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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.'"
How about un-funding the massive health fund payments that they were forced to make?
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It's not a problem in apartments, where it is safe and easy to get down to the mailboxes. However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away. Do you want to drive for 12 minutes to just get useless ads? 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.
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?
Right, because we have never had horrible horrible results when we de-regulated a service and made it for-profit.
Overall it's more efficient for one guy to go from house to house (especially in a vehicle designed specifically to make the efficient) in a ring topology than for a bunch of people to each drive to a central point in a star topology. The mailbox clusters can work well with areas designed around them from the beginning (so you naturally pass the cluster on your way in/out of the neighborhood).
Why don't we just let the price of stamps rise to where it makes sense, instead?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They are not trying to save the Post Office, they want to kill it. If you remember, it was the Republicans in 2006 that passed a "reform" bill that forces the Post Office to put $5 billion a year into a pension fund to pay for pensions 75 years into the future. They want the fund filled within a 10 year period. The Post Office already has a pension fund and other worker funded retirement plans. The Republicans created the problem, and now they are using the shortfall as reason for attacking the Post Office. Post Office jobs are good paying middle class jobs. If the Republicans succeed in killing the post office, hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost, including businesses that depend on the Post Office and the buying power of postal workers. It would also hurt UPS and FedEX. They use the Post Office for the last mile in regions they find unprofitable.
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However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away.
You mean like these...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Canadian_rural_mailboxes.jpg
Canada's had them for decades. Although those are from the 70s... new ones look more like this:
http://www.rcmpveteransvancouver.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_0206_edited-1.jpg
I'm having a really hard time working up the level of apparent outrage you have over this.
When did this happen? During the time when the Republicans last had control of all three branches of elected government? No. What happened was an astonishing turn-around from budgets with surpluses that could have been used to pay down the debt, to huge budget deficits. Most of it was funded on tax cuts without performing corresponding cuts to services to balance the budget. While this may have been justified on the hypothesis that "starving the beast" might work, the reality has been that the richest have paid much less in taxes and the bill for the difference has been passed on to the next generation, by which time the people who should have been paying into the system for the last couple of decades will have retired. It was very bad financial and demographic management. At least one important Republican of the day actually said "deficits don't matter". It was an idiotic move.
So, you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little skeptical of Republican's dedication to balancing budgets, because the history of the last 2 decades shows no sign of that when they had the opportunity to enact them. On top of that, they also managed to lead the country into the worst financial crisis in decades, then handed the keys to the next guy and tried to pin it all on him as if he created the problem, while obstructing every attempt to fix it.