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USPS Ending Overnight First-Class Letter Service
New submitter cstacy writes "The United States Postal Service will be closing half of its processing centers this spring. Currently, 42% of first-class mail is delivered the following day for nearby residential and business customers. But that overnight mail will be a thing of the past, with delivery guaranteed only for 2-3 days. About 51% will be delivered in two days. Periodicals may take up to nine days. (Additional delays beyond this may come into play when Congress also authorizes USPS to close operations for some days each week.)"
You do realize that the postal service is mandated that it needs to be able to support itself? And that it's been doing so just fine for quite some time? And that none of our taxes have gone to it in any significant amount in recent history? Just because Congress governs it doesn't mean that we provide for its funding.
The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. Revenue in the 2000s has been dropping sharply due to declining mail volume, prompting the postal service to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.
From Wikipedia
Actually, 0% of the USPS funding is through taxes. As an entity, it is entirely self supporting. See: http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/welcome.htm#H12
Just jack the price of delivery up to its real value... I did a quick lookup at FedEx for sending a package across town... The lowest cost was $7. Add to that that UPS and FedEx essentially "cherry pick" only the profitable areas... Even locally they don't always deliver to suburbs and make you pick up the package.
The Post is undervalued. That used to be offset with "junk mail". Each of those items subsidized the wages of the mailman that only brought 0-3 pieces of actual mail per day. To turn the figures around, for a person to deliver to your house, you probably need 5-10 pieces of mail each day... Or $2.50-$5.00. That comes close to FedEx quote for $7 I mentioned earlier. Also, there is no way that $.44 now equals $.25 from 20 years ago.
Mail needs to cost more, I'd say the need to jump to $1 minimum. They also need to trim residential service days to Mon-Wed-Fri. I know I don't get ANY mail at least one day per week, and at least one other is only junk. I could easily get all my bills in one day per week, except that makes receiving things timely a problem. I think Businesses get enough mail to justify 4 day service, maybe take Wed off.
I don't think for most individuals upping the price to $1 will hurt anybody.. You're paying $4 for an average greeting card now! Packages are a separate business that allows a higher price point already.
Not just that, but pissed off sorters pushing packages off conveyor belts 30' in the air because they're pissed off that 60,000 packages per hour are being crammed through hubs designed for 30,000 packages per hour and they're getting yelled at for shutting down the belt every 7-10 seconds to keep up. Shoving unix boxes and monitors was my particular favorite act of revenge in the early '90s when I worked at UPS.
Then, you have loaders who literally kick holes in expensive packages because the flow is coming down the belt far too fast for even two experienced loaders to keep up, while supervisors are cussing them out for not keeping up. Another tactic was to time it, and load only one box every six seconds, which is the performance level that loaders are required to achieve to keep their jobs, per union contract; they can't be forced to work faster - which would cause the already-overloaded rollers to back up onto the belt, past the pickoff sorters, and occasionally even up to the sorters where the trailers are being unloaded.
The USPS is totally self funded and profitable. The problem is Congress gave them a near-impossible pension funding mandate so that they could borrow against those pension funds. It's more like the government is leeching off of USPS. Not the other way around
Let the free market succeed where the USPS only exists by monopoly.
No, USPS is no monopoly. If you think you can deliver letters across the country for less than half a dollar, you're free to do so.
Actually, USPS is a monopoly. It is a federal crime to deliver a letter. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes
No, USPS is no monopoly. If you think you can deliver letters across the country for less than half a dollar, you're free to do so.
No... you're not free to do so. That proposition would be a federal crime. Under 18 USC S 1696 . Also, the "unlawful letters" would then be subject to seizure by US postal workers, and US marshals.
as a former UPS employee (unload/load, night shift) this is absolutely true.
Here the volunteer fire department still gets the fire hall, trucks and rest of the equipment payed by the tax payers. I think the firefighters also get a small amount of money when working as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Or see them intact, for that matter.
Whenever I get some UPS package (not my choice, I am always forced into this option), I wonder in what creative new ways will the parcel be damaged. Broken items, punctures in various places of the package, even folded parcels (3D parcels, that is, where one dimension isn't particularly prominent, either), leaks of chemicals into the parcel, these are all various joys of a UPS-delivered parcel.
The fact that they treat you like an idiot by never telling you when they'll deliver it at your home (and doing this repeatedly) just adds insult to injury.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
USPS isn't on the verge of collapse due to any shortfall in business, it's recent changes in politics that have thrown a set of concrete slippers on a historically great swimmer.
H.R. 1351 would allow the Postal Service to apply billions of dollars in pension overpayments to the congressional mandate that requires the USPS to pre-fund the healthcare benefits of future retirees. No other government agency or private company bears this burden, which forces the Postal Service to fund a 75-year liability in 10 years — at a cost of more than $5 billion annually. Without the mandate, the USPS would have shown a surplus of $611 million over the past four fiscal years.
from http://postalemployeenetwork.com/news/2011/09/h-r-1351-gains-momentum-on-capitol-hill/
There's a lot more to the Post Office than just delivering junk-mail. The Post Office has been the glue that allowed the US to exist almost right from the start. The difference between a 1st class nation and a 3rd world country is the Post Office. Can you imagine if your bills didn't arrive in a timely fashion or you weren't able to put a check in the mail. Sure there's a lot of movement towards electronic payments for everything, but there are still plenty of areas without broadband and getting on the modern web with a modem is painful. Odds are if you're older, the Post Office also delivers your medications safely and quickly regardless of where you live. Rain or shine, you can always count on the Post Office to deliver, Fed-up and OoPS, half the time when the package is in town, on the truck and out for delivery, it still won't show up for another day or two as they skip stops.
If I was a politician, I'd really think twice about screwing with retirees prescriptions or the people handling the ballots.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Here in Oz we have the CFA (Country Fire Authority) and MFB (Metropolitan Fire Brigade), MFB are paid, CFA are not (except for some admin jobs). If you look into the history of it, up until the great fire of London in the 17th century fire brigades in the UK were private organisations (sort of like an auto club that does roadside repairs), they would only put out their customer's fires, the other houses around were someone else's problem. It was realised by the government of the day that a bunch of competing private companies was no match for the fire hazards of a city like London, so they created their own and elevated them to a similar social position held by police. Similarly the Brits realised that large cities need a public sewer system when 19th century London was literally dying in it's own shit.
Of course the above are examples of where socialism works as advertised, but I'm sure someone will object because their dogma tells them to reject the concept having their wealth redistributed, even if they are receiving more material benefits from it than they could possibly afford by themselves.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
To elaborate on what Uberbah is referring to, a 2006 Congressional mandate contained in the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006”, required the USPS to pre-fund healthcare benefits of future retirees, a 75 year liability over a 10 year period. It has to project and pay for employees who haven't even been born yet. No other agency or corporation is required to do this. UPS and FedEx are not required to do this, only the USPS. Whose lobbyists do you think congress and the white house were listening to when they passed this provision? This provision costs the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year. When you add in an adjustment that was made in how workers’ compensation costs were calculated based on interest rate assumptions and long term predictions concerning health care and compensation of $2.5 billion (a non cash accounting adjustment), you come up with $8 billion in cost. Actual loss was $500 million and when added, comes to the $8.5 billion reported for 2010. While $500 million is a lot, it doesn’t compare with $8.5 billion and is down from the previous year loss of $1 billion. If you took out the onerous pre-funding mandate, the Postal Service actually shows a $700 million profit over the last four years instead of the $20 billion loss.
We decided that mail service was such an important part of our national infrastructure that we mandated it even in the poor areas.
Also worth noting here is that the people who negotiated the Constitution thought a public mail service was so important that it's one of the 18 powers specifically granted to Congress. (Article 1, section 8)
I am officially gone from
I have to agree, although I've long since switched to FedEx for most of my package shipping needs.
UPS uses union labor and FedEx doesn't (at least, last I checked -- because I realize there have been some fights to unionize there in the last few years).
I'm not necessarily a believer in the idea that union labor is always worse in some way, but I think that tends to be the case when you're talking about relatively unskilled labor. Basically, you've got a scenario where the people doing basic, manual labor (loading and unloading of boxes at sorting facilities, etc.) are protected against punishment for wrongdoing in the workplace by layers of bureaucracy. (EG. Shop foreman can't just fire some guy on the spot if he witnesses him flying into a rage and stomping his boot through a customer's "FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE!" box on the shop floor. He has to go through some union-mandated disciplinary procedure that probably means, at the very least, the employee just receives some kind of verbal warning for the first offense.)
Plus, I'm not impressed with UPS based on personal stories told to me by former UPS employees themselves. For example, one of my buddies used to work at a UPS facility where he said boxes were regularly stacked up into 6 foot high walls, regardless of any warnings printed on them. When a truck would come in, someone would yell "Tear 'em down!" and they'd knock over the walls, letting boxes fall all over the concrete floor, for people to sort through and load up.
FedEx isn't perfect.... I once had them absolutely destroy a music synthesizer I was shipping to Canada, and then fight me for weeks about paying the insurance claim on it. But overall, I think they have a better track record of getting boxes to destinations on time and in one piece. Additionally, they have a better arrangement for receivers of packages if they're not available to sign for the delivery. Unlike UPS, it's easy to go to a FedEx facility in person, in the evening, and sign for and pick up your delivery.