Post Office and Snail Mail

i'm in. not sure how they would handle the workforce and how much it would save tho.

 

The main reason why is it would quite literally take an Act of Congress. In addition the USPS has a very strong union. This would mean cutbacks to the number of employees needed and the number of hours those employees would be needed. There is no way that they Postal Worker's Union is going for that one.

 

3 day a week would be cutting it a little thin but I could live with that as long as Priority and Express mail were still delivered 6 days a week. One carrier could cover several normal routes if he were only delivering Priority and Express so the labor cost hit wouldn't be too high.

Your schedule could also use some refining to even out the workload for staffing purposes, but overall I think it would work. Maybe 1/2 the town M/W/F and the other half T/Th/S.

One of our local supermarkets has an official USPS station in it. It's staffed by store employees and seems to provide all the services that the regular post office does except for PO boxes. If more stores had fully functional postal stations, post offices could be consolidated for additional cost savings. I really like their business hours
Business Hours

Mon-Sat

9:00am-7:00pm
Sun
10:00am-4:00pm


If there is no one needing postal service, the store employee(s) go back to doing store work until another postal customer shows up at the counter.


We also have a good local post office, but the store is more convenient for me to use and the wait is always less, frequently no wait.

 

They should have different rates for personal mail and commercial mailings. If we go by weight alone, the commercial mailings I throw out every week are probably 10x more than the stuff I actually care about. Charge those junk mailers more and we'll be swimming in money.

 

What would you do in the event of a holiday falling on one of your delivery dates? I'm not totally opposed to 3 days a week, but waiting an additional 2 days could be brutal sometimes. I would be happy with 5 days a week to start with. I think cutting it in half is too much of a jump all at once.

I also like the idea of shipping centers in stores. Everytime I have to pick up a package at my post office, there's 20 people in line and 2 people working. I think it would help alleviate some of the busier POs and also close some of the slower ones that may no longer need to be open.

 

I subscribe to NetFlix. Fewer delivery days means longer wait times. And I doubt they'll deliver priority or express mail more often than other mail. So I don't like the cutback idea.

However, what I like isn't likely to matter, and I expect there won't even be home delivery in ten years, if the USPS even still exists.

Aside from the occasional greeting card, and one utility and my doctor bills (which do not offer electronic delivery of bills) I have only two friends who still write hard-copy letters. I get NetFlix, but in a decade that will probably be all streaming. And I get an occasional check from one mutual fund company that still does not offer direct deposit.

So realistically, snail mail has shrunk drastically in importance for me, from just 15 years ago when I was totally dependent on it for nearly all my communication.

I wish the USPS would respect my preference to NOT receive mail addressed to "Occupant" or "Resident." Sadly, junk mail is a big money-maker for the PO. It's all pre-sorted, so it costs them less to deliver even at the reduced fees they charge.

 

+1 on charging commercial spammers more money.

I open my mailbox every day and if there is a package or obviously large envelope in there I take it out. I leave all that other junk in there. When recycling day comes I just dump the entire contents from mailbox to bin.

If it was something important, they should have digitally mailed me.

As to cutting back, they shouldn't have to. They are NOT loosing money. They make enough to cover all operating costs as it stands right now. If you want to know why it looks like they are loosing money, look back at the Bush-era policies. Eliminate that crap, and they can get back to normal.

I enjoy being able to send a package from one coast to another in 2 days for $5 and overnight for $15. If USPS would implement tracking I would use them for more. But currently their "tracking" is anything but. I have packages received when they still say "we've been notified by the shipper to expect your package" and similarly I have had packages say delivered when really all I got was the we missed you yellow redelivery card.

FedEx shows you it was picked up at HH:MM, scanned into this facility at HH:MM, left this facility at HH:MM, and so on. USPS obviously has the ability to enter this info, they just need to use it.

 

Fewer delivery days?! And here I was wishing they delivered on Sunday! I order a lot of things off the internet and I can't tell you how many times it was Sunday and I wish I had my package.

BTW - it is quite funny, your mailman knows EVERYTHING about you, believe it or not. I was talking with my mailman and he motions to my next-door neighbor's house, "I just dropped off a big letter from college x, I can't believe he's going to college already. I remember when he was a baby!"

So yeah, those wedding RSVPs, magazine subscriptions, college letters, credit card bills, bank statements, they see it all.

 

I would have no problem cutting back to five days or even 3 days a week. We get very little "useful" mail any more.

The only problem that I see is that my mailbox will be full of junk mail each of the 3 days rather than just partially full for 6 days

 

Great idea. Is there a difference between letter mail and parcel delivery? Letter mail is soo 19th century. Next day parcel delivery is the future in that it will become ever more important.

What do we need mail for? Statements, bills and letters can all be sent by other means now and who actually writes a letter these days?

 

You take it for granted. 49 cents or whatever to send something from one side of the country to the other? That's amazing still.

Just because you don't get any good mail, doesn't mean other people don't.

 

We don't have a mailman, mailwoman, or mailperson. A trivia question: how many of you knew that the US Post Office does not deliver to some locations in the US? We aren't talking about the middle of BFE, but a downtown location in an incorporated village. The Post Office does not deliver to any physical locations inside of our village. We all have Post Office boxes, and we all have to go to the PO to get our mail.

Generally it's not a big deal, but it can be a PITA when it comes to shipping packages. UPS and FedEx will not ship to P.O. Boxes, and the USPS will not ship to our street address, so I *always* have to know how a company plans to ship, otherwise the package may get sent back. It's particularly amusing when dealing with the federal government, who often insists on physical mailing addresses (no P.O. Boxes!) -- It's their postal system, and their forms, but they are incompatible. I give them the street address as required by law, but say "I may not get it. The Post Office won't ship to that address." Generally they look at me like a crazy person. Oh well.

Tom

 

If the USPS were a private, non-unionized company that had to be underwritten by my beloved government to the tune of several gigabucks----THEN it would be a whooooooole different argument, now wouldn't it?

Personally?
I use a PO box, and private companys already do that very well, thank you.

I'm sensative to the fact that they're an historically important industry, and that they used to be important to the infastructure of the nation...kinda like when we had a whaling fleet.
However (comma!) I think it's time to consider some changes.

 

Can you please source where you are getting that the post office has to be underwritten or has received any bailout at all?

The post office costs tax payers nothing and has cost nothing since the 80's. That's a whopping $0.

The reason the post office is in financial trouble is because it has to fund the pension accounts and health care benefits of future employees. Not only current employees, but future employees. What sort of crap is that?

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) (HR 6407), enacted on December 20, 2006, obligates the USPS to prefund 75-years' worth of future health care benefit payments to retirees within a ten-year time span

 

The problems that the post office is having poses quite a dilemma - it still has a place in the country, just not the same one that it has had in the past. I see how others have mentioned charging more for commercial mailing and also cutting down on deliveries. While both would change the economics of the post office I'm pretty sure that it would not be for the better. The root cause of this whole mess boils down to one simple fact - fewer letters are being sent with the USPS than in the past.

Charging more for commercial mail will bring in more per piece of junk mail, but it will likely result in less mailings. The net result would likely be trouble. Part of the problem is that the mail system is built to a very high standard - I know that everyone has a joke or story about how idiotic they can be, but if you look at it they are amazingly efficient. Back when I was in grad school I had a statistics professor who had a consulting business that did statistical modeling for the post office and just about every lecture involved USPS stories, and from those stories it was clear that they were very good at moving a huge number of letters and packages around the country. Their whole problem is that fewer letters are being sent - anything to accelerate that is trouble.

Cutting back on deliveries has the same sort of result - while it cuts down on delivery costs it also will kill volume. As Daniel said, services like Netflix will be ravaged. That will result in fewer letters and packages being sent, and soon the new set-up will be unsustainable.

I think that with cuts like these the post office would quickly be in a death spiral - each cut causing more defections until there is no viable business left.

I do think that there is a fair bit of fat that they can cut. I'm in a suburban location and there are 3 small and 2 large post offices within just a few miles of me and there are probably a half dozen more within 10 miles. At least a couple of these need to close and they need to improve service at the others.

Is it just me - the fact that I can send a letter anywhere in the US for 44 cents is a miracle. I think it is something that needs to be saved for the good of the country. If they go away how much do you think sending a letter by UPS will cost - I'd set the over/under at $2.44.

It is a heck of a problem and I only wish that I had the faith in our representatives in Washington, but there is just too much partisan BS these days for me to have much faith.

 

When I lived in rural North Dakota I had main delivery to the mailbox at the far end of my driveway, but people in town had to have a P.O. box, like you. It never occurred to me that this would be a problem if someone were sending you a package, since the USPS wouldn't deliver to a house, and UPS/FedEx won't deliver to a P.O. box.

I always find it frustrating when I do have to go to the P.O. that there is always a long line, and just one or two clerks, and if a couple of people are sending out big mailings, it can hold the whole line up for 15 minutes. I never send packages by USPS any more for that reason. I go to the Fed Ex, get my package off quicker, and have proper tracking.

Also, there are still people who don't trust direct deposit and get their social security by check in the mail. A day can be a long time if you've run out of money for food. When I worked at the homeless shelter we also ran a soup kitchen, and our numbers went way up just before assistance checks went out.

As for the quality of service, it used to be really impressive. To my knowledge, no letter of mine ever got misdirected when I lived in N.D. But since moving to Spokane, roughly 2 to 4 times a month, a letter addressed to an address other than mine is in my mailbox, and every once in a while a neighbor brings over a letter of mine that was in his box. And recently a doctor's bill that was correctly addressed to me was sent back to the sender by the P.O. marked "Undeliverable."

The quality of mail service has declined markedly.

What they do is still impressive. And compared to Mexico, where the success rate was about 90% for letters to reach their addressee when I lived there, the USPS is doing great. But it's not what it once was.

 

Daniel, in cases where the USPS doesn't deliver to homes and the residents have PO boxes, the people just use their actual street address for FedEx and UPS deliveries. It isn't all that uncommon in many towns around here.

Another thing about cutting out days of delivery is the 2nd class periodical mail of newspapers. There are newspapers that use the USPS for their delivery method. Cutting of days will cause the newspapers to resort back to carriers. Further hurting the USPS revenues.

The 3rd class mail or junk mail as people like to call it is important as it is what actually pays for the mail. Mailing a card to Mom, may be nice but that little stamp isn't paying the freight. The junk mail really pays the bills. Third class pieces start at around 14¢ per piece.

 

The place on Cape Cod that my family has a house is this way. We have never had an issue with this (since 1978) - perhaps because we refuse to get a PO box and just pick up mail from the guy behind the counter.