Slashdot Mirror
Door-To-Door Mail Delivery To End Under New Plan
First time accepted submitter Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that under a cost-saving plan by the US Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters. 'Converting delivery away from door delivery to either curb line or centralized delivery would enable the Postal Service to provide service to more customers in less time,' says Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan. More than 30 million American homes get door-to-door delivery and another 50 million get their mail dropped at their curbside mailboxes. But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses, sees savings in centralized mail delivery. Door-to-door delivery costs the Postal Service about $353 per address each year while curbside delivery costs $224, and cluster boxes cost $160 per address. But unions say it's a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled. 'It's madness,' says Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. 'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"
We have been doing this for new homes in San Antonio for the past 5-10 years. My house was built in 1993 and it's like this.
My mailbox is something like 400m away.
Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!!!
I've spent my whole life around them & to be honest I'm more comfortable w/ walking ALL THE WAY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET than a strange man (or woman) putting shit through a security-risk insulation-killer hole in my door. Lets take a step back here: When the postal service started, you went to your nearest post office & got your mail by name. Then, later on, they decided to add numbers to every house & it'd be delivered. Curbside makes plenty of sense to me, but a hole in your door? REALLY? BTW IIRC in certain areas you can still get your mail by name at the office.
I think most Americans would rather give up Saturday delivery than have to walk farther to get their mail. I would be happy with just MWF delivery, but I would not want to have to walk to the end of our block to a cluster box.
How about un-funding the massive health fund payments that they were forced to make?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You young people have it easy !!
& yes I'm familiar w/ wall-mounted doorside mailboxes but I'm sure many people would still prefer something on the curb than someone dicking around your doorstep 6 (or maybe in the future 5) days a week.
Old people have to go to community mailbox in their building
'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"
Oh the horror, the horror....
Cut out the middle man and send it straight to the NSA
Face it, we don't get any mail anymore that can't wait a day. Bills and junk mail are the norm. It makes a huge amount of sense to deliver non-priority packages every other day. It would cut the manpower needed for delivery almost in half. Combine that with community / street mailboxes and then that makes some real savings.
I've, um, never really had a problem with a pretty trustworthy guy sticking stuff in my door. Did you have some kind of bad experience or something?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Huh, I'm actually the opposite. I've had a locking mailbox and currently have a "normal" curbside mailbox now. I'd much prefer a door slot to the normal curbside mailbox, and would prefer it to a lesser extent to a locking mailbox. A door slot is more secure than a normal curbside mailbox and I wouldn't have to worry about stopping mail delivery if I'm away for a week or two to prevent the mailbox from filling (or to reduce signs of me being away).
wow.. I'm in the wrong place.
...about whether or not it ends in to THESE congresscritters.
We have a ruling class in the USA, just like the founding fathers were scared of.
Lysander Spooner already demonstrated that private mail carriers can do a better job for less money, back in the mid 1800s. It's even more true today.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.
If a person doesn't keep their path shoveled enough to walk to their own mailbox, why should the mail carrier trek up to their door? Where I grew up if you didn't shovel the mail carrier wouldn't even bother. Maybe he or she would come up once and ring the bell to at least give you warning they won't come up again if you don't shovel. Most often they would just skip you. At least this way a kind neighbor could help the elderly couple with shoveling or bringing up their mail rather than getting nothing.
under massive financial losses. It is buckling under the massive stupidity of Congress.
This would also mean that you have to go to the Post Office every time you have a letter/package to sign for, as they are probably not going to come to your front door for that anymore, either. Even though I live less than a half mile from a Post Office, due to the insanity of current cost cutting, I have to drive 8 miles away to get to the Post Office that serves my house.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
here the law was changed recently, now requires the mail box be at the side walk or apartments at clustered at the front door
disabled can request a dispensation
The other advantage is that cluster boxes (at least in Canada) have secure parcel delivery capability which, while limited in size, is still a big improvement over what can fit through a letter box. Only downside is that unlike your home the parcel boxes are not heated which means if you parcel contains electronics you need to let it heat up before opening it in the winter when temperatures drop below -30C otherwise you risk condensation.
I don't get any mail that's so sensitive that I can't get it weekly. Bring back the corner mailboxes so I can drop off outbound mail or just leave it to be picked up at the curb/cluster/whatever.
We might have to get bigger mailboxes though considering about half my mail (by weight) is junkmail. I do get three magazines. One motorcycle and two guitar.
The banks, credit card companies, utilities, etc would have to adjust to make sure mail is sent in enough time for the mailman to pick up the outbound and deliver it in time.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Around here our mailboxes are normally attached to the outside of the house. There's no bigger danger than having no mailbox at all.
What you're also ignoring is that when the post office started it was open 7 days a week and they didn't have the benefit of things like cars.
I see no problems with this. The post office will still need door to door delivery for packages. If someone is disabled or elderly then I'm sure it'd still be cheaper to create a registry where the post office delivers mail to the door of those people. As an added bonus every cluster box I've seen has a key to your mailbox so your mail is more secure and nobody other than the mailman can put mail in your box.
This isn't new either; as was mentioned already. I grew up in a small town of 700. Nobody in the whole town had a mailbox. Everyone in town had to go to the post office and get their mail form a PO Box. Sure, for some it was a mile away but your mail was always delivered at 9 AM if you wanted to check that early. This was in the 1980's and as far as I know it'd been like that the previous 30 years. Then when I went to college all the mail was centralized near the cafeteria. When I graduated and moved to small city in Indiana all the houses in my subdivision had cluster boxes for every 10-20 houses. This was a subdivision built in the early 1990's. Now I'm living in MD in a gated community and it has cluster boxes too although for some odd reason I have to walk past the nearest cluster box and down the street to next one to get my mail from that box. So, from my point of view I've never had door to door service.
Did they factor in the wasted time and money of delivering junk mail that inevitably gets tossed in the garbage?
I've lived in places with the mailbox-cluster idea in Canada. Personally, I love it. It's especially great for parcels that would otherwise be left on a doorstep or taken back to a depot.
What happens here is that the mailbox-clusters have a a small number of large mailboxes. If you have a parcel, it goes in one of the large mailboxes. Then the key to that mailbox is put in your personal mailbox. You open it, take your parcel, and lock the key inside. Awesome.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Non-American here.
What is happening to the largest economy in the world? You guys have the largest military, largest economy, dominant currency and you need to cut back on the mail service? I am even more flabbergasted at this than the lack of universal healthcare and the furor surrounding Obamacare.
Mail delivery for me is as basic as clean water and electricity; a basic staple of civilization that is part of every modern society.
Please don't take this as a veiled anti-American rant because it is not. I honestly wonder if I am witnessing the decline of a once might country. The other possibility is that the political stalemate in govt. is responsible for these basic things not getting fixed. If so this is almost scary: institutions in a superpower are crumbling because the politicians cannot work together.
Any American that cares to enlightens this foreigner?
It makes perfect sense from a logistical standpoint. Unfortunately, mail clusters are an appealing target for mail thieves. Pop open the big door, and all your mails are belong to us.
It could be worse.
The Post Office could easily see fit to give you a "free" PO Box at the post office....
And eliminate delivery altogether.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
And hope you can get there before they close. And since Saturday hours is on the chopping block too, there goes the chance for most of us M-F folks to get a package and will have to choose other carriers.
Back to the 'community boxes' concept, i prefer my mail to be securely delivered on my property, not some 'common area' down the street, ripe for robbery and theft.At least in an apartment building its normally ON your building and not down the street ..( around here anyway )
My neighbor is elderly and we would have to get her mail for her. but of course, that is a crime....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Walking out to your mailbox may be the only exercise that some people get. :)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I have not wanted to receive anything via mail in over two decades. I'd be ok with paying them to stay home and stay out of trouble. Now if we could pay our politicians to stay at home...
mailbox in a snowstorm is crazy but having the mailman walk from house to house in the snowstorm isn't????
We walk to our box and sometimes pick up the mail when we are on the way home from other errands. We've have a cluster box for over 20 years. I see no reason to have people manually deliver the arbitrary bills and junk mail to my door. It seems like a waste of time.
All the worlds indeed a
Can you move the box further away? I'm thinking that I'd like my mailbox moved into the industrial side of town. Now bear with me, I'll explain why. What's on the industrial side of town? Recycling centers. So? Virtually all of my mail goes into the recycling bin. I have a few pieces of real business that come in the mail. I could tell those companies to send it to a PO Box on Broadway (there is a street by that name here lined with shops, it's a nice walk). The rest of the mail would go to the box on the industrial side of town.
Now you're probably still thinking this idea is crazy. I'd still have to go across town, right? Nope. I could just tell the recyclers to get it, or... better yet, the USPS could offer "hole in the box" service.
They just lease a building next to the recycling center, cut a hole in the back of my box, and shove it all the way through. Problem solved.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Less service for a higher fee.
A winning combination in Fantasyland, D.C.
This idea is fracking insane.
I live a block from a high school in a suburban community. If you put mail at the curb, it will be messed with. It will also make it much more apparent when someone is not home. And it will make the streets--already a patchwork of wires and telephone polls--even uglier by cluttering the curb with mailboxes.
Here's a better idea--why don't they charge communities for to-the-door delivery? That way a town can decide whether to splurge for it or not.
Google will merge the self driving car technology it has developed with some robots from ai.mit.edu and complete the mail delivery from the cluster boxes to the door. But first it has to complete the robot that will open the mail and merge it with the OCR technology it developed for the Gutenberg project.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Really, the Post Office is the one thing we shouldn't care about losing money on since it's a necessary and constitutionally required function of government. When's the last time we complained about the military losing money?
What is a much bigger problem is the absurd amount of money losing ventures the government embarks on that it's not even supposed to be involved in.
Work Safe Porn
Go Postal does not have the same connotation as Go Federal.
The postal orifice had it's chance when the trial balloon of personal eternal email addresses was popped by corprat interests.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Before the Civil War, you had to go to the local post office to pick up your mail.
In 1863, Postmaster Montgomery Blair petitioned congress to "promote the public convenience" by providing free home delivery in cities, and argued - correctly, it turns out - that the resultant increase in postal usage would offset the delivery cost and yield a profit. Free rural delivery followed around the turn of the century.
Others at the time argued that whether home delivery yielded a profit was irrelevant, since government entities should be more concerned with civic duty than profit. It's a balance, for sure, but I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today, or at least to acknowledge the trade-off.
I rip up junk mail and send it back in the postage paid envelopes. The post office gets paid twice, and I don't have the mess.
In some small towns, there is no mail delivery.
I would prefer that the USPS grant everyone a PO Box, with automatic translation of Street Address to assigned PO Box. This would reduce the amount of letter carriers needed for a given zip code immensely. With that savings, parcel lockers and extended front desk hours would be within reach.
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
I'm a Canadian who has also lived in the US for a number of years.
I have had one of those "community boxes" in my Canadian home for more then 10 years (the subdivision was built with the community box model). Many homes in Canada don't get door to door anymore, certainly not the newer subdivisions. I check it on my way home from work every few days and its only annoying when some little bastard knocks it down and Canada Post takes at least a week to stand it back up (especially true when it becomes frozen to the ground).
While living in the US I had door to door 6 days a week. Great for getting your netflix BluRays but seriously who needs door to door 6 days a week when most of it is now bills and junk?
Loved this part: But unions say it's a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled.
Are the Elderly "disrupted" when they go to the grocery store? Are they unable to stop at the "superbox" on the way home? Is there some time commitment to opening the junk mail USPS delivers? Newsflash, Union leaders say anything (even it its stupid) to protect the status quo. The fewer unionized postal workers the less they take in union dues.
First thing the USPS could do is cut back, no one needs bills and junk delivered 6 days a week.
Next is convert to the superbox system. Some will complain but its a huge cost savings.
Considering its USPS, i'm sure they will put in superboxes and need to double their staff to manage all of them.
One thing i've always wondered, how come the newspaper is delivered 6 days a week for such ridiculously low rates, but yet Canada Post cant match the service level (i know when my paper will arrive, but no clue when my mailman will come) at substantially higher costs?
Perhaps Canada Post should outsource to the newspaper delivery people?
Dear USPS,
Please forward all photographs you've taken of my mail to my email address. This way, I can predetermine, for you, if I even want said articles of mail delivered to my address. I am sure precluding bulk mailings and advertisements from delivery to my address will save the USPS even more money.
On second thought, could you just open my mail for me before you photograph it? I can just read my mail in the photos and save you the trouble of delivering anything.
Thanks,
Bob the Recycling Dude
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/
Pointing to the highwater mark of demand from the 1990s (and the disparity today) as the reason why USPS can't pay its way is disengenuous. There is no rational explanation why today's situation is worse than the 1950s or 1850s.
Republicans see another workers union that they want destroy, so they made up absurd funding requirements to force USPS to drastically reduce staff. Its not much different than Florida Republicans requiring women to present proof of every name change (e.g. marriage license) for each and every licence/ID renewal in order to reduce an unfriendly demographic's access to the voter rolls.
a better idea would be to allow customers to completely opt-out of door-to-door mail delivery in favor of a completely electronic system that scans your mail and puts it in PDF format, and then you can manually select which ones get delivered manually, but otherwise it gets destroyed completely after a period of time (one year for example). There are already virtual mailbox companies that have been doing this successfully for many years.
Hmm never had that or even heard of a USPS mail carrier doing something wrong around anybody's house...
The same could be said of the now extinct paperboy.
Yeah, it's crazy that nobody will walk to get their mail. Except millions of Canadians do it every day, and have been for years. They don't get winter in Canada, do they?
The main difference between the two postal systems is that Canada Post is strongly discouraged to lose money. So when they saw mail volumes declining, they started acting to reduce costs. Every new neighborhood gets a community mailbox, where every house has a locked box in that larger group of boxes (what's called a cluster box in the summary). The mail goes there. The end result is that far fewer staff are needed to deliver the mail, which makes it cheaper. You can drop off letters to be delivered, and small packages are also delivered there (or delivered to the door, depending on the service level). In my small city, there's one big post office and two smaller ones inside pharmacies scattered around the city for if you want to mail parcels or pick up items too big for the boxes.
Because it's a Crown Corporation, management has some autonomy to enact changes like that, as the government can't step in as easily as Congress can (and has, in the case of blocking the end of Saturday delivery). The real problem here is less the USPS and more that the USPS isn't allowed to change anything without reactionaries in Congress interfering.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
They're bought.
Why should I be forced to subsidize some lazy people who _choose_ to live in a city where they experience snow flurries once in a while? I don't know of anyone in North Dakota or Minnesota who complains about having to get their mail from the curb. You think Buffalo has harsh weather? Then move!
The USPS could simply deliver all mail directly to Ft. Meade, MD. The NSA could then email us scans so we wouldn't even have to leave the house. Everyone would be a winner.
(note to NSA lackey scanning this: run this up the ladder and get back to me... you know my email address)
I'd be fine with curbside delivery. It would save time and allow mail carriers to remain in their vehicles. That would speed things up. I don't like the idea of mail clusters. That's how mail is done in housing projects here and it's awful.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I have a better idea... stop delivering mail. I'd pay the post office to stop dropping off junk mail at my door. I do not get ANY mail from the post office that I actually want or need. Everything of importance comes via UPS, Fedex or some other service because the post office is so ungodly unreliable.
Here's a money-saving tip for you: Stop delivering anything less than first class postage to me. They all tick me off, and I throw them away, anyway. You'll find you won't have much to deliver to me anymore.
You know, actually give the enough money to operate.
Just only hire mailmen that are trained track and field athletes then send them on foot. That's faster so they can cover more area and they can hit a house just as quick as a curb box. Then they stay super fit and healthy so the health insurance pool risk level goes down and their benefits get cheaper. It practically writes itself.
I've, um, never really had a problem with a pretty trustworthy guy sticking stuff in my door. Did you have some kind of bad experience or something?
I used to have a dog that saw it as her duty to bring the mail from the door slot box to the kitchen floor near the 'fridge, she'd usually wait by the door and grab it as the mailman shoved it in (after barking a cheery hello to him). Aside from the slobber she did a good job and never chewed up the mail, though at times she got distracted by something else outside and the letters ended up behind the couch when she was barking out the window. She'd have been disappointed without her "job".
Interesting that Australia Post has seen both revenues and profit increase in recent years then. Traffic to their stores has steadily declined as has traditional 'letter' based post - obviously less people send letters, but also less people get bills by mail etc also.
However parcel delivery has skyrocketed due to online shopping and they've used this to continue to build growth. There are other options they're running also (digital mailbox where they'll scan stuff that arrives for you, 24 hour access secure mail collection system) but prices overall don't seem too bad to me & the service levels are not horrendous either.
What is it that makes America so different?
that will not have the high costs of setting up cluster boxes as well As there up keep as well.
'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'
The idea that some mailman is going to walk up to doors in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to deliver the mail is just as crazy.
Here's an Idea. Lower the postal services wages. There is no reason to pay 30 an hour for somebody who puts mail into a box. or 25 an hour for a sorter. Pay them a telemarketers salary of 10 -15 an hour. This is where they should be. Of course middle and upper management needs to take a substantial cut as well!
I trek to the curb for my mail already, but I'd be more than willing to pay a little extra to get the bitch to CLOSE my mailbox on rainy days. I guess she just doesn't want to get her hand wet or something, but she always leaves the door open just enough for my mail to get wet. Sunny days she closes it completely.
I've complained to no avail. "We're the Post Office. We don't care. We don't have to."
In a way I really hope they go out of business - just to put that ditzy bitch out of work.
I live in an older neighborhood and my mail slot is actually next to my front door and drops into a coat closet in the house. I don't even have to open my front door to get the mail.
I remember when they started to bring these in to my part of Canada they were being referred to Super Mail Boxes but on the Canada Post website they are referred to Community Mail Boxes now. A super mail box, now there is something that you would want.
The first thing that comes to mind when I hear cluster box is clusterf*ck and who the heck wants that in their neighbourhood?!
Most utilities allow online payment. With this change, we can expect to see most "net-savvy" users converting to 100% digital and then ignoring their snailmail boxes ("good riddance, US junkmail delivery service").
---
Other misc things to consider:
Can the post office be held responsible for promptly fixing damaged mailboxes? Ever lived in an apartment complex? Every box at every apartment complex I've ever seen is dented and has wide and/or bent edges where someone pried each box open. People move to houses to get away from that crap.
Can the post office be held responsible for robberies on the way to the mailbox? Anyone living in a bad neighborhood the north knows not to go outside in winter when there's no daylight outside of work hours. Will the USPS pay for police escort to the mailboxes?
So all Rural people have to go back to driving to their post office to get mail? Yeah, this will never ever fly. It's nothing but mental masturbation. all AARP members will bitch to high hell about it and some congresscritter will cave in and kill it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The USPS is redundant and irrelevant. Nothing the post office delivers can't be delivered by the private firms, which I might add are cheaper and more reliable, at least for packages.
Letters could be 100% electronic since 100% of the US population has Internet access available to them. There is not a square inch of the United States that is not covered by at least one form of Internet access that is fast enough to take 100% of letter delivery.
The postal service is not really anything more than an advertisement delivery service anymore. And since they have a monopoly, why not just charge more for the service.
Because that $353 is to deliver 99.9% unwanted mail, so it should be profitable.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Actually, it was Republicans that passed legislation that made sure the USPS fully funded its retirement pension and medical coverage plans instead of borrowing that money to cover losses.
The GOP was saving the union, not destroying it.
Wait till your old, or injured or both!
Get off my lawn!
This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.
I use paperless all the time but the companies I pay do not have unfettered access to my accounts. I get a bill by email and I go to my online bank account and time a payment for a couple of days before the due date. No money comes out of my account without my initiating it. Paperless does not mean pre-authorized payments.
PS I also find it funny that you don't quote dates. For some people two weeks between getting a letter and the due date is "ridiculously short". For many that would be plenty of time. To make an informed judgement I would need three dates; the postmark date, the date received at your home and the due date.
In Australia, it has always been normal to have a mailbox at the front gate, regardless of whether you live in town or country. I don't believe anyone has an expectation that the postman will deliver to the front door.
In my case, it's a bit of a pain since my front gate is 2km from my house, but our mail-lady more than makes up for that by collecting as well as delivering mail. All I have to do is put my (stamped) mail to be delivered in the mailbox, and put any sort of flag on the outside. Not that I need to do this very often, but the option is so civilised as to be almost unbelievable in this day and age.
Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. 'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"
So the idea of someone walking to the curb to get their mail is crazy, but the idea of someone being out in the same weather for eight hours delivering the mail is sane?
Mailbox at the end of my driveway? No big deal. Door to door delivery is kind of silly, it's not like I don't walk to the end of my driveway every day anyway.
Cluster mailbox for the block 1000 feet up my 9% grade hill (or 1000 feet down, makes no difference)? F- that, post office. My neighbors and I would just join the hordes of people who drive to their mailbox.
Get Kate Middleton to deliver it. Everyone will get it.
The Unions are the ones forcing the USPS to cut costs. Every year the USPS starts off $5BB in the hole due to a stupid law that affects NO OTHER GOVERNMENT ENTITY (pre-funding pensions).
Its a huge slush fund not meant to help anyone but the crooked politicians play magical 'balance the books with phoney money we count twice'.
I'd be worried I would miss a jury duty notice or similar, and end up with a warrant out for my arrest. That is the only reason I check my mail now, government correspondence. And when my credit card expires and they send me a new one. Lately UPS has been letting USPS deliver packages the last leg, so I guess that counts too.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Seriously? Are people that god damn lazy?
In the town where I grew up, we had mailbox clusters for neighborhoods. Not just apartments and townhouse communities, but actual separate-houses-fences-and-yards areas. Oh, and get this, in the winter, we deal with an average of 14ft of snow annually. That doesn't stop anyone from walking or driving often as much as 1/2 a mile to the nearest mailbox cluster. It doesn't stop the elderly either, who sometimes rely on family, friends, and/or neighbors, but more often use it as an excuse to leave the house, even in blizzard white-out conditions.
Seriously. Walking to your curb isn't a huge deal. Better if it gets your fat, lazy ass off the couch, and may even help you be more fit and able to walk to the curb when you're older.
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Really, Ben Franklin was operating the post office on Sundays?
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmailus1.htm
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
But as someone who lived in what used to be a rural area:
Anywhere that didn't have a paved sidewalk up to the door only got mail delivered to the street.
And this house dated to the 40s.
A mile away in either direction and family members have houses that get direct to door delivery.
Regarding the mailbox+flag: We have that for the people who have mailboxes with flags too. However due to mail theft people rarely make use of that service anymore since AFAIK there aren't any standardized locks available for the mail carriers to use to retrieve mail meant for sending. (Not a big deal here since thre are post offices within 2-4 miles of anywhere you are in town here.)
US btw, so it sounds like the majority of 'Western European' cultures are pretty standardized in that manner. Anyone from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, smaller island nations want to chime in on what it's like there?
We had a cluster of mailboxes at the end of the block where I grew up, and that was back in the 1980's.
Personally I think they should reduce home mail delivery to two days per week. Hell, I'd be happy with delivery only on Sundays. There you go, USPS. I just saved you millions of dollars. You're welcome.
In Canada the "clusters" are called "super mailboxes". They've been here for a while, in subdivisions. Where I used to live, we had mail delivery to the door, and we had mail stolen a couple of times, not to mention it just being rather annoying (both to us and the mail delivery person) that our dog would bark when they came up the steps. The super mailboxes (at our new house) solve both those problems by (a) not requiring the person to be on our front porch, and (b) requiring a lock to open. When we get large parcels, they usually put an extra key in your mailbox, and that opens one of the large compartments where they can put medium and large boxes. That's convenient, and better than trying to leave it in an unlocked mailbox at your front door. As for having to "walk" to get your mail, it's only half a block away, and most people I see just stop their car there for 60 seconds on the way home. I pick it up the next morning when I'm walking the dog. Plus each one has a mailbox (for outgoing mail) built-in. Overall, I think it's a better solution, especially if it saves money.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I recall some time back when law enforcement and the postal inspectors were pointing out that cluster mailboxes just makes it easier to steal mail. Particularly as all of the mail is now located in one spot. So now we'll have an even higher density of mail to be stolen?
Why can't this shithole country ever function like a normal 1st world country. Just fucking allocate the tax funds needed to have a functional society!
That's true, up to a certain price. Above that price, it will be profitable. FedEx operates at that higher price point. At some point, the junk mail senders would stop using the post office. At that point, most people would get mail maybe twice a week. With 1/3rd as many stops to make, costs decrease dramatically.
I'm guessing neighborhood kids didn't put dead fish through your door mail slot when you were on vacation.
The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.
Call us crazy, but lots of people in Canada have been doing that for years. Oh wait, this is the US, right?
The idea that somebody is going to drive down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.
FTFY.
Postal service stops delivering door-to-door and instead delivers to curbside mailbox.
Postal service stops delivering to curbside mailboxes and instead delivers to cluster box a block away.
Postal service stops delivering to cluster boxes. Postal customers must go to local post office to send or receive mail.
Postal service closes post offices. Postal customers must travel to The Post Office in Lebanon, Kansas to exchange mail with other customers.
(P.S. I hate cluster boxes.)
From the summary:
But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses
Services may be funded both by user contribution or by taxes, or both. Saying USPS has losses is just ignoring the second part.
With such a way to present things, US army is also under massive financial losses.
All those middle aged women in blue wool shorts with the stripes down the side... in the summer.. They'll be all gone..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I don't see why the service can't be price controlled.
They could retain the current mailing rates for mail that is collated and dispatched only once a week, and introduce a new rate that is 5 - 10 times higher for mail that needs to be delivered in a 1 - 3 day timespan.
I haven't received time sensitive snail mail (packages and parcels excluded of course) in years.
Actually, it was Republicans that passed legislation that made sure the USPS fully funded its retirement pension and medical coverage plans instead of borrowing that money to cover losses.
The GOP was saving the union, not destroying it.
Read the article. No entity has ever been expected to fully fund retirement benefits 75 years in advance. Its a completely absurd requirement based on unfounded assertions about mail delivery volume causing the postal business model to go away.
In my neighborhood, our mailboxes are in clusters of 4. They look mostly like a standard mailbox otherwise. The support to hold them up broke on ours and I'm not sure who is supposed to fix it. Do I get together with my 3 other neighbors (I don't know them well) and ask them to pool money together to fix it? It would be different if it were on my property, but it isn't.
Until I figure it out, I'll just leave it alone.
I wouldn't mind this given that I would land up with a PO Box address. They want a ton of money per month for tiny PO Boxes around these parts.
Ok, as a formal rural carrier, I didn't have to do door to door delivery. We only delivered to boxes at the curb and clusters. We also have 'hardship' boxes for disabled residents, which are basically on house boxes, but they're very few, one or two per route. However, there is one major issue with this plan that only a carrier would understand, and I bet a city carrier would more understand. And that's street parking. If you can't get to the box at the curb in your LLV or personal vehicle, that mail is not delivered. It is held back at the post office to be attempted to deliver the following day. At least that's how it went for rural carriers. Since I drove a LLV doing almost a city route (750+ box route), I seen this quite a bit. I can't imagine how problematic this will be on very busy streets with parking. I would have to guess they would need to rely on cluster boxes heavily in these areas, but even then it won't be pretty. Unless maybe they can get the city gov't to do no parking zones around the clusters, but I doubt it.
How about providing a service like outboxmail.com. Don't deliver my mail at all. Instead scan it and hold it and let me pick the stuff I actually want delivered. Most of what comes to my snail mailbox is junk anyway so 90% of the time nobody would have to come to my mailbox. The only downside is it's just more stuff the NSA can get their hands on.
The fact that no other corporation or government in the world are funding their retirement benefits is perhaps one of the most monstrous, immoral things this generation is doing to its public servants and future generations.
Fixed that for you. Nobody funds retirement the way the USPS is being required to. It's a political ploy. That's not to say that defined benefit plans shouldn't be properly funded, but under the rules imposed its effectively impractical to do so.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've got a better solution. I removed my house mailbox 40 years ago as the previous folks living here were getting 2+ POUNDS/day of "Save the starving (enter something here) fund that were addressed to "Occupant" or my fav "Our friends at". I use my P.O. Box and only get two pounds a quarter at best.
I religiously make a trip to the P.O. Box on the first day of the month whether it needs it or not....
Could not be happier.
Soooo.... Mr. "Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers" you think people choosing to walk an extra bit to their mailboxes in the middle of winter would be crazy? As someone who has grown up living in Syracuse, NY (which, incidentally, receives an average of 24" MORE snow yearly than Buffalo, NY), I can assure My. Sauber that there are a good many folks who already *do* go farther than their front porch to get their mail in the winter. Oh! And by the way, Mr, Sauber, the letter carriers walk that far and farther. What does that imply about your belief and attitude towards the letter carriers youare supposedly chief of staff for? If I were a letter carrier I'd be insulted. Heck, if I were from Buffalo I'd be insulted too.
The customers of the USPS are not the people that receive mail, they are the people that send mail.
What a great business plan:
1) Identify the one remaining way average people make use of your service.
2) Find way to eliminate it or make it more difficult to use the service.
3) ???
4) Profi oh wait, they don't make a profit.
5) Go Go Postal Crisis! Go Go Postal FacePalm!
This is not a new way of thinking for the USPS. Years ago, they decided that they needed to push counter sales of items like gift cards, extra stamps, delivery approximation, packaging and other high profit value-added services. But the problem was, people were using stamp vending machines out in the lobbies too much and thus avoiding having to speak to a postal counter clerk. So the repair process went like this:
1) Remove stamp vending machines so the public is FORCED to stand in line to buy even one stamp. NOW we will upsell the fuck out of them!
2) Fire half the counter clerks to ensure the line -which now cannot be avoided- is literally out the door
3) ????
4) Profit? We've heard of it.
Not surprisingly, people who had any way of avoiding having to set foot in a USPS branch did exactly that. Counter sales didn't go up, because frankly, you can get gift cards anywhere so why would you stand in line for one? Stamp sales also tanked because (get this) people don't like standing in line, and they like it less when there's a huge line and ONE clerk working where there used to be three or four. And the one that's left is angry and surly because there's this huge line in his face all day.
The USPS never does anything that will actually encourage average people to use the service. They instead threaten to cut Saturdays, then delivery to individual addresses, and next who knows? The only customers (note, this is the first time I have used the C word at all in this post, for a reason) who are in any way catered to by the USPS are the big bulk and commercial mailers. That's where the USPS makes some small money and by and large the big mailers don't complain too much because they actually need the USPS to deliver that mail, so you pretty much bend over and take it when the USPS on-site clerk says "oh there's a PROBLEM with this mailing and we'll have to reject it, because the Form MIF-50 wasn't paid."
MIF-50? That's not in the DMM! No, the Mail Incentive Form $50 is not in the DMM. It's in your wallet, and needs to be in their wallet, you know, just to be sure the mail makes it.
Just remember, the USPS never does anything that makes it easier to do business with them. Anything that looks easier is a fraud or a trap and is designed to make their life easier at your expense.
Sig for hire.
No keys, now it is easy to steal someone else's mail. Where will the boxes be located, in the common area, what if there is no common area. Will it be in someone's front yard? Will it cause a traffic issues with existing neighborhoods?
This could apply to almost anyone could end up costing people large amounts of money (but not the USPS, I am sure of that, since the Postmaster makes the rules).
Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who has spearheaded Postal Service reforms, has introduced a bill that would also require cluster boxes for existing residences with an exemption for people with disabilities.
I don't really care about postal mail. Anything delivered to me that is worthwhile comes from a brown truck from time to time and I pay good money for it. I see no reason to be required to have a mailbox since all I get is spam anyways. They should just do away with USPS since I'm sure 70% of the mail that goes through it is spam anyway.
Every house I've ever lived in there's been a mailbox at the curb. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen a house where the mail is delivered right to the front door... maybe that's just an American thing.
It's not exactly a hardship to swing by a box at the curb to pick up the mail when I get home from work, since it's more or less on the way from the curb to the front door anyway. Has been the case in every house I've lived in. The elderly having trouble walking to their mailboxes is not an entirely unreasonable point, but if they have that much trouble walking, they shouldn't be living on their own for a whole host of reasons.
And hell, even at rural farms around here, the mailbox being a fair distance from the house doesn't seem to be a major problem for anyone. Sure a trip out to just check the mail might involve a motorbike, but in a typical day a farmer would be all over their property anyway.
> I honestly wonder if I am witnessing the decline of a once might country.
50% of Americans think so. All of the things that made the country great are being thrown out by people who want to improve things, but don't understand "don't throw the baby out with the bath water".
Either they they don't understand about about throwing out the baby, or they think it's always sucked and it would be best to trade our ways of doing things for any random untried idea. "I've never been proud of my country" Obama doesn't think America ever was great, so he doesn't mind tossing out everything we think made America great.
Why can't everyone just opt-in to have all mail automatically opened, scanned and emailed to them before being shredded and recycled.
User wins, Environment wins, USPS's bottom line wins.
So the new credo of the US Postal Service will be "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, except when we have to cut cost.
Sorry Guys but the unions logic doesn't fly. Yellowknife NT. gets block mail boxes and so does a vast majority of Canadians and we have harsher weather than Boston!
The claim of setting aside funds for pensions 75 years out isn't true. It's a rumor started for political purposes, by conflating two separate things.
USPS is required start investing money to be used to pay pensions for current employees. The main reason for that is that 25 years from now their revenue might be half of what it is today. So this year, they need to start investing to pay the pensions of people who are delivering mail this year. That's one mandate.
Here's the other. Suppose they have a current employee who is 20 years old. That employee will be colllecting a pension 60 years from now based on the work he does today. USPS is required to ESTIMATE, NOT PAY, how much they expect to owe todays's workers, for today's work, that they won't actually pay for up to 75 years. That's just common sense. If I make a promise today saying "when you're retired I'll pay your bills", I should estimate how much that promise is likely to cost me.
The assertion that the USPS is "buckling under massive financial losses" is incorrect. The USPS is actually profitable. Their problem is that Congress is playing accounting tricks with the money from the USPS in order to flip the USPS' profits into the general fund in order to make the overall budget look better. And now they're not only taking the profits, they're flipping so much money from the USPS that they leave the USPS with a deficit caused, not by the USPS, but by Congress.
For more details. http://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432
other governments definitely do this and most corporations DO FUND their retirement benefits, in many countries it is mandatory and is a serious violation of corporate law not to be funding it.
I would not find SPAM so annoying if they would just hold it for me at the Post Office until I went there to pick it up.
So I lived through 30 Minnesota winters, which I would say are more or less the same as Buffalo winters as measured by chilliness of the walk to the mailbox, and for most of those 30 years lived in places where the mailbox was a reasonably long hike. Long enough that you didn't skip putting on a parka. People have been walking to the mailbox for generations in ex-urban and rural America. It's not crazy. Having somebody walk up to my front door with the mail is what feels kind of odd to me.
My flather-in-law, to this day, has to walk to the *next* *state* to get his mail. Of course, that is because the road in front of the house is on the state line, and the mailbox is across the road, so while the mailbox technically *is* in the next state, it's only about 100 yards of walking to get there.
It's "madness" to expect someone to walk to the curb? What do you call continuing to operate a tax funded agency that loses $15 billion a year in a country that is basically insolvent?
Much more often from these. They suck balls.
We've been doing it the cluster way for years in my neighborhood, and it was our choice. Far be it from a way for the post office to save money, it was a way to secure our mail. Us homeowners came together, pooled our resources, and bought the big armored mail station because we were tired of getting our mail stolen. It was about $70 per household about 15 years ago, and has since survived a collision at respectable speed by a drunk driver.
I think the furthest house is a half block away. (It's at the intersection of two streets, so covers a half block in four directions.) I don't understand why someone would not want to do it this way. It's a better, more secure box than any of us could afford on our own.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Postal banking is very common in many countries. To save the Post Office let the Post Office provide a reasonable range of basic, low fee, CFPB-approved consumer banking services at every post office: international remittances, international money orders (they have some, but bring back near-global coverage), and simple interest-bearing deposit accounts with debit/ATM cards and bill paying. Your debit card would be compatible with government benefits (e.g. SNAP), and cardholders would be strongly encouraged to include their photo on the front. Card-not-present transactions would be allowed but only with a generated one-time use virtual card number. Cards would have chips, and magstripe transactions would be limited to $200 per day unless the account holder overrides the default. Limit cash deposits and withdrawals to the postal ATM to reduce the safety risk at post offices. No loans, no overdrafts. No foreign transaction fees. Simple Roth IRAs would be available but you only get one investment choice: your age-appropriate Vanguard "target" retirement index fund (assuming Vanguard bids the lowest cost to the consumer). No business accounts, no joint accounts, but you could designate a payable on death (POD) beneficiary. Accounts would be federally insured. To avoid "too big to fail" problems there would be regional postal banks, but there would be no cross-region postal ATM fees. Regional banks would be organized something like: Atlantic Postal Bank (PA, DE, MD, WV, DC), Cactus Postal Bank (TX, NM, AZ), Dixie Postal Bank (VA, NC, SC, GA), Gulf Postal Bank (FL, AL, MS, LA), Harvest Postal Bank (MN, NE, ND, SD, IA), Lakes Postal Bank (OH, IN, IL, MI, WI), Middle Postal Bank (KY, TN, AR, MO, KS, OK), Oceanic Postal Bank (AK, HI, GU, VI, PR, AA/AE/AP, MP, AS, FM, MH, PW), Pacific Postal Bank (CA, WA, OR), Rockies Postal Bank (WY, CO, MT, UT, ID, NV), and Yankee Postal Bank (NY, NJ, and New England).
Hi. I live in a "rural" area as far as the post office is concerned. Their classification is a bit wonky.
I live near a major tech/employment center (5 miles away?). I live within walking distance (10-15 minute walk) of about three grocery stores and two strip malls (opposite direction from the businesses, at that). There's a semi-major freeway 5 minutes from my house (on surface streets, with stop lights) and a couple of 55mph roads nearby as well.
This is not rural. It's definitely suburban, but it's not rural. Don't think post-office "rural" means what it does in casual conversation.
Tell that to that to the retired public union workers of Detroit.
Got Code?
Y'know, all this concern for little old ladies trying to navigate their front steps would mean a lot more if it was coming from the AARP rather than the postal worker's union.
The Attack on the USPS continues by the 2006 law forcing them to fund pensions of the UNBORN immediately. This created the budget problem from which they suffer despite record throughput (packages up, mail down... a threat to FedEx and UPS as they adapt... you connect the dots.)
Killing Saturday delivery and closing offices went too far and was stopped so without that "solution" new remedies are being explored. This one is going to upset even more people, it is unlikely to be allowed to succeed either. So we wait for the next painful solution to be shot down... Until we fund it with taxes (again, as the founders did) or we allow them to go back to the sane pension funding they had or eliminate the pension or... completely privatize the pension? (if they didn't do that one already - in which case, it's not really a pension is it?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The US government is artificially creating a loss, by forcing the USPS to pay out 75 years worth of pension funds out of their account; in other words, they are being required to pay the pension of future employees that haven't even been born at.
Sounds like basically an income steal to me!
If the USPS were a private company, their management would not be taking such ridiculous actions.
Basically, the USPS is being mismanaged, and then they expect the customers to pay for the mismanagement by accepting a lower quality service.
Which is only maybe even possible due to laws prohibiting competing against the USPS.
How about you link a reference to something from a org that is not interested in blaming the Republicans for everything?
Linking to thinkprogress is pretty much the same as linking to something off the dailykos or whatever the fuck obama's campaign site is called.
This is due to the method of accounting as required by the US Office of Personal Management. The USPS is required to fund only the future liability of only current or former employees.
Allow me to repeat for those liberals repeating thinkprogress, huffington, etc.
The USPS is required to fund only the future liability of only current or former employees.
Where does this 75 years line come from? It goes back to the US OPM. If a male employee is hired at age 25 and has a life expectancy of ~79 years, that means the USPS would have to project retiree health benefits for this employee for about 54 years in the future. But, due to the US OPM guidelines for accounting, this 54 years is stretched out to 75 years. Theoretically this 75 years could count for an unborn liability, in actuality, the USPS only has to account for current and past employees.
Um... I live in Buffalo. Several key points.
- I have curb delivery. Many in the area do.
- Buffalo does not get nearly the wintry weather or snow accumulation that many folks imagine. New England has been faring far worse of late. Green Christmases are pretty normal.
- Walking 50 feet to get your mail is not a major hardship.
- If you do get a pile of snow, wait a day, it'll be gone.
The problem with your demand is that people run out of things to link to on this and some other subjects.
In other words, why don't you address the substance, instead of trying to shift the debate to the source? Even from across the Atlantic it is obvious that the Republicons have a hard-on hate for any kind of public service.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
It's a threat. They are doing this to make ending Saturday delivers more acceptable. They know that this will never get enacted and the termination of Saturday deliveries will happen instead.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Why don't we just let the price of stamps rise to where it makes sense, instead?
Because that would allow the USPS to continue operating smoothly, and is thus illegal.
The goal of both parties of Congress is to sell off the lucrative USPS to private interests. In order to do that Congress and its owners must trick the public into believing their valuable USPS is a failing, worthless business.
The USPS cannot - by law - raise the price of stamps by anything more than the "rate of inflation" the government announces. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a politically-motivated number, since higher rates of inflation reflect badly on politicians and cost the government money in payments keyed to CPI. So the USPS is legally prohibited from raising prices to reflect its costs, and even the amount it is allowed to increase is artificially low.
The USPS is prevented from doing what every other business is allowed to do - change its prices to reflect changes in its costs - and then the results of this Congressional restriction are used in Congress as an example of how the USPS is inept and inefficient and must be privatized!
This legal constraint on the revenue side is matched by a legal requirement for the USPS to wildly increase its expenses. The same law restricting increases in USPS revenue requires the USPS pre-fund 75 years worth of retiree health benefits - while private businesses are being allowed to completely renege on even existing pension agreements.
(There's also a little backstory here about Congress mandating these huge front-loaded payments. The USPS had been overpaying into its pension fund and was actually going to be able to reduce the amount it needed to pay, but because of unified federal budgeting, USPS payments into its pension fund counted as revenue to the entire government. Congress required these huge payments from the USPS to make sure Congress didn't have to reduce its own spending. But that's a detail, like robbing a person already being murdered for their bodily organs.)
The goal of this simultaneous restriction on revenue and increase in costs is to force the USPS into bankruptcy and paint the USPS as an expensive failure so the public will accept having another valuable public resource sold off at fire sale prices to private interests.
Said a shorter way, what "makes sense" from the standpoint of the public makes no sense at all from the viewpoint of those who feed off the public.
Everyone is so fat they can't even get there own mail few feet away from there house. Most will use a car to drive to it LOL
Many, many years ago, public services and government-controlled monopoly companies had a mission to provide a service, not to make a profit.
Then, privatization was "the thing" to do and politicians were frothing at the mouth about estimated profits. Everyone with 2 working brain cells already had the "too good to be true" feeling, but since we all know politicians, they went through with it.
Other then others I don't think that private or public ownership is the deciding factor, but whether your focus is service or profit.
For Europe, the result is higher prices with massively reduced quality in the areas of postal services, trains, energy and several others. It appears to have worked so-so (i.e. no drastic negative changes) for public transport (busses, underground, etc.) and it actually does appear to have worked in telecommunications.
The rage right now is buying these things back. I would love to make a final calculation at the end, about what this whole stupidity has cost the taxpayer, in other words: How much money was transferred from the public to some private companies. And then sue the fuckers for it and jail them. I just fear that won't happen.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The times of paper letters is over. That's what e-mail is for. We've had legally valid digital signatures for years now.
And packets are too big for the mailbox anyway. Besides: It's not like the thing is safe in any way. Any idiot can steal everything inside. Packets should ALWAYS be handed over face-to-face, and with as signature (preferably digital, to be *actually* secure). Otherwise delivery didn't happen.
So quit living in the past: Throw away your mailbox today.
I did, at the beginning of this month. I also threw away my phone numbers. E-Mail and XMPP+Jingle (or in emergency cases Skype)... both with end-to-end encryption if possible... is the new standard.
Everything else, like ENUM DNS, answering machines, FAX numbers, SMS, this here, etc... is trying to improve the oil lamp in a time of quantum dot (laser) lighting.
Ditto for printers, paper and books by the way. Apart from art projects and love letters.
With the decrease in the volume of mail, it is obvious that charging for premium delivery services is a necessity. The obvious answer is to have cluster delivery as the default and have a charge (say $200/year) for doorstep/curbside delivery.
Other options to consider are to only deliver second class/low priority items once or twice a week. Most postal communication would not regret/miss the cutback in the number of deliveries, and those that do could again pay for premium rapid delivery.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The other day I bought a beautiful bass guitar on ebay. The postal service carried it from the opposite coast and delivered it to my door for less than $30. How would this be done if home delivery were canceled? You can't cram packages through some mail slot, and let's face it: Thanks to the internet, there are lots of packages being shipped around.
So why not take the man out of the equations and get everyone to install a package dock on their roof?
the self organising drone swarm acts as the on foot postman and ferries the packages/letters from the central depo to your house.
24/7, returning to base to charge and only taking breaks when there weather contitions prevent the drones from flying..
Deploy the flying monkeys!
Continue the research.
I think they mean "same number of customers in less time". Considering that the only people who don't currently get mail delivery are in some extremely rural places where people are miles apart, I doubt they're going to use this cost saving measure to provide delivery to MORE customers.
Several decades ago the way the mail was delivered was as follows... A van drove through town dropping off a mailman at the corner of each block. By the time the mailman was going up and down the block the van would be back to pick him up. Each van carried 7-10 carriers. Why the heck can we not go back to doing this again? It would cut down vehicle costs, automotive maintenance, etc... The only time you'd need more vans would be during the christmas season. Also, I remember quite well that when the Post Office asked for permission to raise rates one year, congress approved. Two weeks later it was announced the top 25 people at the Post Office split several million in bonuses. Hmmm...
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Excellent service!
Here they just send a mail and/or SMS that they tried to deliver, but failed. They never actually even tried to deliver of course.
I guess they deliver while they have time, and when time runs out they drive back and spams the remaining recievers with failed to deliver messages. The postal people, that only deliver papers, not packages, then put a physical paper with that information in at the next office day.
Smart! We'll never find out! :-)
USgov mandates more broken hips for elderly shut-ins, with increased Medicare costs vastly eclipsing USPS savings.
Or we could use email. but you know, postage and what have you.
I'm going to move into a new construction later this year. Since there are only one or two empty lots on the road and they are unlikely to be built on any time soon, can I request the mailbox cluster to be at the end of my driveway?
Mail carriers are often a pretty good set of eyes for keeping a daily check on neighborhoods. They can see if something is off or if someone isn't getting their mail for awhile. Frankly, I kind of like knowing that there is a dude stopping at my door every day who knows my area and knows me. I like it a hell of a lot better than knowing a thousand little shitheads and school kids and identity thieves and meth addicts are passing an arm's reach from my personal and financial things every fucking day.
When I was growing up (not very long ago), we still had this whole thing about "neither rain or sleet nor snow".
Or maybe Congress can rescind the order that the USPS has to fund their pensions up front. It's one thing to have to record the liability (like most businesses do). It's a whole different thing to actually have to pre-fund the full amount up front. Not even congress does that for their own pensions, nor do corporations. Most analysts see the move as a means to break up the postal union.
If congress wants the USPS to operate more efficiently, then they should quit messing with how the USPS works. Does it cost less to deliver non-profit, governmental, political and religious mail? No, then don't discount it. UPS and FedEx don't. Same thing for bulk mail. The problem is that the USPS doesn't have the final say on its rates and services.
The USPS has submitted numerous savings plans over the years, but congress has denied most of them. Congress should decide if they want a cheaper or a more efficient postal system. The two are not neccesarily the same.
The fact that no other corporation or government in the world are funding their retirement benefits
I'm sorry, but you have that completely wrong. 1/4 of private companies that still offer pensions fully fund them. And all of the others have to count their pensions as a liability on their balance sheet. We should be doing that at the federal level as well. We do in fact owe people more money than we state, and most of it is unfunded.
The USPS requirement is indeed aggressive. The main flaw was not letting them raise rates until the pensions are caught up. We could have also just ignored current retirees and required funding for just current employees... that would have been a lot cheaper and with some luck the Post Office would have survived long enough to see the current retirees through the rest of their lives.
I still maintain it is immoral to (a) promise someone a benefit you have no way to provide them, and (b) saddle future generations with debt for salaries and benefits. It's one thing if you build a bridge that is going to last 50 years and you take out a 30 year bond to pay for it. It's quite another to pay for your own comfort at your descendant's expense.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I have been saying that they should move all the door-to-door to cluster boxes. It is crazy that we continued door-to-door when the USPS is having issues. I will say that they should continue to mail-box routes if they are in the country. Basically, I do not think that we have that is a huge part of their costs. IOW, it is expensive, but far far fewer of them and with separation, it actually is better to have one vehicle do this than to have multiple vehicles come in for mail. Perhaps switch that to every other day if they want to save a few bucks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't care how many people are exploiting a bad system, it's still a bad system.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Who do you think grows the food sold in the market 3 blocks from your apartment? Why should they miss out on mail and Internet access just because they grow the food that you eat? And no, children don't choose their parents' lifestyle.
They have agents in every neighborhood in the US that are perfectly capable of spying on Americans under the pretext of "delivering mail".
You think I'm joking?
I have had the neighborhood mailbox clusters for the past 12 years - ever since I moved to a new neighborhood. Saddly the street they put it on was never designed with it in mind and it is a busy street. The mail service and the city planners really need to talk about these neighborhood mailbox clusters and their placement.
I do not see the big deal, over seas I got mail once a week (every saturday in fact). For mail service once a week would be fine too.
His state/province has to subsidize farming to an extent because he and other farmers in his state/province has to compete on price with producers in other states/provinces and in other countries that are subsidizing farming to a similar extent. Besides, it's in the tax collection body's interest to have a uniform mail service to reach households that owe tax.
The problem of elderly and disabled requires a final solution. I propose the creation of a series of concentration apartments in the areas infes..plag.. inhabited by those groups of ..people.
Now excuse me I have to hurry to make a speech in an institution selling the finest Austrian beer.
So how do you pick up parcels that you have ordered through the web?
Please see about proper mailbox support
It's a video, and a transparent div is overlaying the Flash player, preventing me from clicking the Flash object to start it. Is there a transcript?
while they're at it have them install a paper shredder beside the clusters to save me the trouble of shredding the 90% of my current mail that ends up being junk.
99.999% of all mail I receive 'to my door' is junk mail advertisements that the postal service makes 'bulk mail delivery' money on. Either ban advertising by snail mail or charge more to deliver bulk mail ads.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Walking to the end of the driveway wouldn't be a big deal.
Please allow us to enroll in a 'first-class only' program for $1/year that allows you to trash any mail destined for my address that isn't personally addressed to me and isn't a first-class letter. Please continue to charge the sender for the cost of the junk mail, just never deliver it, and don't let them know who's enrolled. You could even make money off recycling all that non-1st class mail.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I live in a historic neighborhood that is designated as such by the state and recognized on the National Register of Historic Places. Our neighborhood is a walking route with high housing density where all of the mailboxes are on porches or otherwise attached to the front of each house. Starting a year or two ago, the USPS started sending letters to newer residents explaining that their mail service would be discontinued if they did not move their mail box to the sidewalk. Of course, having a mailbox on the sidewalk is a violation of the historic code. A few folks actually complied until the neighborhood organization intervened and the local postmaster recognized that we are a historic neighborhood and will always be a walking route.
I'm foreseeing us having to fight yet another round of "move your mailbox" with the USPS, and if we don't win the results will be ugly. And I mean literally ugly. Without a massive redesign of our sidewalks and roads, there simply isn't a way to move mailboxes from the houses without making the sidewalks unusable and deteriorating the historic look and feel of our nationally recognized historic neighborhood.
I understand this won't be a big deal for most folks and I'm embracing a slippery slope fallacy, but if we're going to eliminate a historic fixture from 400+ houses, why are stopping someone from tearing a 120 year old Victorian to build a stucco McMansion?
It would seem we have to add 'mail' to your list of boxes, but in acordance with the government way of counting, still keep it at '4', because this is the one we'd have to walk to the curb to get to.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
We walk to our mailboxes at -30 here in North Pole, Alaska. I guess I've been up here so long I forgot that mailmen used to actually come to the door! Now that I think about it, as a kid we used to have snowball fights with the mail main when he came by. He loved it! And he had good aim.
Ugh, that bad news their trying push centralized mail. What happens someone sends a package? I'd rather have mail box at post office than be neighborhood mail box. It could be missed, Some of us can't use UPS all the time.
While we are eliminating and reducing waste", how about whittling down the House of Representatives from 435 to a nice even, workable number, let's say 100. Just like the Senate. Seems that we waste more time and money on these ineffective jackoffs with their expenses, staff, travel, salary and other benefits. I'm sure we could save almost $1Billion a year out of the budget. Then again, if we didn't have the House, then the USPS might not be in such a heap of financial trouble in the first place.
I'm surprised they don't have you drive to the Post Office to pick up your mail. Guess how much a savings it would be to get rid of those mail trucks and delivery people! Maybe that will be their next plan.
Most mail in Florida is delivered to a curb-side mailbox that effectively and efficiently delivers the daily mail. The issue at hand is we have taken the value of the USPS for too long for granted. Compared to countries traveled and seen those countries' mail services, we are the best. People who want to receive door step mail that have a physical impairment should have the choice to delivery. Those that don't should either pay for it or walk/ride horse/tractor/ or provide an errand job to a responsible teenager.
There are delivery companies that will pay for leased access to the mailbox. It would offload bulk mail and magazine subscriptions and reserve first class for the USPS. I love this: "The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'" But it's perfectly sane for postal workers to do that daily?
I wouldn't want a group of mailboxes, too tempting to rob them.
The job of carrying mail is one of the last that lets you be outside.
Like the now extinct job of reading gas and electric meters these people are the face of the company.
Forcing investments is a piss-poor plan i.m.o. since the market is full of sizzle with hardly any bacon
I would not count on retirement from investments. Pay me more now and forget promising me stuff later, I don't believe you anymore.
The most plausible reason I've heard for privatizing the post office is to kill one of the biggest unions there is left.
Unions can mobilize, they can affect elections. Getting rid of that power is the most logical reason to disembowel the current system.
As an employer and a private business owner would you want to be paying people's retirement after you've retired?
That is an unreasonable expectation. People better start thinking for themselves and saving for their own future.
I lived in Maine for about 20 years. We didn't have door-to-door delivery; we had mailboxes at the end of our driveways, along the road. The same is true where I live in New Hampshire. I lived at a house with door-to-door delivery for a year, and it's stupid. Mail carriers shouldn't have to walk up everyone's driveway just to get to the house-attached mailbox or slot. Put mailboxes along the road and be done with it.
Mail proces have gone up a lot in recent years, and they were talking about stoping Saturday deliveries, and now they have this new plan to cut even more cost.
Detroit bankrupt (along with several other cities). States and cities shutting down street lights. Food prices going up while quantity and/or quality goes own.
Yeah, the economy is recovering alright.
In a subtle way , the new Go post service(https://gopost.usps.com/go/EPLAction!input) of USPS is headed in this direction.
Hugh Pickens a first time submitter? Are you fucking kidding me?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hugh+pickens+site%3Aslashdot.org
Not only has that click-whore submitted stories here for years, it would seem that all knowledgeable people have fucked of, since exactly *no* comments out of 762 mentioned Hugh Pick-me-pick-me-click-me Pickens.
Well, it's been nice, thanks for the fish, I'm outta here. Fuck you all.
"will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled" If we let smaller problems blockcade the larger, then nothing will ever be resolved.
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
Wow! Really? At my parents house they had 'curbside' delivery to a mail box and had to walk all the way from their front door to the mail box at the street (gasp!) since 1959 until present. Where I live, we have had the neighbor mailbox cluster since 1984. So, this is new? I guess maybe in urban areas they still have door to door, but it's not been that way in the suburbs I've lived in for a very long time.
Dump the unions, pay the low skill workers what they're worth (~minimum wage) and get rid of the pensions.
According to http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/ every two weeks 1.8 billion is paid in salaries and benefits. That is 46.8 billion dollars. They get 65 billion dollars in revenue according to that same page. So 72% of revenue goes directly into compensating workers.
If the USPS has 522,144 career workers, that means the average compensation per worker is 89,630$ - but this number probably doesn't account for the wages paid to temporary and seasonal workers, so it is likely the average cost per worker is somewhat less than that number. I can't find any specifics for the overall amount of compensation spent on seasonal workers but from personal experience they pay between 10-14$/hr and you get zero benefits.
In the long term, keeping all the unionized pensioned senior people longer is just going to increase the amount of money they'll have to pay them later when they retire/get laid off. Make a change they don't like, let them all strike, and fire everyone who violates the attendance rules just like walmart does. Boom, done. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/06/23/2200081/labor-group-walmart-fired-five-workers-for-participating-in-strikes/
Yeah, it'll never happen. Instead the USPS will slowly wither away and die. Private corporations will end up picking up any profitable service USPS loses with service cuts and price hikes to support their massive employee base. Ultimately everyone loses.
Mine gets delievered to the mailbox, so about 12 inches to the left of the door ;)
Curbside would be fine, altho i have no idea what to do with 8 or so cars parked in the street as the alley parking kinda sucks around here. The little old lady next door prob wouldn't even mind much altho she isn't 90-years old, she wishes she was only 90 :O
Altho, after 80 years or so of service to the door she probably won't be real happy either!
(house is like a time travel machine, most of the interior is older than you)(I believe she was born in my house and moved 'away' when married..away being 50ft to the east)
I live in a condo and each building has a group of small boxes.. Where exactly will they put packages that do not fit in the box? They just going to leave it there for anyone to take?
Junk mail it has almost able to stay afloat at 32 cents. The FedEx and UPS model has them charge more, not deliver junk mail, and not go broke. That also works. The proof is it FedEx is doing it.
one big difference is under the $0.32 model they're promising employees pay that they aren't able to pay (the pensions). Charging more, like FedEx, they would be able to fund the pensions and not be delivering junk mail.
It's the GOP that's determined to shut them down and is forcing them to pre-paid retirement benefits the next 20 years that's breaking their budget. Retirement benefits, for employees they won't hire for another two decades. The problem is political and ideological, not fiscal. The GOP wants to destroy the USPS because it's a) government that functions and b) unionized.
Why can't they charge the junk-mailers more money?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usps#Delivery_timing
So yes, they used to deliver 7 days a week.
Wtf I thought we were going to have to start going to the post office for our mail. Way to make it inconvenient AND expensive for everybody, including you, USPS...
Can you be sued if you don't pick up your mail? I would refuse to retrieve mail from a centralized box as a form of protest. The last thing I need is for some teenager to go around breaking in to the corner box or jamming the locks with superglue.
I live in Brazil, I don't have a house you insensitive clod.
Captcha: NSA
Why would someone who is already retired or close to retirement want their employer to start a fund for employees who haven't even been hired yet?
Why would a postal employee with years of service ahead want to see service cut back because a crisis was manufactured in the above manner?
Its completely irrational to support such a scheme, unless your goal was to undermine public services and send the business to greedy corporations.
millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb
Shouldn't that be "millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to get into their SUVs and drive to the curb"?
Nothing is going to change for me. Mailbox is at the curbside already. Now, for my neighbors across the street and a few others, yeah, this is going to impinge on them.
Bryan
the solution to solving the USPS financial problem is to charge monthly(or quarterly or yearly) for home delivery, because it isn't reasonable to charge what it actually costs per item of mail. if you don't want home delivery, then you would have to pick up your mail at the local Post Office.