled prescriptions via the USPS have figured out some other solution. If you have had a similar experience let us know.
Ken Silverstein
Lewes
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