During the first week of the fall semester, a birthday package intended for Alex Vesneski ’26 showed up a week and a half after it was delivered to the Mail Services Center, located in the basement of LaFarge Hall on Hawk Hill.
“Just getting that a week after my birthday was upsetting because [my family] took the time to write a heartfelt message and I couldn’t get it for a week and a half,” Vesneski said.
For many students, what happened to Vesneski is no surprise: delayed and sometimes missing packages are a common occurrence on Hawk Hill.
Vesneski said he went to the mailroom a couple of times to ask about the status of his package but staff “sped through it like they wanted to push me aside and get back to work.”
Vesneski said he was concerned the mailroom had lost his package, but eventually, it showed up.
According to Vernon Belden, Mail Services Center manager, this type of backup only happens at the beginning of the semester. Even then, he said, the mailroom is only backed up by about three days.
“That only happens during move-in because you have every single student ordering everything that they need for their dorms,” Belden said. “And you don’t have the student workers yet because school hasn’t started. So you have a limited staff here. And you have probably 10 times the volume as you normally would.”
The Mail Services Center can receive anywhere between 200 and 500 packages on its busiest day, which is typically at the beginning of the semester, according to Randy Kehl, general manager who oversees University Printing Services and the Mail Services Center. The staff in the mailroom are contract workers, employed by The MCS Group, an outsourcing solutions company based in Philadelphia.
AnnE Potter ’25 said she eventually gave up trying to track down multiple packages from Amazon that the company showed had been delivered to the mailroom Aug. 23, but Potter never received the packages. At the time, Potter was living in Rashford Hall, so her only delivery option was the mailroom.
Employees at the mailroom were “dismissive” when she tried to get an update, Potter said.
“I honestly just didn’t really feel like fighting it,” Potter said. “And he just shut it down very quickly and just basically said, ‘It’s not in our system and didn’t get delivered. I can’t help you.’”
Potter said she is now getting packages delivered to her house in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, and driving home to get them.
Belden said any delays in packages being delivered are generally due to packages not being addressed correctly. Belden said mailroom staff recommend that students include on the shipping label their name, an indication that they are a St. Joe’s student and the building that they live in.
If a package appears lost, Belden said mailroom staff can help if students provide them with a tracking number.
Potter said she gave staff the tracking number, but they told her she needed to contact Amazon.
Since the mailroom is not open on the weekends, delivery workers for companies like Amazon will leave packages outside of the mailroom instead of delivering them the next business day, which results in students’ packages often getting wet or ruined, said Kate Maginnis ’23, head RA of LaFarge.
Maginnis said a gated fence that provides access to LaFarge and the mailroom from Wynnefield Avenue closes at 4:30 p.m. along with the mailroom on Fridays and remains closed until 9 a.m. when it opens on Monday. That poses a problem for weekend deliveries.
“Packages most of the time are thrown over the fence, and they’re just left to sit there,” Maginnis said. “We’ve had a couple instances where public safety officers, while they do their area checks, they’ve had to gather the packages themselves, but then don’t have access to the mailroom. So they end up just being left in LaFarge and then the RAs bring them to the mailroom on Monday.”
Maginnis said security has called her staff members to assist with packages left in front or under the gate. One time, they collected over 15 Amazon packages that were thrown over the fence, she said.
According to Kehl, the Mail Services Center is working on getting a dropbox outside of the mailroom for Amazon to put packages in over the weekend to keep them secure until the employees can get to them the next business day.
An Amazon locker was installed next to Alumni Hall on the University City campus in 2017 and was utilized by both members of the University of Sciences community and the community at large.
Maginnis said part of the issue is that students live in a “fast-paced ultra-consumption society.” They don’t want to wait additional time for delivery. But Maginnis said the university still needs to help mailroom staff come up with a solution to the current problems.
“I know they work hard, but I think in terms of the weekend issues that we’ve been seeing just in LaFarge, there has to be some solution,” Maginnis said. “Whether it’s with a student worker working Saturday and Sunday or however they best want to solve that problem, things definitely should change.”
Kehl said he was not aware that students were experiencing issues with the mailroom, but he wants students to know he will help them resolve any problems they are having in regards to their packages.
“We are very interested in anybody that is experiencing difficulty,” Kehl said. “And if they experience difficulty, if they contact me directly, we will put that front and foremost.”
