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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
What's a tardis?
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.
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
You may not be aware that the U.S. Postal Service has a free pickup service, and they also have a paid premium pickup service...
p age=schedulepickup
Check out their pickup options below:
http://www.usps.com/pickup/welcome.htm?from=home&
Ron
I think they should do that with the public elevators too. Maybe they could give the disabled, old, or people with babies (think strollers) a smartcard to operate them. Most of the ones in Ottawa (especially in the public transit terminals) smell a lot like urinals (that haven't been cleaned). We recently had a baby, and I've started to really hate using those elevators. It's a close call between carrying the stroller up 30 ft of stairs, and standing in the pee soaked elevator for 20 seconds to get to the next floor. As an asside, I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked replacing the tile floors in those elevators one summer. Worst Job Evah!!
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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"
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
About a year ago my roommate was interviewing for a job and one of the questions they gave him was "how many phone booths are in manhattan." I think they may have told him how many blocks tall and wide manhattan is but that was it. Being the very mathematical person he is he simply took the area and guessed at how many phone booths there would be per square block.
When he told me this though, my initial response was zero--they have gotten rid of them all since everyone has cell phones and its cheaper to maintain payphones that are not inside booths (like those in building lobbies). We did some quick research on it and found a site where soemone had documented the last remaining manhatten phone booths...there were 4 of them. 4 in the largest city in the country.
Bottles.
I'm guessing you mean doorslot. If so, it likely doesn't work any more to do this.
If a simple majority of people in a neighborhood agree to it, the PO will put in a cluster of mailboxes (for maybe eight to twenty houses) at the curb, so the postthing can make one stop instead of walking up 8 - 20 walkways, dealing with dogs, etc.
Once the vote is taken, everyone else is roped in and there's no escape. Maybe it's different for the individual box-on-a-post.
Another problem is that the clusters all end up on the same side of the street. Consequently the people on the other side have to cross the street to get their mail. I have a friend with Parkinson's who not only has to go to the curb and down the street to get his mail, but also has to cross the street. Since he can only walk slowly, this is an added danger for him.
The insidious part is that there is collusion between the PO and the housebuilders to prevent you from having an individual mailslot if you're buying a new house. It's to the benefit of the PO to have the cluster boxes. It's also to the benefit of the builder to not have to cut individual mailboxes into the outside wall of each house. Consequently, the contractor arranges with the PO, before any houses are built, to have cluster boxes. The contractor, therefore, gets to "vote" for the entire tract.