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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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
Face it, we don't get any mail anymore that can't wait a day.
I do. One of my credit card companies is trying to force me to go paperless, so they're delaying the processing on the outgoing statement, putting a ridiculously short due date on it, and then applying late fees when my check doesn't show up in time. A couple of other companies, including my city water department, are pulling the same stunt.
This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.
Oh, I should add, to keep from getting socked with a late fee two months ago when I realized my statement hadn't come, I called these slime on the phone and paid that way. They screwed up the account number, the payment was refused, and instead of notifying me of the problem in a timely manner they simply added a late fee to the next bill. And since the previous bill wasn't paid, they sent the matter to their collections department, so I started getting calls once an hour at 8AM in the morning. The third one actually had a customer service person (predictive dialers should be outlawed), who asked me for account number and other identifying information before she could tell me why she was calling. Right. Sure.
When I spoke to a supervisor about the problem, she claimed that they did try calling me to tell me about the failed payment. It was "in the computer". I promptly picked up my caller ID box and scrolled back through the last month's worth of calls and found nothing from them and told her so. Her response? "Let's move forward...". And I pointed out that the reason I was calling them was because THIS months statement hadn't arrived yet, either.
So, yes, a day can make a difference.
The USPS has to go to each address each day, to see if there's any mail to be picked up. Customers could conceivably go to a cluster only once every one or two weeks.Until you account for this asymmetry, your accounting is defective.
That you are jealous of those who have earned a better life than you, is neither a good argument nor an indication of good character.
Different is not better. I live in a city in a nice apartment, a 2 minute walk to the train that takes me to work (2 or 3 days/week I make the 30 minute bike ride to work), a thousand acre park nearby where I can do my morning runs and attend concerts and other events throughout the year, a grocery store 3 blocks away, over a dozen bars and restaurants within a 15 minute walk from home, a real butcher and baker within a 10 minute walk. I have a car, but only use it on weekends and since I only fill up the tank once a month or less, I don't care if gas is $3/gallon or $6/gallon.
Trust me, I don't dream of a sprawling rural lifestyle where I need to drive 30 minutes to town to buy food when surprise guests stop by for dinner. Some people *do* want that lifestyle, but I don't see why I should subsidize them.
Aside from this obvious partisan bullshit you just spewed, your argument is essentially "the USPS is the only entity required to actually act in a responsible manner with regard to pensions - thats unfair to the USPS!"
No, its not unfair. What is unfair is the fact that many other public sector workers are likely to get fucked out of their pensions. Detroit isnt the first city to declare bankruptcy because of their growing pension problem. The list is growing, and within 10 years it will be hundreds of cities (its already dozens.)
Wake the fuck up. Public sector unions never should have been able to negotiate pension deals that werent based on the immediate funding of them. The public sector workers of Detroit, in concert with the local officials, were trying to steal from future (often too young to vote, or not even born yet) tax payers when they negotiated their packages 20+ years ago.
Now onto your partisan bullshit. You are claiming that Detroit is a conservative city? Really? There is no city in the world that has more influential unions. Detroit is a union city, ruined by union policies.
"His name was James Damore."
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.