SALEM – Customers calling the Salem Post Office are frequently taken aback when the phone is answered, “Salem Post Office. Stan speaking. May I help you?”
Stan is Stan Scruggs, the Salem Postmaster since September. Sometimes he fills in at the counter for a few minutes when clerks get backed up. Customers have seen him riding along with carriers on the Salem Post Office’s 21 city routes and eight rural ones in the Salem zip code “To get familiar with the routes,” he said.
Salem Postmaster Stan Scruggs shows the big, blue combination mail box for curbside mail drops that will be installed behind the post office. At 38, Scruggs is one of the youngest postmasters in the state and already has 21 years of experience with the United States Postal Service. Photo by Meg Hibbert
He continued: “Every customer here is my No. 1 priority. We’re going to put the service back in customer service in the post office. I want customers here to know we appreciate them when they come in the door.”
If there’s one thing that Scruggs is accustomed to, it’s change.
He admits that he’s “a little Obsessive Compulsive,” and his office in bare-bones office in Salem reflects that. There are maybe six sticky notes around the edge of his computer screen. A toy mail truck on the desk. No pictures on the wall, no clutter. Scruggs doesn’t spend much time at the desk.
“I’m a hands-on manager. If I’m not here in the office, I’m on the street with a carrier,” Scruggs said.
He’s already had the custodial staff to strip and refinish to a glossy shine half the floor of the massive sorting area customers don’t usually see. Next on his list, installation of a combined big blue box for curbside mail drops behind the post office.
At 38, Scruggs is one of the youngest postmasters in the state. He was the youngest postmaster in the Appalachian District in 2001, when he was the postmaster of Goode in Bedford County. His goal is someday to be district manager of the district centered in Charleston, W.Va.
Scruggs started working with the United States Postal Service right out of high school when he graduated in June 1993 from Rustburg High School in the Lynchburg area.
“I was a ‘casual/route carrier associate’ who worked in the Lynchburg Processing and Distribution Center plant at night Monday through Friday, and carried mail on Saturdays” as a fill-in route carrier, he explained.
The area where started out working is emptier now. The Lynchburg main post office plant has been consolidated, and mail from there, Charlottesville and Norfolk is all processed in Richmond area.
A similar consolidation could happen for the Salem and Roanoke area, he pointed out, although at this point Salem mail still goes to the Roanoke plant. “Roanoke is still on a the list to be consolidated to go to North Carolina,” he said. All mail dropped in the boxes and slots in Salem goes to Roanoke to be processed and sorted, and that for Salem is delivered back, already sorted for route carriers, the next morning about 4:30 a.m.
There’s one exception: “If someone comes to our counter and wants a Salem post mark, it stays in Salem,” Scruggs said.
Hand-sorting costs more than sending the Salem mail to Roanoke for machine sorting, though: “It costs us about 30 an hour to sort,” he said. “If we send mail to Roanoke, they can process 35,000 an hour, and that reduces the cost to $2 an hour.”
The changes are all about trying to keep the postal service a paying proposition. To be promoted through the system, “You have to show you can save money for the postal service,” he explained.
What many people don’t realize is that despite the name, the United States Postal Service is not supported by tax dollars. “We’re supported on stamp sales,” Scruggs emphasized. “We’re working with customers to get their business back.”
In the Roanoke post office he was able to save $20,000 in a year on the trash bill by changing Dumpster service companies.
Automation and electronic tracking are among the ways the postal service in the Roanoke Valley and across the nation are making mail and package delivery more efficient.
But providing personal service remains his top priority. While being interviewed, Scruggs got a call from a customer who had ordered something from out of state on eBay and hadn’t received it.
Scruggs checked the electronic records and found the package had not yet arrived in Salem, so the holdup wasn’t in this area.
“Almost every package that goes through our system now gets scanned up to 11 times, I think,” he said.
“We have an app on Facebook that sends a text when items are ordered and shipped,” he explained. “I probably get 50-60 calls on this a day.”
Post office delivery has come a long way, he is convinced, since the days when his mother was a postal employee. She worked for the plant manager at the Lynchburg plant, he explained, and his mother encouraged him to get a temporary job with the postal service.
Even though his mom worked for the post office, both sides of his family came from farm families, Scruggs said. He was promoted from a temporary employee to a window clerk waiting on customers in the Chatham Post Office, as a part-time flexible employee.
“That was an old post office building with a bomb shelter in the basement. All the Civic Defense supplies were still there,” he recalled.
In 1998 Scruggs transferred back to the Lynchburg plant. He had bought a house in Rustburg, and worked as a flat sorting machine operator. Those machines separate magazines into carrier routes, for instance. The following year, he applied for the associate supervisor program, and scored 100 on the test. That’s when he was accepted in to the Roanoke area.
He worked in the processing plant on Rutherford Avenue on the midnight sift, “supervising employees processing the mail that comes out here to Salem,” he added.
Before arriving in Salem as postmaster, Scruggs was postmaster in the Bedford County community of Goode, acting postmaster in Rustburg, a labor relations specialist in Lynchburg, Blue Ridge postmaster, supervisor of customer service in Blacksburg, then manager of customer service at the Hollins Post Office. Before arriving in Salem, he was acting postmaster for Vinton for a month.
Scruggs and Brandy, his high school sweetheart, have been married for 16 years. She is a distribution clerk for who sorts mail for City of Roanoke carriers in the post office annex in Roanoke.
They live in Bedford with their two children, 11-year-old Luke, who attends Bedford Elementary School and 14-year-old Farrah, who is a Liberty High School student. They share their lives with a Boston terrier, Jewelz, and a Shihtzu mix, Gunnar.
In his leisure time, Scruggs enjoys drag racing his 1995 fox body Mustang at the Shelor Motor Mile in Radford.