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.'"

Comments

Already happening

[JackieBrown]

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.

Re:Already happening

[Grishnakh]

You don't seem to understand how the USPS works. The USPS is NOT part of the government, it's a government-owned corporation. That means it has to run its finances exactly the way every other company does: it brings in revenue from customers, and then spends that revenue on expenses (operating expenses including salaries, capital expenses, and employee pensions). If they hire more people, then they have to raise their prices to pay them, which means more people switch to shipping stuff by UPS/FedEx, or they just don't send any mail at all. The USPS gets a lot of its revenue from junk mail, unfortunately. If they jack up the price of sending junk mail, then the junk mailers will send much less of it, which equals much less revenue from the USPS to pay all these new employees, which means they go bankrupt.

The USPS is, in fact, quite reluctant to hire ANY new employees at this time, because it costs so much, since they have to pre-fund every employee's pension fund for the next 75 years, thanks to the stupid law Congress passed in 2006 (with both Dems and Reps, so save your partisan bullshit). This is why the USPS has been moving to shut down Post Offices and instead encourage more franchise operations, called CPUs (contract postal units); the franchise operations act as postal clerks and handle normal mail duties like any PO location, but they're separate companies and not USPS employees so the USPS doesn't have to deal with any pensions for them.

Re:Already happening

[ganjadude]

The USPS wouldnt actually be in the red if it werent for the stupid rules congress imposed on them a few years back where they are the only federal entity that has to have 100% retirement funds paid for (my understyanding is the industry standards are 10-15% funded) In fact they were doing fairly well until the change.

Re:Already happening

[dkleinsc]

It's worse than that.

In July 2006, Republicans passed legislation that required the USPS to come up with $5.5 billion to pay for retirement benefits for people who hadn't retired yet within 6 years. 6 years later, conveniently right before the 2012 election, the USPS was able to cough up the money but ended up with a $0.5 billion shortfall in its budget without drastically reducing service. So, during the sequester fight, these same clowns made the USPS pre-fund the retirements of people expected to retire 75 years from now. In other words, Republicans have demanded that the USPS fund the retirements of workers who are 5 years from being born.

As far as I can tell, the Republicans in question believe that the USPS is not something that should exist. It may be because of campaign funding from FedEx, UPS, etc. Or it may be because they believe that anything that the federal government does domestically is overreach - this seems odd though, since creating a postal service was one of the specific things Congress was charged with doing in the Constitution.

Re:Already happening

[hawguy]

How sad.

They could instead, go to MULTIPLE door-to-door deliveries per day.

Until the 1950's the USPS *did* do multiple residential deliveries per day. In the 80's, I worked at a business that had 2 deliveries/day and sometimes we could send a letter across town the same day - send it out in the morning pickup and the other business would receive it in the afternoon. (didn't always work out that way, so we still had to courier documents that had to be there the same day)

http://about.usps.com/publications/pub100/pub100_018.htm

Carriers walked as many as 22 miles a day, carrying up to 50 pounds of mail at a time. They were instructed to deliver letters frequently and promptly — generally twice a day to homes and up to four times a day to businesses. The second residential delivery was discontinued on April 17, 1950, in most cities. Multiple deliveries to businesses were phased out over the next few decades as changing transportation patterns made most mail available for first-trip delivery. The weight limit of a carrier’s load was reduced to 35 pounds by the mid-1950s and remains the same today.

Re:Already happening

[fahrbot-bot]

The USPS wouldn't actually be in the red if it weren't for the stupid rules congress imposed on them a few years back where they are the only federal entity that has to have 100% retirement funds paid for (my understanding is the industry standards are 10-15% funded) In fact they were doing fairly well until the change.

You understand correctly. From USPS Healthcare Expenses (and other sources):

Since 2006, the Post Office has been legally required (by Congress) to pre-fund health benefits for future retirees (for the next 75 years) at a cost of around $5.5 billion a year.

Re:Already happening

[tftp]

If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.

This is so obviously untrue. Math to the rescue. USPS requires one customer per mile. Let's say there are two, and the road (dead end) is 10 miles long. There are 20 customers. A carrier has to travel 20 miles to make all deliveries if he starts at the mile 0 (and let's posit that the USPS office is there too.)

Now, if the carrier doesn't deliver then every resident has to drive to the USPS office. Let's even disregard the waiting time and focus only on miles driven. The fist customer drives one mile (0.5 mile * 2.) The second customer drives 2 miles (1 mile * 2). The third customer drives 3 miles. An obvious arithmetic progression here (every next resident has to drive extra to his neighbor and back.)

Rumor says that the sum of an arithmetic progression is often found as n*(a1+an)/2. Since the a1 is 1 and an is 20, we suddenly learn that all residents have to drive 20*(1+20)/2 = 210 miles per day!!! Compare to 20 miles that the carrier has to drive. If we force residents to drive to their mailbox cluster (under those conditions, that are typical in rural areas) then it would generate a lot more pollution and wear of vehicles.

Of course there is one simple solution to that - let's outlaw rural homes and make everyone live in 100-storey skyscrapers; Gil the Arm visited one of such buildings, as I recall. Arcologies are very efficient this way. And who needs all that nature anyway? Humans are born and bred to live in caves of steel and eat yeast products. They don't need all that dusty and dirty nature.

Re:Already happening

[TrollstonButterbeans]

If they go ahead with this method, I would be tempted to cancel mail service. Those who I deal with have email, and I can pay them electronically.

You wish. And I wish.

Try it and see what cruel things the government does to you. The IRS people... The motor vehicle department... the lawyers ... jury duty. Automated speeding tickets. Rare random demand letters from the government about X, Y or Z (i.e. registered mail).

Then again, maybe if enough people did it even with the occasional headaches, the government would be forced to adapt.

My mail is almost exclusively advertising crap, I pay everything online.

Re:Already happening

[xigxag]

Back in the day when the government pretended to actually govern, the way it worked was that you would vote for some things you didn't like so that you could get a coalition to pass some things you did like. And so yes, the dems agreed to vote for stupid riders like this so that they could get support for their own little pet projects, in this case, keeping the country from shutting down.

Of course, recently one party has pointedly announced that it doesn't actually need any bills to pass at all, so it has no incentive to compromise whatsoever. Deliberately sabotaging the smooth working of the government absolutely is a partisan issue and the republican leadership proudly admits it.

Re:Already happening

[Uberbah]

If you haven't noticed, everyone everywhere has a similar budget crisis with fixed-benefit retirement plans.

No one has a similar budget crisis because no one but the USPS is forced to fully fund health care and retirements 75 years in advance. No public entity. No private entity.

To pretend otherwise is misleading at best.

Funding was based on 90s-boom-era assumptions about stock market performance that spent the last 13 years not happening, and pension plans in general are in serious trouble

Err, no. What's really happened: state and local governments have constantly underfunded pension funds or "deferred" payments so they could cut taxes, primarily for the wealthy.

Leaving that fact out is as much journalistic malpractice as talking about the "woes" of the USPS while leaving out the 75 year requirement which only applies to the USPS.

Re:Already happening

[g1powermac]

As a former rural carrier, I can tell you that your carrier should not be doing that. Plus, he/she would most definitely want to pick that mail up during mail count. The more outgoing mail counted means possibly more money in their pocket as the route will evaluate better. And yes, twice a year or so we have to count the friekin mail. . .not a fun prospect. Luckily management takes a good chunk of the heat counting all the packages.

Re:Already happening

[hawguy]

Nobody should subsidize anyone, IMO. Note that I said not a word about prices that USPS may charge for delivery to certain locations. I'm all for them charging more; that would give me a reason to review the deal with USPS.

So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?

However many people live outside of cities just because they need the space. For an example, look here. Can you install such an antenna in your backyard (that you don't have anyway?) Other people have other interests, and often their needs exceed what a standard city home, with a one-car garage, can offer. Where do you set up your machine shop? Where is your nanoparticle-emitting 3D printer installed? Where do you do your welding and plasma cutting? You can't seriously suggest that human interests must be constrained to a morning jog in a park and a bar in the evening. I don't even know where any bar can be found in this area, since I have no use of them. But I have a good list of metal warehouses, electronic parts suppliers, and know every Harbor Freight within 100 miles.

Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative, I've managed some good contacts with a 3 foot diameter magnetic loop, and I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results... take it to the beach for even better results. If you want to use a big antenna, then you can use a remote station either through a club, or rental. If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own (along with instant access to others that are experienced at using the equipment and can help out when needed).

Common in Canada

[danbob999]

My mailbox is something like 400m away.

Re:Common in Canada

[Mashiki]

Not really all that common in Canada actually. It's the trend in new subdivisions built in the last 15 years, but most people still get their stuff to the door.

Save on cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut out the middle man and send it straight to the NSA

Re:Every other day delivery is much better.....

[Lucidus]

To discourage such shenanigans, many states require that creditors allow a certain minimum amount of time - typically 14 days - between actual receipt of your bill and the payment due date. You might want to look into this.

Re:Every other day delivery is much better.....

[tftp]

This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.

I pay all my bills electronically. Wells Fargo has a "Bill Pay" service where you can instruct the bank, online, to either transfer the payment electronically (if the service company registered for that) or to mail a check (if they haven't done so.) Both payments are one-way and one-time (unless you want them to be recurring.) The receiving company does not have an "unfettered access to my bank account." Some companies offer automatic withdrawals, but I decline such offers for the same reason as you do.

Another good aspect of this service is that all payments are registered at the bank. If some service company mixes up the paperwork, I have the proof that is pretty heavyweight - records of a major bank that document everything that happened to every sum of money that moved around. This service is free (to me, at least - don't know if they tie it to some other conditions.) I would be better off even if it costs 45 cents per transaction - because that's what a stamp costs, and an envelope, and my time to fill it all out and then worry if the check gets lost. Many services signed up for e-bills; this means that no paper is involved, and no humans either.

Re:End the monopoly.

[damnbunni]

Not to all addresses.

Private carriers can do a better job for less money, but only because they aren't legally required to deliver mail to everyone. If you let the USPS cancel all the rural routes, their costs would go way down, too.

Re:Considering the Constitutional Nature....

[kenj0418]

Please point out where in the constitution that it requires mail delivery. Thought so....

Article I, Section 8.

Did you not peruse your copy before posting that?

Did you? Please show where it is REQUIRED. I see where it AUTHORIZED. Maybe it's just that Congress has been ignoring the idea of being limited to only what they are authorized to do for so long, people don't even understand the concept anymore.

The Congress shall have Power To...establish Post Offices and post Roads...

For reference, this is what REQUIRED looks like:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same...

One major problem. . .

[g1powermac]

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.

75 years is false. Conflating two separate things

[raymorris]

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.

Re:ps more details

[arobatino]

The correct figure is 50 years (according to section 8909a of the PAEA), not 75. The PAEA does not specify 75 years anywhere at all. See here and here. Given that a postal worker can start working in their late teens and retire in their 40s, a 50-year requirement is perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, as the first link says, once you've gotten enough people, even "journalists", to repeat an unsubstantiated claim, there's no killing it (not even here at Slashdot, where people like to believe they check their facts). In this case, the false claim was apparently first made by the NALC and the NRLCA, two postal carrier unions. Neither of them has ever substantiated the claim. The NRLCA merely says it's "widely cited" (of course, that was the plan). The NALC simply refuses to respond to requests.

The rumor that the PAEA was a Republican plot is also false. This was before the 2008 recession, and total mail volume peaked around 2006 (although first class volume peaked in 2001 and was already dropping), so at the time everyone involved (Republicans, Democrats, postal management, and postal unions, with the possible exception of the APWU) thought the prefunding was affordable. It passed with bipartisan support. For the NALC's opinion of it at the time, see this. Note the almost total praise. The only criticism was a now completely forgotten provision that requires injured postal employees to wait three days before qualifying for Continuation of Pay. The NALC has never actually claimed that it was a Republican plot, though it now serves their purposes for people to believe that. They don't have to, there are enough left-leaning bloggers to do the job for them (along with spreading the false 75 year figure).

Re:Every other day delivery is much better.....

[Rockoon]

If those pensions were fully funded, then they would not be considered a debt that the city owes.

You have been lied to. Detroits pension funds are valued at $5 billion right now. The unfunded estimate is another $3.4 billion that the city currently owes. Thats only 60% funded no matter how you slice it.

Those that claim that Detroit had a 100% funded pension system in place were doing creative accounting, such as adding in future payments from the city as if they were real, and ignoring the method previous payments had to be made.

Not only will the city not be making the future payments that would make the funds solvent, this city specifically is notorious for not making them. In 1991 the public unions had to go to court to force the city to pay money into the funds. Fast forward past a long string of other pension funding issues, in 2005 the city had to borrow $1.4 billion to catch up on payments to the funds. The city was then on the hook for that $1.4 billion plus interest on top of the continuing problem of not being able to make payments.

Guess when those "100% funded" calculations are from? Right after the city borrowed that $1.4 billion to precisely meet its unfunded obligations. Thats creative accounting, and the people that told you that it was 100% funded were cherry picking the start year also. The city still owed that $1.4 billion which it didnt have, so now instead of the funds not getting that $1.4 billion.. the pension funds wont get $3.4 billion. Amazing how stuff works in reality.

Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes.

[afidel]

First it's 30 million households, not 30 million people, 30 million households is between 90 and 120 million people or roughly a third of the US. Second, I think the carriers representative is stupid because millions of people in the upper midwest already go to their curbside mailbox to pick up their mail during the winter, everyone around me is 300+' from the road and none of my 80+ year old neighbors has a problem with it.

Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes.

[meglon]

Again, being a stupid fucking ideologue makes you useless to any conversation.

Reagan ballooned the deficit. Bush Sr tried to change course, but was held back by stupid fucking idiot conservative ideologues. Bush Jr was a complete fucking moron, and his tax cuts did nothing but funnel more money to the wealthiest people in the country. IF Bush Jr.s tax breaks would have helped, there wouldn't have been recession in 2007 because we'd have more fucking jobs than the entire rest of the world. They didn't, and we didn't. Stupid fucking ideologues can't fucking look at reality and see what's happening.

Bush had a choice... a 5.7 trillion dollar projected surplus which could have been used to pay down and off the national debt, OR be a fucking idiot and squander that and keep the national debt. Fucking stupid ass republicans ARE the reason we have a national debt.... THEY chose it.

Stupid fucking idiots usually make the argument that it was Clinton had nothing to do with the good, that it was all the republicans who helped the economy then... those same people are too fucking stupid to answer the question on if that were the case, why is it the whole thing went to shit as soon as a republican was in the white house again.

The day Obama took office, there was a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit projected for that year. The follow year even higher... that year being Bush's last budget. Bush kept the "deficit" low, but pushed the national debt up a huge amount by intentionally lying to everyone. He kept the wars off budget, as well as homeland security spending. Now, the deficit is falling, fairly dramatically, again. It took a democrat to come in and fix the complete fuck up that is republican policy.

And honestly, coming from someone defending Bush... the Bush who ignored a security briefing in the month before 9/11 about an impending attack, and who later would say he didn't consider Bin Laden a priority.... i'd say you trying to drop Bush's stupidity onto Clinton is just fucking childish. Then again, childish bullshit is about all republicans are good for. And for the record... 9/11 happened on Bush's watch.

Here's the whole fucking point though, because you don't seem to have enough of a fucking brain to understand: USPS is in crisis BECAUSE OF a republican bill where they have to fund retirement out 75 years in advance. No one, anywhere, other than a fucking idiot republican, would think that's sound money management. If not for THAT BILL, that fucking stupid ass republican bill, USPS would be posting a profit.

Quit being a useless fucking idiotic ideologue.

Re:Every other day delivery is much better.....

[Rockoon]

Are you shitting me?

By 2005 the city had accumulated $1.4 billion in missed pension fund payments. They didn't have that $1.4 billion so had to borrow it through the issuance of bonds (aka promise of payment.) That is nothing like having $1.4 billion in assets and then borrowing against it. The city literally did not have the $1.4 billion. That was also before the recession so you dont get to cite it as the reason for Detroits problems. Full stop.

Secondly, there arent hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around wallstreet. There arent even hundreds of trillions of dollars swirling around the entire planet.

Thirdly, you are an idiot if you think that I would support that Quantitative Easing shit.

You see someone that argues that Detroits problems is the overly strong union influence, and just assume that someone against a strong influence of labor on governments would naturally be for this quantitative easing shit, right?

Yeah.. sorry pal.. you are repeatedly wrong. Wrong about Detroit's problems, wrong about Detroits Pensions, wrong about the amount of money on wallstreet, and wrong about what I support and do not support.

When will you admit that strong, well backed arguments begin with research rather than declarations. You don't pick a cause and then find a problem.. you pick a problem and then find the cause.

I have absolutely nothing against private unions, and my only beef with public unions is that legislators are allowed to negotiate with the money of far-off-in-the-future tax payers. It should be illegal, as in taxation without representation start-a-revolution-illegal. All public pensions should be funded immediately with no promises at all about future benefits, because such promises can only be kept by unrepresented future people.

I have a big beef with the FED. The FED should be abolished as unconstitutional. oh, and BTW, the FED is not "the feds" -- the FED is not a government entity... hell, its not even owned by the FED like the USPS is. You should have at least known that before going off about quantitative easing.