Before she could start work in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Butler last month, Connie Chen, CC ’14, needed to show United States identification. Her parents sent her a Priority Mail package containing her passport, which had a shipping time of two to three days. Chen waited for notification by the Lerner Hall Package Center that she had received mail but heard nothing for five or six days. When she went to the Package Center to ask if her passport had arrived, an employee told her that the center had a large amount of backlog.
“I felt like there was nothing that I could do, and I really needed to have it,” Chen said. “And I even offered to, like, look for it myself, but they said I couldn’t do that. I just felt really helpless, and kind of desperate.”
It took two weeks for Chen to get her passport. And she is not the only student who has had trouble receiving packages, with many students complaining not only that the line at the Package Center is too long, but that it can sometimes take weeks for the center to process packages.
The volume of mail received by the Package Center has increased by about 8 percent each year since 2006. But in summer 2009, the center saw its hours of operation reduced as part of budget cutbacks throughout Lerner Hall. The center started opening an hour later on Tuesday and Thursday and closing entirely on Saturday.
Alex Azar, the manager of Student Mail Services at Columbia, said the cutbacks have not caused the Package Center to work more slowly. In fact, he said, opening later on Tuesday and Thursday has had the opposite effect.
“While the hours of operation for the Package Center were scaled back by two hours per week, a reallocation of staff time to focus on package processing during those times has actually led to an increase in the overall efficiency of the Package Center,” Azar said in an email, adding that Saturday had usually been a slow day for the center.
But many students see room for improvement. Madeline Cohen, CC ’13, thinks that the Package Center should be able to process deliveries faster.
“I just feel like maybe there has to be a more efficient way,” she said. George Zhang, SEAS ’12, said he recently waited in a 40-minute line to pick up a package.
“Usually when school really starts and everyone has a lot of packages, there’s a huge line,” Zhang said.
According to Azar, the Package Center is busiest in September, when it does 20 percent of its business. Due to increased demand during this part of the year, additional processing staff is hired, and a second package center is opened in Carman Hall.
Nick Scott, CC ’13, frequently receives packages from his mom, who lives in England. He said he has rarely had to wait in a line longer than five minutes to pick up a package.
“It’s all very efficient there. I just get the email and come in and sign,” he said.
The Package Center receives an average of 110,000 packages every year. Azar said that while 99.9 percent of all packages are eventually received by students, attributing the 0.1 percent that are not to error on the part of couriers, some packages can take a few weeks to process. The usually happens when a sender misaddresses a package, he said.
Kathryn Neely, CC ’14, ordered concert tickets last month through FedEx. She was notified by FedEx four days before the concert that her package had been delivered to Columbia, but said she did not receive a notification from the Package Center.
After waiting in a half-hour line, Neely spoke to an employee at the Package Center, who asked her to take a look at all the packages still waiting to be processed.
“He told me, ‘Do you see our center?’" Neely said. “I looked over [into the Package Center], and it’s like, yes. And he’s like, ‘So we’re not gonna process that quite yet.’”
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