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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
When was the last time you saw a (pay) telephone booth?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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. --
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!
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.
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.
Fellowship 9/11
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
Print it out, grab an envelope out of the drawer, stick a stamp on it (if you're not sure if it's gone up since your last mailing, stick 2 for good measure), put it in your outside mailbox and put the flag up.
See? Much simpler when you don't make it a 5 step list process with extraneous steps like reminiscing.
...and that's all there is to it.
It means that a tiny Superman would not be inconvenienced, but the regular-sized version might be.
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?
It's called a postage meter. It was invented in 1912 by Arthur Pitney, who went into business with Walter Bowes in 1920. They're used on pretty much all commercial mailings these days (when was the last time you saw a stamp on your utility bills?), and can be found under "Mailing equipment" in the Yellow Pages (which, by the way, is a telephone directory in nearly every building in the country).
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
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.