Glen Ridge post office: It’s busy, busy, busy

GLEN RIDGE, NJ — Just promoted a month ago from acting supervisor to supervisor at the Glen Ridge post office, John Gonchar, 57, said that during the holiday season, the U.S. Postal Service delivers 850,000 parcels and 15 billion letters. The borough has its share of that, too.
“Today we delivered 18,000 cards and letters,” he said recently, “6,000 magazines and 1,500 packages.”

He said the seasonal average is about 25,000 pieces of mail for 10 carriers, three clerks and a supervisor working in Glen Ridge. But a postmaster, he said, will be joining the office soon. Her name is Giovana Villa Nueva. She is currently working in South Orange.

The 10 mail carriers the Glen Ridge office has during the holidays is the same number they have during the year. Three carriers retired this year and were replaced by part-timers.

“Hopefully, the part-timers will be promoted,” Gonchar said. “There’s always room for growth and promotions in the post office.”
At this time of year, as expected, the post office clerks are extremely busy.

“Glen Ridge is mostly residential,” Gonchar said. “There are 2,700 residential deliveries in the borough and 385 post office boxes.”
There are about 3,100 daily deliveries to residents. Over his 18-year tenure in Glen Ridge, Gonchar said he has delivered to every house and has met many people.

But even for all those people, there have not been many unusual packages delivered to them.
“We did have an order of baby chicks that came in last year,” Gonchar said. “They were peepers. You could see them through the holes in the box. They all made it, intact.”

A lot of the customers in the borough post office, he said, are not from Glen Ridge. He attributes the popularity to the size of the office. It is smaller than neighboring post offices and can provide more personal service. Bloomfield and Montclair residents are regulars at the office.
But small as the borough is, its post office needed another truck to handle the holiday crunch. Other times of the year, the eight trucks they normally use are enough.

“We’re working seven days a week,” Gonchar said. “On Sundays, there is Amazon priority mail.”
Letters to Santa are still in vogue in Glen Ridge and there is a North Pole mailbox in the lobby. Glen Ridge High School Key Club members answer each letter, according to Gonchar. There are nine street mailboxes on Glen Ridge thoroughfares but over the last 10 years, first-class mail has dropped significantly, he said. Yet during the holidays, the mailboxes are almost always get filled.

“Customers are happy to ship with us,” Gonchar said. “The post office is a great bargain.”
Sometimes a complaint does come in and it is usually about misdirected mail — the address was not written clearly enough. But the people who call up to “complain” are usually cheerful anyway, he said.

And carriers, once they get to know their customers, will go out of the way for them. Packages delivered to front porches are also placed where they cannot be seen from the street to deter theft.

“There’s nothing you can do with large boxes,” Gonchar said. “But we put the packages on the back porch for one woman who has a hard time bending over.”

Deliveries to Puerto Rico, from the Glen Ridge post office, increased after the hurricane that occurred earlier this year. Postal worker, with family in Puerto Rico, could even go to the stricken country and work for the postal service, if they wanted. Gonchar said they could go, at their own expense, for several month.

“A Glen Ridge postal worker thought about it but had family obligations,” he said.
And while so far local municipalities have been spared heavy snows, after a storm, the Glen Ridge Post Office can catch up in a day. “The whole chain of pickups and deliveries is affected,” Gonchar said. “Recovery is very quick.”

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