As many of our long-time regular customers know, Andytown production has grown quite a bit over time. From the early days roasting out of our Lawton street cafe on a 5-kilo Probat to now, to roasting nearly 200,000lbs per year with our 35-kilo Loring at the Taraval roastery, we’ve relied on the United States Postal Service to deliver all of our online and subscription orders. We, like other small businesses, need this service to serve our customers, especially with the continued stress of COVID-19.
Robin, AKA our local mail carrier on Taraval!
Robin is our mail carrier at the roastery on Taraval (shout out to all of our mail carriers across the Outer Sunset!). He’s been delivering mail to us and picking up our completed packages for as long as we’ve been roasting on this side of the Sunset, and he’s been carrying mail since 1989. He sometimes circles back several times in the afternoon to ensure your orders get to you as quickly as possible, and that we still have room to walk around in the Roastery.
On one particularly memorable day, we had run out of Regional Rate Box B’s and all of the surrounding post offices were fresh out— he phoned a friend who dropped some off for us an hour later. He is that rain-or-shine mail carrier that so many of us rely on to keep in touch and keep everyone adequately caffeinated while sheltering in place.
A day’s worth of mail at our Roastery, ready for Robin to pick up!
Prior to COVID-19, we were shipping a modest average of 12 packages per day. Since January, this has grown to an average of 100 per day! The Taraval post office and Robin have been with us every step of the way to create the most efficient pickup schedule and procedure, and this partnership is what makes the USPS so special and vital to our communities. They help us track down missing packages, revise addresses to reroute them, and they are the only shipping service that is able to consistently get your coffee to you within two days of roast at a sustainable price for a small growing business like ours.
The USPS is under a great threat. Currently, the president is defunding the USPS in a blatant attempt to undermine our democracy. Not only is the USPS a vital tool for voters to safely cast their ballot during a global pandemic, it is also a lifeline for small businesses like Andytown who have transitioned to online orders to survive. While we are shipping more mail than ever before, Andytown is still “too small” for competitive pricing from private carriers, and the USPS is the only way we can affordably ship customer orders.
We want to raise our voice in the fight to save the USPS, and we hope you will speak up too. Small businesses like Andytown rely on the USPS as an affordable carrier to get our products in customer’s hands. Take a moment to sign the Change.org petition or contact your local representative to denounce the dismantling of the USPS.