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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.)"
People are still sending around non-electronic messages?
That is going to be a pain for subscribers to Netflix, Gamefly, etc. I used to be able to validate the turn around time with local processing centers, but this is going to impact monthly turnover for those with DVD plans. I can see where this is probably going to do more to push consumers to use Redbox and Blockbuster kiosks, furthering the impact to the bottom line of USPS when more Netflix subscribers drop their service, decreasing use of traditional mail.
This means that getting a bill from my credit card companies will take 15 to 30 days, which means the check payment for that months current charges will be late and later with each billing cycle.
This will push the remaining people into e-payments, which will further decrease USPS revenue and further increase USPS expenses, a feedback cycle that the USPS will not escape from.
The USPS-Titanic is going under water on the 100th anniversary of the real HMS Titanic sinking. How poetic. How tragic. What will history say about the United States of America, a "Super Power" country that cannot maintain a functional national postal service.
What a disgrace.
They're going to encourage people to use their services by dramatically reducing the service quality they offer.
The sad thing is to hear people bitch about the raising cost of a First Class letter - sent *ANYWHERE* for how much? 50 cents or so? Oh yeah, that's WAY out of line...
People, the US Mail is a *service* to the public, there's no way it can every pay for itself and still move mail at the current rates. We fund this *service* with tax money, *not* postage.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The last 10 non-bill mail I recieved were wedding invitations and birthday cards. It's trivially easy to find someone on facebook or similar and email them. I can't imagine why I would write a letter these days except for the novelty of it - in which case it's generally not time sensitive. It's not like people are writing to their doctor for twice weekly consultations on their condition and expect a response by mail.
It's been proven for at least a decade that if you absolutely, positively need it there tomorrow, people are willing to pay $13-25 to make sure it gets there through carriers like UPS and FedEx.
It's worth pointing out - kudos to the US Postal system for not taking taxpayer money to prop up a self-admitted outdated business model. It's sad to see those jobs disappear, but it's a real mark of leadership that they are taking initiative and solving their own problems. I wish the same could be said for other parts of our government.
moox. for a new generation.
it's time for the Pony Express to come back!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The USPS plan to fund their crazy generous pension plan is to increase the volume of junk mail. Being an important left wing constituency their contribution to the creation of unnecessary waste is downplayed.
You can mitigate this nonsense here.
Reduce service to your customers when you are having financial problems? Of course, those are more related to pensions and health care than operations, but who's going to care that there letters will be intentionally delayed? What could go wrong?
Only the government thinks this way.
Let Google deliver all your stuff! Once Google has a 'Google Locker' ability to compete with Amazon Locker, all will be right with the world. Just have Google deliver all your mail that once went through USPS.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Is this further fallout from the republican bill that hosed the postal service?
Get Congress to allow 3 day a week delivery on residential routes (and maybe commercial routes), Mon-Wed-Fri for half, Tue-Thu-Sat for the other half. Still offer daily delivery to post office boxes. Anyone who thinks they really need daily delivery can rent a PO Box and pick it up daily.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I really wish Congress, and the Post Master General for that matter, would stop pretending that the USPS is just another business and should be operated as such. It's not! Mail has been a public service almost since this country was founded and the idea goes back even further in time in some other countries.
Given what the USPS does, it cannot operate like a normal business and it shouldn't have to. Considering how much money they are losing each year, it's clear they need to change something, and I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for first class postage, but this idea that the USPS needs to break even needs to stop soon before Congress completely ruins the postal service.
Packages aside, you simply can't send everything through email. I still get plenty of real non-junk mail all the time, from bank notices to insurance EOBs. This is far more secure than email could ever hope to be. Yes, it would be nice if everybody encrypted their email (especially banks), but until that happens, regular mail is a lot more secure. We actually have laws against this sort of thing and most people even take them seriously. There is little, if anything, to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
I certainly don't want to see the end of the traditional post office in my lifetime, but at the rate Congress is going, who knows. And while I would expect the Post Master General to be fighting the good fight *for* the USPS, every time I hear him talk it seems like he's gung ho to implement whatever idea Congress throws his way.
The USPS is a public service, not a business...
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
This just sounds like someone wants to kill the USPS and loot it.
Get rid of the pre-loading of pensions for 75 years as required by Congress, and they'd be a LOT closer to solvent - and no need to have slower packages.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
People are still sending around non-electronic messages?
This is a really tired expression. We didn't stop using the axe when the chainsaw came along, and we didn't stop using the broom when the vacuum came along, and we didn't stop using land line phones when cell phones came along. Most long lived legacy technologies and services survive for a good reason. They don't survive in great numbers mind you, and are used in very specialized situations, but they survive nonetheless. It should come as no more of a surprise to you that some people send letters any more than it should surprise you that some guys still cut wood with a metal blade attached to a wooden handle.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I would like to ask that the post office only deliver once a week. And that should be the day before garbage/recycling day. 60% of the mail I get goes straight into recycling. The next 30% goes into the shredder and into yard waste bin.
We get so little mail which is direct and important correspondence any more that we only check our mail once or twice a week. Every few months the mailman puts a slip in our box saying we have to go the post office to pick things up because our box is full.
We had 9lbs of mail last time we picked it up. We kept two letters out of everything (2oz).
The problem is not with their service, rather, they have discounted their service so much for things that people don't care about that it has degraded and made the delivery of important items a secondary item. Those who say "they make all their profit on bulk mail". I argue, if they didn't have to stop at EVERY BOX and transport TONS of material every day, they should be able to deliver the first class mail much faster and require half the staff.
And talking about staffing, when they closed a mail processing center in the midwest recently, I saw that nobody lost their jobs. Instead, the unions said the employees took new jobs and were "forced" to deliver mail door to door.
I have no sympathy.
never underestimate the bandwith of a postal delivery truck full of optical discs hurtling down side streets. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Sad to see the USPS getting worse and worse over the years. It has been a very successful least common communications denominator for over 200 years. It delivers all over the world and does a great job doing so. I would have been using them almost exclusively all along if they would have had a package tracking system like the other guys. USPS keeps rural areas connected to everything else. It is still amazing to me that I can be in such far off places as Hawaii, Guam, or Palau and for less than 50 cents send a letter or postcard to someone living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or middle of Maine and almost never fail it gets there and quickly (3-5 days). This is definitely not the case in some other countries. Of course I know the Internet has changed things (been using Internet since 91), but still things such as legal contracts, business with governmental departments, shipping of precious metals, etc are still done largely via US Postal service because of its reliability and legal protections.
I think the USPS is a public good and an important part of keeping such a large country with spread out citizens on more equal level. Does this mean they need to find ways to be more efficient? Sure! Does this mean they need to compete with fully private companies? Sure! But I think we need them to stay around and be healthy. This means tax payer money needs to added in because some parts of the business will never be very profitable. Someone needs to deliver the things to people who do not live in high populated areas and the letters to Santa.
USPS does need to get rid of a lot of it's current functions, they are redundant and wasteful compared to e-mail and privatized delivery (UPS/FedEx/etc) . USPS should serve as a government backed, secure mail service for things like legal documents where a physical piece of paper is necessary and next day delivery wouldn't be necessary. Any pure information is relayed through e-mail, and bulk packages are best handled by current delivery services that have much better customer experience and much more consistent results, probably because they aren't government workers. I also always figured the USPS made money from delivering so much spam mail to everyone, but I guess not.
This is going to be a little bias as I ship a lot of packages but I think to compete with cheap imported goods from other nations we should subsidize package delivery in this country. When I can order something from China for $3 including shipping something is wrong. Shipping costs account for nearly 15% of my costs and in an economy where so many items are ordered online subsidies to shipping companies would benefit us all.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
You could of course check your credit card bill online and pay it on time, like you mentioned yourself. I don't hear people complaining about the lack of jobs in the wooden-wheel-making-market, or the horse-and-carriage driver business lately. Maybe quick mail isn't that what it's used to be and a few niche players will fetch more money for the few letters that still need fast delivery. The rest of the dead tree spam doesn't need to be anywhere in a hurry, so why bother?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
USPS is forced to do this because it refuses to excise the wasteful incompetent personnel it employs, even when the incompetence is documented in detail. They even get Congress to pass Federal laws that allow them to further shirk liability and responsibilities. In my postal zone, the only way even a lowly mail carrier can get fired is if he's caught on video killing someone's dog. If he's responsible for the theft, damage, or loss of packages, even when it's documented, he'll be back the next day and every day after that, for so long as he shall live. If you thought the SCOTUS judges had it made with their continued employment prospects, they ain't got nothin' on mail carriers.
I always thought that the post offices would be OK because with the Internet, sure we're sending way less letter mail, but package deliveries must be through the roof compared to what they were before. Most people do shittonnes of ordering on the Internet now.
yeah, they need to cut costs, but this isn't the way to go about it.
closing a bunch of offices in Podunk might be necessary, though.
of course, not gonna touch "administrative expenses" :(
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The thing is that DM is way more expensive than eDM. Say you get lift over control of oh, I don't know, 1% with eDM and 5% with DM. That means 4% extra sales with DM but you've had to spend roughly 100 times as much on delivery. Plug in some typical numbers for profit margins and well, DM still has a place but more often than not eDM has a much better ROI.
In practice it's more complicated than that - DM tends to cut through to a different group than eDM cuts through to, and in some contexts that matters. Also both have creative costs so for small targeted mailouts the delivery cost is unsubstantial which puts DM in the lead, and then there's printhouse costs.
The impact of losing USPS would be fair greater than most people here seem to think. Think of all the "junk mail" you get, ever thought about how many people are employed printing and mailing that stuff? Or magazines? Or coupons? Or Newsletters? Or how many jobs are kept around because of direct mail advertising? I'd bet you the cost of keeping USPS alive is less than the tax revenue it enables businesses to bring in.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
It is a common misconception that the Postal Service uses tax money. They are funded entirely by the money they make from postage.
Kill it faster!
from what's supposed to be the greatest country in the world
Coming from Canada a few year ago I was amazed by the USPS.
Overnight delivery? We're used to four to seven days, even in town.
Saturday delivery? We lost that in the seventies.
Mail pickup at your rural mailbox? I'm assuming we don't have that either.
Most amazing to us though was that people used USPS to send important things, and assumed that they'd arrive, and on time. No way do you do that with Canada Post.
Three Squirrels
I run a business that sends a few thousand invoices each month via first class mail. We process about the same amount in checks inbound using first class mail. My customers are regional and the lion's share of them are in the same 3-digit zip code processing center so delivery has been overnight. The USPS has just stated that they are adding what amounts to 4-6 business days to my accounts receivable cycle. This has prompted us to reevaluate implementing some needed changes in electronic billing.
The postal service is so inept, they cannot even manage to put a machine in the post office to sell coils of stamps. I have to stand in line and use the time of a union, pensioned government employee just to buy stamps.
Such is the corrupt government contracting business where contracts go to the Honorable Senator's nephew instead of the company who can do it better for less.
A private company like Redbox seems to have figured it out.
I'm an early adopter as well as an impulse shopper. I set things up in my house and it generally isn't longer before my neighbors are knocking on my door asking to see what their kids are talking about. Then before you know it, they're asking me how to get it in their houses and before you know it, they're asking if it would be suitable for their 80 year old mothers.
For the past 9 years, my kids have had media center PCs in their rooms... no TV signal as it isn't important. From collecting seasons of TV shows, they have an assortment of roughly 1500 cartoons on their PCs which they can watch by clicking a few buttons. My daughter has a 22" TV as a screen which was handed down by mamma when she bullied me to give her a bigger TV in the bedroom. My son has a 24" BenQ screen with some Logitech speakers. Their computers are their TVs, video game consoles and web browsers etc... I can safely say that with the exception of maybe on show a night before bed... lasting about 20 minutes, they never really watched TV... well except when visiting houses with technonoobs.
On the top floor, I have a laser/led projector that gives me a 110" screen and a sound system able to do the room it is in justice. It's connected to a media center PC where we often play games we buy from Steam or movies we buy from iTunes and I often find myself web browsing from the couch there.
On the bottom floor we have a 46" Sony LCD with the cable box which my wife watches reality TV on.
All of us have iPhones, we have two iPads and I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate) which I use as a PC for Windows, Mac and Linux development as well as watching films, playing games and pretty much everything else. These are our books. I am entirely unable to throw away a paper book on principal. So, I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have received a single piece of mail in the past 13 years which was addressed to me other than a bill. I haven't received a bill in the mail in about 6 years as they come through email. The one piece of mail I received was actually a paper based Nigerian 419 scam presenting itself as a letter from a law firm.
We get out mail on any of the screens in the house. We get our movies entirely electronically. We get our games and music also electronically. If we want to watch broadcast TV, we do it through a streaming web site. If we want to listen to the radio, we do it through a streaming site. Of course, we have a sling box setup just in case someone calls and says "You have to turn on channel 9!" But, it's collecting dust.
I just opened a new bank account inside the U.S. (I'm an American abroad) and I was in utter shock how ridiculously paper based the U.S. still is. I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages? They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that. In the end, they agreed to let my dad send them a bank check or money order for $1 to get it open. They also required a color photocopy of my passport picture page and social security card. It wasn't good enough to e-mail them. They had to have genuine photocopies. So, I scanned them, sent them to my dad and he mailed them to the bank.
I didn't have a social security card anymore and although I provided them with my number, they needed proof it was mine... so I asked the american embassy for a letter saying so... it was printed out and signed. After all... somehow a piece of linen stationary from 1975 which was printed in blue ink by a cheap press and then put into an IBM electric type writer is obviously more proof that the number is mine than me saying so.. DUH!!!!
overnight, same 'sector' delivery has been touch and go for 5+ years here in new england. Used to be that we could send a birthday card the day before a normal delivery day and it would arrive on time. Not so much the past few years, and it's never really annoyed me either.
Would rather they drop Satyrnday delivery in favor of keeping up with regional deliveries, even if they are 1-2 days.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
They have to fully fund the benefits of every postal employee; that's actual employees, not any potential employee they might hire in the next 75 years. Meaning that for any new (young) employee they get, they must fully fund his retirement/benefits that wouldn't normally have to be paid until his retirement 40 or 50 years from now. The cost you cited is correct, and the requirement is justifiably called absurd and not a thing any private company is burdened with, but getting hyperbolic with the requirements of the law itself simply give your opponents a way to wave off your entire argument by pointing out this one innacuracy. I know it isn't you that started that little misinformational bit of hyperbole, but I've heard it a bunch and I've seen plenty of conservatives shrug off the entire argument by pointing this out and claiming the whole thing is "union lies" or some such. Whoever started the 75 years thing did their cause a terrible disservice.
That said, another restriction Congress has put on USPS is the requirement not to raise rates faster than inflation (based on CPI or something like that). Fuel costs go up 30% this year? Well, suck it up, because you're not raising rates more than 1.67%!
Conservatives like to point at the apparent failure of the USPS as an indicator that the government is simply wasteful in everything it does (instead we should privatize things so our corporate friends can take the profitable areas and leave everyone else to rot!), but that is a ludicrous assertion given that USPS is under restrictions such as the above which no private business would have to work under. Add to that the requirement that they serve every American, no matter where, with the same rates (a good and proper one, IMO) and it's amazing they're even close to profitable.
95% of what the USPS delivers to my mailbox goes directly into the recycling bin. This is no great loss.
Can we vote for Slashdot Hall of Fame entries? If there is a "tl;dr" category or an "Overt Asperger Perseveration/Rumination", I would like to nominate the parent.
Thank you.
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
So if you wondered why Netflix was shooting itself in the feet repeatedly a few months back, now you know why. Folks are not going to be as satisfied with their by-mail service if DVDs take three days to show up, and three days to get back.
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...)
History proves you wrong: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MfS_Abt_M_Brief1.jpg - Automatic letter re-sealer, in use by East-German Staatssicherheit (Stasi) until the fall of the wall.
Read it.
If you bothered to do -any- research, you would know that the price increase by netflix has everything to do with SKYROCKETING content costs, not delivery costs.
So, while firex726 is hauled away for daring to think in a free country (try typing that with a straight face) I, as a communist living in a communist country (IE everywhere NOT America) can confirm this.
There are plenty of essential services that our society depends on but that don't always make economic sense. A starbucks is a easy. it should only continue to exist where it makes economic sense. It is not going to have enough business to sustain itself in a one horse town. (Horses don't drink coffee for the agriculturally challenged) But since nobody actually NEEDS a coffee shop (no, you really don't no matter how much you need caffeine to function) this is alright. You can live your entire life quiet happily without a starbucks or a McD near you.
But try the same thing without say, water and sewage services. Electricity or gas. Or even more basic, a road system. Roads to most people just seem to be there but they are costly to put down and maintain and often of no direct economic value. It is a rare farm that can afford to pay for a road a system to deliver its produce to all its customers. Without the road it cannot deliver but it would be a very costly bit of lettuce if the farm itself had to pay for it. Me? The customer pay for it? I don't NEED that farm road or even the countless kilometers (remember, communist) of highway. I live in a small area and pay for goods to be delivered to me. They can pay the transport costs from that.
This is why private roads are rare AND deliver ON private roads is NOT a sure thing. If you own a farm and don't keep your private road in a satisfactory state of repair you might be highly surprised to learn that deliveries are to the edge of your land, not the door. I am not going to risk MY truck on YOUR pot filled hole. To some people, getting the mail is a bit a more then firing up Gmail.
Essential services are a part of the infrastructure that an entire society is build upon. This is nothing new. It doesn't even have to be costly. Once the USPS was a big source of income for the US government. But decades of mis management in order to reduce government by republicans have made a profitable service that everyone needs a byword for money loosing inefficiency. And the result? We have been steadily going back on the quality of a service once known for its reliability.
But who still sends mail? Bill collectors? In a country in debt, that is the only remaining growth industry. The idea that you can send a letter and have it delivered anywhere in the country the next day is so ingrained that we don't think of it anymore. Electricity and water are the same and when they are turned off for a short time we suddenly notice how depended we are on it (quick for how many flushes of your shit do you have water stored). But they are only cut for short times or during unplanned outages where everyone is working as fast as possible to get it back up. NOBODY could seriously suggest that electricity will only be delivered part time (except in the glorious free market of California, high tech area of the world, think about that if you can).
Once the mail service has been gutted (and it is already way to late) turning it back on is impossible. The infrastructure is gone and no matter how much it is needed, the finances just won't be there to restart it. Oh, the people will adjust but it will be one more slide into 2nd world status for the US. Roads broken up, bridges falling apart, electricity unreliable as in 2nd world nations. Pretty soon, this will be used as an excuse for entire companies to relocate to areas with better infrastructure. Oh wait, the companies already did move since lack of social services and high living costs put the pressure of paying for it on individual wages and made the US worker far to expensive. Here is a hint, if the only way for a worker to come to your factory is by car, then his salary must be able to pay for said car. A cyclist can afford to demand a lower wage. Simple economics no republican will ever understand. Same with health
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You are aware that volunteer fire services are a perfect example of socialism? They may not pay a wage but the equipment is payed for by the people FOR the people. And it is fairly typical that everyone in the area gives the volunteers leeway to do their service. Or do you think non-volunteers can suddenly drop their job and rush out to put out a fire? No? Can't think of any employment contract that has this in it. Yet volunteer fire fighters do it all the time and are NOT fired (get it , fired, fire-fighter, that pun is smoking hot!, Get it, smoking hot? Fire? I am on FIRE today! What do you mean, good?)
So what is your argument? Things that the whole society needs even if an individual might never need it, need to supported by the whole off society?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A Republican so someone who cuts of his own legs because they are to large and unwieldy for their minimal usefullness. All that meat and bone (lets face it, muscles on a rep are in the neck) for what? Cut it off. And that brain? 25% of energy of the body? Who does it think it is?
For a postal service to work, it has to be inefficient. The same with public transport. Unless it reaches everywhere, it isn't usable. That is why early electricity producers PAID big bucks to get everyone hooked up. But they would only do that where it made sense. Getting a line out to the farms often didn't. And so they didn't.
Society NEEDS infrastructure even in areas YOU as a person never use. That road to nowhere DOES go somewhere and those people at the end need it.
Don't believe it? Go live in areas of the world where only individual interests are catered for. Somalia is nice for that. No functional government, no services. No taxes. Just protection money to the guy with the bigger gun. And the payment might be your kids. Gosh, wished you payed a tiny percent for a national police service now eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Two relatives, mother and daughter on my dad's side, both ran large Post Offices in the Midwest. Both can tell you the same things about what is wrong with the Post Office. First is a the unionized work force who doesn't care. As in, you tell them something, they tell you take a hike. My cousin used to refer to her work as "Debby's Day Care" except all those in her charge were adults. Had an emergency, too bad their going home, you do it or get that new guy to do it, the one with the shitty route. People paid more simply because they were there longer who didn't feel they had to work because she was powerless to do anything. You could write someone up for being drunk and it went no where because it couldn't go anywhere. Fortunately no one was ever hurt but she always wryly remarked, it probably would not have mattered.
The second problem was the incredible waste. Like the convention in Chicago where they stayed at 4 and 5 star hotels (depending on size and importance) where mother and daughter offered to share a room and were told that "they don't do that". Where they were flown in for the convention business class. My Aunt used to scream about the waste of that convention when she needed a new delivery truck and instead had to watch the money poured down the drain so upper PO officials could celebrate themselves.
Then comes the trucks, or should I say the infamous left hand drive Windstars. Which no one on a route wanted because, well they were too large to reach across and such made mail delivery a non-starter. So they became shuttles to smaller post offices or those road side lock box places.
Still the largest controllable costs except it ain't because of union negotiating is the costs of the employees. The actual rules state that negotiations cannot take into account costs when it comes to setting rates for employment.
Go search CATO.ORG to see all the stories on the USPS. I tend to ignore the calls to privatize it, it is a requirement of the US Government to do this. However nothing requires them to do it wrong or inefficiently, that happens because of the unions and Congress. One which protects the pay of the workers and more importantly the union bosses and the second because they want to stay in office.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.
Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...
Just a point of clarification. The USPS is NOT required to stop at your door if you have mailbox that is not at the roadside. Outgoing mail can sit in my mailbox for days and days if they don't have any spam ...err... incoming mail to deliver. This is according to my local post office.
I live in Chicago and honestly I wouldn't even bother trying to mail a letter. It's basically a jobs program.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
True, they use the Internet, but even dial-up is enough to manage one's Netflix DVD queue.
A private service comes in and competes only for the simple jobs- they refuse service to anywhere tricky. As all their deliveries are simple, they can massively undercut the national service on these jobs, depriving the service of it's main revenue stream.
You just described the Wal-Mart business model. They don't really compete with flower shops, pharmacies, craft stores, toy stores, etc. They don't offer the same depth of choice or quality or service. But they siphon off enough of their customers--the ones buying the common, cheap, bulk basics, and requiring little service--to turn them unprofitable.
One thing I never hear mentioned is the level of service to private residences. When I grew up (ca 1950-60) we had a mail box on our front porch and many had slots in their door. The mailman walked up to each door to deliver. At present we have a mail box across the street that a mail delivery person (no longer a man...) can drive up to and deposit mail. In even newer neighborhoods there are centralized stations where mail can be delivered to a bunch of addresses in one stop. One thing I've never heard is that the USPS is going to reduce the service level to the older neighborhoods to match the level provided in newer areas. Surely it must be more labor intensive to walk door to door than to drive down a street and deliver to boxes that are all on one side of the street.
I'm sure that would cost jobs, but that's the primary way to save money, isn't it?
Oh, I'm aware of those. All I was doing (albeit, rather more curtly than I typically would) was pointing out the factual inaccuracies in the OP's statement with regards to the USPS being tax-funded.
"The changes would provide short-term relief, but ultimately could prove counterproductive, pushing more of America's business onto the Internet."
In the future, please link to news, not editorials.
I am over 50 and I can safely say I HAVE NEVER SEEN, IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, EVER, seen a letter delivered overnight anywhere for anything under any and all circumstances by the USPS. They even tell you that overnight delivery is 'maybe 2-3 days'. And the last several years, here in zipcode 27615 Not only do we NEVER get mail before 6pm, we're lucky if they show up all scheduled days. 5 out 6 is considered pretty good. And that's just for pick up. We stopped dropping our letters in our own mailbox for pickup YEARS ago because if we were lucky they wouldn't disappear to never be delivered half the time. Today it takes about TWO WEEKS to send a letter from one zipcode in Raleigh NC to another zipcode in Raleigh NC. And when ordering anything online with shipment via USPS, on average 3-5 business days is approximately one MONTH. Netflix? I dropped the disk in the mail Wed. It's Monday and the next disk will come today if we're super fortunate but probably tomorrow. In my local PO when you trudge there to do something like send your tax return registered mail receipt requested, while you're waiting on the next employee to keel over from obesity and diabetes, you get to watch on not 3, not 4, not 5, but SIX 50" flat screens overhead extolling the wonders of stamps depicting silent film stars, state flowers, and Christmas.
I say napalm the lot of them.
Sure mail traffic has gone down in an internet age.
But the manufactured crisis that put them in their current state was caused by Republicans requiring that they prefund their pension plan to a degree that no other group has ever been required to.
It follows the current repugnicon playbook: Create a crisis and use it to justify changes which profit their cronies.
We need to stop handing the keys back the dishonest Republicans who have no interest in governing for the benefit of the many, only in profit for the few.
We need quick deliveries. If the problem is money, raise the rates. In 1850, the price of a stamp was around 5 cents. Lets move the cost of a letter to a buck. I can pay that.
The networking equipment at the CO is less reliable than the phone equipment, probably due to the fact that the phone network hardware is far more mature.
You do have a valid point though, using POTS lines for both puts the parent at non-zero risk for having simultaneous failures. We use both cable internet and T1s at our office. That didn't help us one day when one of the 4 telephone poles carrying both wires caught on fire, leaving us without internet for about 36 hours.
"If it has to be there tomorrow, call the other guys. If it had to be there two weeks ago, call us."
http://www.hulu.com/watch/285313/saturday-night-live-jiffy-express
This plan makes perfect sense. "Woe be" to those instant gratification people who demand at least what they've gotten used to or BETTER. (shrug)
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.
Given the time-sensitive nature of small claims court filings (many of which get served via USPS) this is going to pose a large burden on the right to due process.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes, there's a funded-through-2038 trust fund. However, the US Government as a whole collected that money, borrowed it, and spent it on other things. Remember those "surpluses" in the 1990s? They were counting baby boomer social security taxes as current revenue in that "surplus" computation - we were still going into long-term debt.
The US Government as a whole is in deep fiscal trouble. The social security surplus helped cover up the problem, and it is going to have to be part of the solution.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
This is interesting, because your experience with FedEx Ground sounds completely different than mine! I'm starting to think this stuff varies a lot by region, and there's no way to make a blanket statement about any of these carriers.
I know here (St. Louis, Missouri area), FedEx has their sorting facility open until at least 8PM for people to drop by and pick up packages from missed deliveries. I've done that many times, if I see while at work via email or the web site that my delivery was attempted. I just run by there on the way home and get my box. UPS refuses to let me do such a thing, at least on the first delivery attempt. I'm *forced* to wait a second day for them to attempt the delivery again and pick up a signed tag I leave out for them on my door, stating I'd like to pick it up in person.
Also, I don't think I've ever had an issue with FedEx Ground skipping my delivery, just because a signature was required. I've *often* had issues like that with UPS though, including times they ring my doorbell and I hurry to the door, only to open it and see the guy sprinting back into his truck and a note already stuck to my door saying I wasn't home to sign for the package. Other times, I've had UPS simply leave my box in random, strange places, with no delivery notice on my door whatsoever. Once, I waited days for a box I was expecting, only to discover the driver had gone around to the back of my house and placed it inside my BBQ grill. Why in the world would I check my grill for a package delivery if there was no note telling me to look there??
There's still no alternative if you want to rent rare or unusual movies. Where else can you rent The Red Green Show, Mary Tyler Moore, and new releases that aren't mass market crap (Redbox movies).
The problem is, the service may be cheap for what's involved to perform it, but people don't find enough value in the service to pay more without complaint!
Most of the 1st. class letters I've mailed in the last year or two were for things like receiving a $2 - $5 "mail-in rebate" on something I bought, or forms the government itself required I mail back to them. If I'm already losing 50 cents of that $2 I was trying to get back by filling out a bunch of other pain in the ass paperwork to send in, yep -- I'm not going to be real happy about it.
The latest stat from Wikipedia is 71% of firefighters are volunteers. Having just done some community activities with our local volunteer FD I heard a similar number from the chief. Our FDs in my part of Michigan are all tax funded through township or city taxes. If new equipment need is given then they can get very attractive loans but they are still loans. The only grants I know our local ones have received were post 9/11 for chemical and nuclear equipment (Due to being near 2 plants within 50 miles).
I live in a rural area. Local taxes also pay for the local police via a police millage (around 100K for 40 hour police protection a week, plus supplemental emergency coverage from the county dispatch), ambulance (109K for township coverage) and a road millage and a school millage. The local school district built a new middle school a few years ago and a millage had to be passed to pay for it. Schools are also ran off of property taxes. I personally am in favor of removing the Dep of Education since it doesn't make sense to send local taxes to the state, then feds, only for the feds to send the money back to the local school. Cut the bureaucracy! My area is partly on sewer - if you live near one of the lakes - but that was all paid for by hookup fees and monthly fees. Water is supplied all by personal wells. Clean water that tastes good out of the tap is a wonderful thing.
Not surprisingly my rural area is consistently republican. Don't even think of running for the township as a Dem (Not that I think national parties matter on the local level). Realistically most everyone is more libertarian than anything - my land, my right to do anything I damn well please on it if it doesn't hurt you.
Defense 1 - Use glitter. Sprinkle it inside any envelope you want to protect. Anyone opening the envelope is going to positively HATE you for the next week - that stuff gets everywhere!
Defense 2 - Encode a message as tiny colored dots on the paper - anyone seeing the dots will assume it's just more glitter that didn't get cleaned off;
Defense 3 - Make it easy to detect the envelope has been switched or opened by ... you guessed it ... MORE glitter, on the envelope sealing strip (use envelopes with a self-adhesive strip). Sprinkle at random, shake off what you can, photograph the resulting pattern. Send the photograph via email. (Note: This method is used to detect tampering with nuclear warheads under international agreements - if it's good enough to be verifiable by both Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe, it's good enough for you);
Defense 4 - SWAK at the bottom of the letter, or the reverse side - and photograph that as well. It's very hard to match - they have to get the lip pattern, position, and the lipstick color just right. If they try to just "print it", that's easily detected, since it won't smudge when rubbed;
Defense 5 - "This doesn't smell like it's from her" - use a (very VERY) small amount of your usual perfume (guys, substitute your after-shave or cologne - remember - very VERY small amount);
Defense 6 - Coffee ring. A light, broken ring of coffee or tea, off in a corner - with a different mug each time. Don't slop the mug - just dab a bit of coffee in several areas on the bottom rim, and "stamp" your letter. Again. hard to duplicate, send photo of same. Bonus points if you use lemon juice instead (only shows up when heated).
Defense 7 - Put the REAL message buried in the photos, not the letter.
He referred to Netflix "shooting itself in the foot" and did not mention only the price increase. There was also the spin-off of mail delivery to Qwikster, leaving Netflix as a streaming-only operation. The net effect, combined with their public statements about the future, showed that Netflix management considers DVD-by-mail to be a dead model and was willing to abandon it immediately.
Also, it has been reported that Netflix mail costs are 20-times more expensive than their streaming costs. The reported change in their studio contracts is about 10x.
That's the number of career USPS employees.
Let's say that 25% of those work in sorting centers.
That's 143,500.
42% of sorting centers closing puts 60,270 people out of work.
All that human misery, because the Legislative Branch would rather buy 2,443 aircraft for an estimated US$323 billion [Joint Strike Force Fighter], than fund the US Post Office [running at a $5.1B loss this year].
There's something terribly wrong with this picture.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The summary reads as if this is a definitive occurance. It's not. They haven't decided yet...
Netflix has decided that it ISN'T splitting off Qwikster.
And while their streaming costs for a title may be lower, the content they offer that way is about 10% of their total catalog. Per title streaming costs a lot more.
This is why there are big blue mailboxes all over town. Drop it off on the way to work/school whatever.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh, you gave me flashbacks. Fedex somehow destroyed an expensive synthesizer had been professionally double-packed and sent across the country. After weeks of struggling with their insurance department I gave up. Never given them business since.
That's great and all but you'd have to step it up on the envelope itself. It's child's play to 'see through' even security envelopes for someone with the time and interest (and some money) - far easier than steaming open envelopes once you get beyond small quantities.
If we now have devices that can (literally) see through walls in proof-of-concept about I'm pretty sure a lowly envelope doesn't stand a chance. If for no other reason than you by definition lose control of your letter once the carrier takes it.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
USPS has been SELF funding by law for a long while. It is not losing money.
The USPS has been doing record 'business' but their losses are due to the GOP forcing them by law to pay for their pensions IN ADVANCE many decades (I think it was 45 years) in advance! This added an instant MASSIVE cost which makes their operating expenses be negative for years.
The mail is a public service; if it can't effectively be run non-profit then it has to be run AT A LOSS; just as it was when the FOUNDERS created it-- it was heavily subsidized back then (and for over a century.) The mailman used to be thought of as another public servant, like the fireman or policeman-- but unlike those, there was a fee for use (can you imagine the taxpayer cost and amount of junk if postage was free?? or how crazy it would be to pay a police of fire bill?? don't pay up, let the house burn...) We put money into police and fire after 9/11. With rising gas costs instead of investing in electric mail trucks we stick like 50 years of future pensions on their tab causing them to lower service, lay off people and raise rates during a depression.
2010 was the biggest year they ever had; they are not losing demand (ebay, netflix, mortgage issues etc.) Postage prices have RISEN to cover costs in gas etc.
FedEx costs like $5 to do anything; and the volume is far far lower (not physical volume.) maybe 1 time a week I see that truck on my street. I get 6+ items EVERY DAY on average and I'm as paperless as possible.
The Republicans being ignorant and ideological have been purposely attacking this well run institution with baseless attacks. Just watch the ignorance displayed in the sadly entertaining reality show "GOP Presidential debates." A few do know better and are just trying to ruin it so a for-profit contributor to create another wonderful monopoly power like AT&T or Comcast because we love them... Instead of arguing we should make internet more like the post office (equal fair packet delivery) we are trying to prevent it from becoming a hostage to private mega corps (whose 'product' is in extremely high demand with no real competition making it a poor market for pop economics.)
I'm in no way connected to the USPS.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Stop Rural Free Delivery and see how loud remote people squeal. There are many places UPS/FEDEX won't go. The post office ends up delivering the last leg to the mailbox.
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.
I've heard exactly the same thing from a friend of mine and given how much damage I've seen on my own shipments, it seems likely this attitude is everywhere at UPS.
That's nothing. I just got a delivery through UPS of my DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 533a.
'tis'n't even 1999 anymore and it's just getting to me because the UPS manager said they "FOUND" this parcel with my name on it in a back room being used as a shelf stool because THE FUCKING LABEL GOT PUT ON UPSIDE DOWN and they finally just now 10 years later looked underneath to see my name and address and phone number and delivery codes but at-least my name is still the same so they looked me up in a phone book hoping I was the same John Doe in that ZIP code.
CAN"T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS SHIT!! Digital Equipment Corporation was bought-up by Compaq, then Compaq absorbed into HP, then HP stripped naked and pimped and under-payed by Carly Fiorina, and then my DEC Alpha finally arrived with an expired support contract for VMS. Thanks UPS. Thanks 'murika.
>>I got three new 1U servers sent to me via UPS last year. One of the cartons had a TIRE TRACK across the top of it.
Probably 90% by weight of the mail I receive through USPS is straight-to-the-recycle spam. It's a really phenomenal waste of trees, oil, and labor. I suspect the USPS would have a lot more public support if they didn't enable such wanton and annoying waste of resources.
Oh, then we should make sending mail free, as a public service. Wait, that's not what you meant? Of course it's a public service, but that doesn't mean we can't use a more rational means to support it.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
In Chicago its that on a great week. Any further forget it its at least a week.
Most of the mail boxes are once a day pickup and you never know for sure when that is (even though its posted don't believe it). While the PO is going down hill UPS is doing better. I have given up mailing boxes (or larger than envelope) via the PO and only use UPS.
1. Waiting time is essentially zero at UPS
2. More dependable that PO
3. Clerks are actually pleasant (as opposed to the PO where they are surly and work at a snails pace).
4. Prices are higher at UPS but (see above).
Drivers are a hit and miss group. UPS uses those big brown vans and block the street when they deliver a MAJOR minus.
Borrowed via Treasury Bonds. Funny how that part always gets left out of the IOU storyline. And the government has never, ever defaulted on a single Treasury Bond, nor will it - our creditors in China and Saudi Arabia would never allow such an event to occur.
But not cuts to defense spending or tax increases on the rich? Some priorities you have there.