Slashdot Mirror
More E-mail, Fewer Mailboxes
mikesd81 writes "Over at the Baltimore Sun there is an article about the post office removing those blue corner mail boxes because of e-mail. From the article: 'As more people send e-mails and pay bills online, the decline in first-class mail is forcing the U.S. Postal Service to remove tens of thousands of underused mailboxes from city streets.' The article goes on to say that the boxes were an American icon: 'You recognize them in Chicago, you recognize them in D.C., you recognize them in Florida, you recognize them in Montana,' Pope said. 'It's a piece of American iconography that has a wonderful history behind it.'" What the article forgets to mention: they're like an American TARDIS for children.
What TFA doesn't address is what they'll do with the mailboxes. Will they auction them off to collectors, recycle the metal, or will there just be a huge stack of retired mailboxes three rows over from the Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse somewhere?
Start a happiness pandemic
This needs an obvious tag. Next they'll be telling us that record sales are down.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
When was the last time you saw a (pay) telephone booth?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What's a tardis?
Or is it one of those bullshit things that you turn into if you ask what it is?
Good luck paying bills, sending letters or doing quite a few long distance things if your Internet connection fails, or there's some kind of Internet-killing catastrophe...
Redundancy is sometimes a good thing.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ever since I got online, I've been sending more mail (packages, post cards, etc) than I did before the internet.
I wonder if email and the web is really to blame or if concentration of people is more to blame. You don't see these mail boxes going into new housing developments. Everyone has a mail box and daily delivery (and pick up if needed) a their sidewalk.
I don't discount the idea that they may not be taking in as much mail from the iconic blue boxes, but I wonder if total 1st class mail has decreased significally or only where it is picked up from? As older urban communities die off and people that can afford it flock to suburn developments (I know sweeping generalizations), are the blue boxes simply in the wrong place or has consumer culture of this service simply changed?
When you think about it, the first truly tech saavy generation (as a whole, not just a select few) is starting to come to maturation. Snail Mail will always have a roll, I think, for things that you can't give over e-mail (that handmade card or nice drawing by your grandkid), but it will definately become less and less prevalent.
Calling those children 'tards won't solve a thing. Oh no, I think I've misread something...
Interesting problem. I hear that top men are working on it now.
Yeah, I've seen the blue mail boxes that they have in the US. They look pretty flimsy and ugly if you ask me. Heck, the ones here in Canada do too.
You want a post box with character? Here is a post box with character. Those red UK ones were made to last long after e-mail renders them useless. Heck, we have one in our downtown just sitting there because it wasn't built, it was designed.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
How else are lazy drug smugglers supposed to anonymously mail their packages of contraband?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The ones out in front of rural homes? That had a red flag that one would put up if to flag the delivery person that there is some outgoing mail?
If you have a mailbox to receive mail, the letter carrier will take away outgoing mail.
I had a package that was damaged in shipping, customer service sent me a pdf in email, to print out a return address label that the USPS would pick up and deliver to them postage due.
In Canada our postal service is SO much cheaper than UPS or FedEx that it's ludicrous. Unfortunately medium companies don't use it even though it has all the functionality of UPS or FedEX.
v er?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article &cid=1160776234367&call_pageid=970599119419 which I suppose is exactly why the Republicans are "cutting costs" in this area.
Plus as privately managed companies they have all kinds of fun stuff like this http://http//www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSer
If anyone can tell me how to create sexy URL's it would be appreciated.
Of course 1st class letters are dropping, who sends letters these days besides junkmail and bills? Not many. I can only think of birthday/holiday/invitation cards being the only regular use these days.
But the sending of priority mail and boxes must be up with ebay and all that. I wish the post office opened more small kiosks around the place, in strip malls, supermarkets and such, every time I go into a main branch it is a long wait. It would be profitable for them, especially as they are cheaper than the competition.
Oh please, spare us the drama. Zip *g* is going to happen when the last collection box is removed and sold for scrap metal. Except it's one less thing to do on a mail route then having to dismount the vehicle to go to the collection box and scan/service it. USPS still picks up letters from curbside deliveries (ie your typical mail box sitting at the street) and any given single or grouped CBU (Cluster Box Unit) has an out bound mail slot you can use, regardless if you have a box there or not. You want the mail to go out, USPS is more then happy to drive their carriers to exhaustion to keep you happy.
Now one thing that has nearly but all dissapeared are the green boxes. About the only place you will find those are in large urban areas.
Dammy
Rural Craft
Now, it seems the iconic American mailbox is to fall into similar disuse...
Unless, of course, I've completely misunderstood the metaphor. Does the US postal service provide mailboxes which are far larger on the inside than on the outside?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
At the risk of sounding lazy, I've have to say my biggest issue with the postal service is that it's just so much trouble to mail something. The simple act of sending a letter requires me to
1. Print out or write out whatever it is I want to send
2. Find an envelope of the correct size
3. Try to remember or look up what the current postal rate for first class mail is (and then reminisce for a couple minutes about how it used to be a tenth of that)
4. Drive to the post office to buy stamps of the correct denomination, since it changed since the last time I bought stamps
5. Find the nearest drop point (which are getting scarcer, judging by this article)
And don't even get me started on what an annoyance it is to mail a package. I avoid selling stuff on eBay & Half.com just because it means I have to actually drive to the post office (usually during business hours), wait in line for half an hour, and pay an outrageous fee to mail my stuff.
Instead of removing mail drop points, why not improve them? Make it so that instead of just dropping letters, you can drop letters without postage and small to midsize packages. The letters have to be sorted anyway, so just add in a step of the process to have someone calculate the charge for me and bill me. Come to think of it, why hasn't this been done yet?
Then again, this is the government we're talking about... Guess I'll just stick with email.
Makes more room for hitching posts.
On a related note... most all new housing, at least in where I live in PA, do not have mail slots in the door, but instead each has its own mail box outside either separately in front or increasingly as part of a mailbox cluster down the street.
... is the primary reason why there are still so many post offices and postal workers - it could be done with much less, but the U.S. mail system is a big part of Americana and not easily changed.
Homes with mail slots in the door generally get to keep them, and occasionally some new homes will get them, assuming they are part of scattered development (ie a handful of homes or less; larger tracts typically won't get them even if homes nearby do), built within the same delivery area.
It's nice to get mail delivered right through the door - don't even have to go outside; many people would be upset if they had to switch to an outside mailbox, and many postal jobs would be lost
Ron
If you have an IP address, why do you need faxes, or letterboxes?
On a similar note, phoneboxes in the UK are disappearing, as there are more mobile phones in the UK than people now.
Get your own free personal location tracker
they removed my local blue mailbox, and I no longer have a place to return my netflix
Everything I've read on the subject identifies increased security as being the primary reason for the reduced number of postal mailboxes.
o m_content&task=view&id=3222&Itemid=2 (security)
6 0928/NATION/609280323/1020 (vaguely cites rise in net communications and Sep. 11th attack as hastening the death of the mailbox)
I realize that the "Email is obsoleting the Post Office!" angle makes for good copy, just like it did 20 years ago or so when the Post Office was supposed to go the way of the dinosaur, but it just ain't so.
Here, this is what I found with 30 seconds of Google searching:
http://www.standardspeaker.com/index.php?option=c
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200
And then of course the sloppy Baltimore Sun article cited in the story mentions that it's "the Postal Service, working with the Homeland Security Department" (we call it the Department of Homeland Security, for godsake...) who is removing all the boxes. But the article snows over that to proudly proclaim that "disuse is the primary reason for box removal."
It might be that rising costs really are the reason for the removal of the boxes, but that "security concerns" are cited as pretext. Or maybe it's just that blaming innovation for cutbacks has become more fashionable than scaring people into going along with being inconvenienced. In any case, there's your story, if it's true, not this "the internet is killing mailboxes, and by extension, postal delivery!" presumptuous junk. And speaking of junk, I've got to go wade through the 30 pieces of junk mail that just arrived in my mailbox.
I live in an urban area, and although we have mail slots (five feet from the street, no great trouble for the mail carriers), we have to use the blue boxes on the streetcorners for outgoing mail. The reason is straightforward -- outgoing mail gets stolen. A lot of outgoing mail is used to pay bills, and so may contain money or identifying information useful for identity/credit theft. Small-scale identity theft and meth use are trending together (it requires time and concentration, which I gather methamphetamines provide), and stealing mail is one way to go about it.
The blue boxes probably aren't hugely secure since they depend on a lock with likely little diversity in the keys, but that aspect aside they're big sturdy steel things bolted to the ground, placed in visible and generally well-lit locations. Without them, folks living in this area would have go go to an actual post office, mail things at work, or perhaps retail stores would step in to fill the gap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardis
Wikipedia is so awesome.
I often I drop a DVD or two into an envelope and mail my off-site backups for the price of a .63 stamp. I usually use a scrounged envelope. Seems like a good deal to me.
You could argue, that for work related stuff, I could set up an over-the net sync, and sometimes I do. For personal items, there are multiple benefits for using Grandma as an off-site backup for photos and videos, and it is a lot easier for her to deal with physical media - plus she can look at them too!
Just be sure to encrypt anything important, should a disc go missing.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
6. Dodge the guerilla groups who want to kill me because I don't believe in their precise and precious brand (either "New & Improved" or "Classic") of theology/ideology/philosophy/fashion sense.
7. Pray I don't catch ebola, cholera, malaria, marburg, rift valley fever, the creeping crud or any other of 1000 viruses, bacteria or parasites.
8. Hope I had enough to eat to even make the walk to the post office.
9. Wonder how many of my children will still be alive when I get home.
10. Wonder if the letter will make it more than 100 feet from the mail box.
11. Die young and in a ditch with a bullet in my head, or my head chopped off, or whatever.
Yes, life is one peril after another in the great American suburban outback.
It's already been mentioned. Haven't you read the previous comments? Sheesh... No wonder snail mail is dying out.
Aside from the somewhat mystifying sprig of editorial colour, the American TARDIS would likely get our progeny promptly arrested for "breach of Homeland bullsomething" if they actually tried to climb inside.
Have YOU ever been inside a mailbox? I haven't.
Signed,
Perplexed
Where in the world can you see the red British ones?
... but there must be others?
The most exotic location in which I've seen one was Jerusalem (with a metal plate over the slot, leaving only a thin slit through which letters, but not bombs, could be posted)
you live in Detroit, too?
Our company sends and receives hundreds of letters each day. In fact, so many, that we were told by the post office that we have to get them to the post office ourselves (we were filling the mail box occasionally). It seems the poor letter carrier was carrying too much mail away. We have a courier drop off the mail from our P.O. Box each morning as well, at our expense. Each year, the price of Canadian stamps goes up and each year our services received go down.
Wanna know what happened to the box we used to fill? Due to lack of use, it's now been removed. If you beat a customer enough, it will eventually not come back.
"they're like an American TARDIS for children."
In that case, I should go grab one before they're all gone!
Time traveling in a mailbox might be a bit cramp-- oh yeah... Tardis
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
I thought the American TARDIS was this.
Does this mean that pedophiles use them to hide their dungeon of abducted kids? No wonder they want to remove them.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You remind me of a time I visited my brother in Raleigh, North Carolina. He and his wife had recently moved into a new house and were showing me around the neighborhood; we were walking for this tour. Returning to their house, we came across some of their neighbors who had recently moved from some big city like New York. After striking up a conversation, they complained about the lack of places to drop off their mail -- they had to drive several miles to get to one of those "blue boxes" to mail items. They asked my brother if he knew of any closer place.
My brother, his wife, and I looked at each other, wondering if this was a joke. When we determined they were serious, my brother showed them how to use their mailbox at the street: put outgoing mail in the mailbox and put the flag up. Because it seemed so absurd to us who had lived with mailboxes for some time, we were quite amused though we held our laughter until we returned to my brother's house.
Ah, a semantics troll. The breakdown is 2 official booths and 3 pay phones with the little metal privacy hoods. And that means what, exactly? Thank you, come again.
As a further symbol of technological turmoil, the importance of the message and the format of it is completely lost because I forgot to format it in 'Plain Old text', instead of 'HTML Formatted'.
What a shitty little hell the future will be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS
"The TARDIS is a fictional time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The name is an acronym of Time And Relative Dimension (or Dimensions) In Space."
Mailslots tend to leak heat and air conditioning, let in flies because they're badly secured, etc. Security cnsiderations aside, that's a good reasn not to want a slot in your front door.
A couple of decades ago, they were used by terrorists on occasion. The scumbags put bombs in them but I think at least one of them just needed a new door and a repaint.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I was thinking more a small neat looking server rack with a little modding. Snail mail to email with the some of the same hardware!
Puts fresh meaning to the phrase "letter bomb".
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardis Posted as AC to prevent looking like a karma whore.
Stick computers into them and turn them into municiple WI-FI repeaters....
Turn them into bill-pay points, to do something similar to the pay-your-bills-at-Mini Stop, like in Japan. Hell, with a camera, a keyboard, a card swiper and an LCD, those with no fixed address, those who are issued government subsidy/food cards, and the like can update their whereabouts, pay bill, and more. Would be low-tech, low-level terrestrial grades stuff, tho.....
Hell, even the government could put background radiation meters (whether spiked by cosmic or terrestrial terrorists) or chemical agents detectors in them to monitor specific areas.
But, I guess then those would be kicked, pissed into (where being pissed OFF is better than being pissed ON, for the boxes, being pissed ON is better than being pissed INTO), and vandalized in other ways...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
That would be one of those automated self-cleaning pay toilets.
"In Europe (especially France), pay restrooms are very common. It helps cut down on vandalism and keeps the restroom looking cleaner."
But the same can't be said for the streets
This is funny. When I read the headline, I thought of electronic mailboxes rather than the USPS kind. In the rare event I actually need to mail something I just take it directly to the post office in a neighboring town. It's much faster and safer that way. Plus if mail goes through the post office in my town it seems to take about a week longer to get to its destination.
When I first moved to the 'States from Canada, I spent about a week trying to mail a letter. OK, I wasn't working on that 24x7, but I had the letter with me, and I was aware that I needed to stop at the first mailbox I saw.
And I was getting annoyed that there just wasn't any mailboxes anywhere.
Eventually I realized that in this country, mailboxes aren't big red things with round tops, they are smaller blue things with flat angled tops stuck to posts. And I realized that I had looked past many of them, because my idea of what a mailbox should look like didn't match the current reality I was in. It was one of those "we're not in Kansas anymore" moments (which is a rather ironic phrase, but still applies).
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
I still mail stuff using snail mail, and I noticed alot of the mailboxes I used to use have slowly dissapeared. Not that big of a deal, but wtf?
At the time, I worked near the Byron Rumford station in Oakland, CA, which has three windows and a long, narrow lobby. Every time I went in there, the line was nearly out the door, and only one window was open, or, rarely, two. So I went outside, called the USPS main number (800-ASK-USPS) on my cell phone and complained that that particular office never had enough windows open, so the wait was interminable.
I came back a week or two later, and lo and behold, all three windows open and hardly a wait.
Squeaky wheel and all that...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This reminds me of when phone booths were taken out of cities due to the overwhelming use of cell phones.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
It looks like this may be the future. After they cut down on places to post mail won't they eventually cut down on how often they deliver it?
Jon
Why can't they just reduce the number of pickups at these boxes to save money? They've identified which boxes are underused, but that doesn't mean that in 10 years the box will still be so. Couldn't they just make those boxes like a M-W-F or M-Th pickups, so that the post office saves money by not servicing it as often, and people still have box access for routine mail, and should in the future the box become more popular, they can easily ramp up service?
I'll bet our iconic neighbourhood Canada Post carrier would disagree.
It's all history, man. -anon
My bill collectors!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
The decline in 1st class mail is because it now takes a week to get from CA to FL and the equivalent service, priority mail, costs ten times as much and isn't as dependable as, say, FedEx. The US government has priced itself right out of the market!
And this was changed to all-blue in 1971, not because of the Postal Reorganization Act as the article said, but because the red-and-blue motif was used by Vietnam War protestors. They would stencil a yellow star between the red (top) and blue (bottom) thus recreating the North Vietnamese flag.
The mailbox in our neighborhood has been gone now for the better part of a decade, and from talking to the mailmen, they got everything from vomit (from passing drunks) to dog poop in them, but less and less mail. I'm sure the problems of maintaining these boxes, combined with post-9/11 scares, times the decrease in first-class mail, really contributed to the decision to pull these boxes.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Not a troll, quite funny. Knowing everything about Dr. Who is a requirement for being on Slashdot, right?
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
Hehe. That's funny. I semd a parcel post box ($10 and I boxed it myself) to family, and it would have cost me MORE to send it for box boxing ($20) AND shipping ($20), via UPS or FeDeX. Besides I believe Fedex or UPS doesn't handle letters.
I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago. I was driving a 9th-grader, the son of some friends, to camp. I asked him to hop out and mail some letters for me in a USPS street corner mailbox -- and he didn't know how to open the box to put the letters in! He's an A student, so it kind of reminded me of the Far Side cartoon "Midvale School for the Gifted", where the kid is pushing on the door clearly marked "pull". Humor aside, though, he'd obviously never used a mailbox before.
In fact, I have seen inside a lot of them.
Agent 13.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can set it to "plain old text" by default. Check your slashdot options.
hmm ... have you checked out L-Mail? It is great for sending letters to old relatives who don't have email, without all the hassle you outlined. It is also good for writing to companies who still take letters more seriously than email/phone, which is great if you are having problems. It is more expensive if you are sending a letter within your home country (although IMHO the costs are tolerable). If you are sending internationally it is quicker and cheaper.
It was the gradual disappearance of Mailboxes that finally pushed me into paying bills via the net. I can take a hint.
The quality of the USPS has declined so much in the past 10 years, it is a wonder they have any business left at all.
I live in a smaller town, population 22k
I mail myself a first class letter from my house and I get it back 9 days later.
I go into town and mail myself a letter at the post office I get it 4 to 5 days later
I send myself a priority mail letter I get it in 3 to 4 days
I get the pink slip for my power bill the day before I get the power bill.
I am lucky if the carrier(s) even picks up out going mail.
The last "Blue Box" in my town was filled with cow manure and is now gone.
The USPS just doesn't relize that you can't bleed us dry 4 cents at a time
and not improve service.
As one carrier told me back when they came out with the priority mail deal.
priority mail is now the new first class
First class is now treated as second class
Second Class is now third class
third class is now just delivered when they have room on the trucks
--
if you want it to get there don't use the USPS
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
it would be nice if credit card merchants started to offer a discount for paying bills electronically, to reduce expenses of handing paper mail payments.
Take off every 'SIG'!!
"What the article forgets to mention: they're like an American TARDIS for children."pp This would be true if American children even watched Dr. Who and knew what a TARDIS was. If they have even seen one they probably think it's some sort of trashcan.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw a corner mailbox. They certainly weren't common in suburban Minneapolis, and they can't be very common in suburban Atlanta either.
When I want to mail something which might be sensitive, I either mail it at work, or drop it off at the box at the local Post Office. If it isn't sensitive, I simply put it in my own home's mailbox and raise the flag.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Frankly this doesn't bother me. I try not to use the USPS whenever possible. With the troubles I've had with my mail carrier and the amount of mail that has simply gone missing it wouldn't break my heart if they lost enough money to be put out of business or sold off to a private company. In the last five years, my carrier goes home if the weather gets bad. This includes rain, wind and snow. When I asked at the local post office about the policy of quitting service in bad weather, I was told by the postmaster that "He doesn't feel that safety of his carriers should be put at risk just to deliver mail." I would much rather see FedEx, DSL, or UPS begin a general mail service and compete with the USPS. If one of them did, I know of one route that would jump at the chance to switch. Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Somehow along the way I made a bad choice in life and now must live with 0 Karma.
That's a great point. The only thing I can think is that people in Metropolis were so dedicated to prudish 1930's-era social conventions that they all just averted their eyes anyway whenever Clark Kent went into a phone booth. You know:
;)
Little Girl: "Mommy, Mommy! That man is making a phone call!" *points to Kent in the booth*
Her Mother: "Look away, dear. We must give him his privacy!"
Personally, if I were out in public and had to change my clothes, I'd probably try to do it in the men's room. If I tried to change clothes in a phone booth, even quickly, I'd be risking arrest. But that, my friend is what makes me just a man and no...SUPERman. That and the no superstrength and superspeed thing. And the flying thing. And let's not forget the heat vision. Oh and Superman is from an alien planet. And wears red and blue. But you know, other than THAT...the phone booth thing is probably, you know, like the biggest difference...