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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.'"
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.
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?
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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 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?
Right, because we have never had horrible horrible results when we de-regulated a service and made it for-profit.
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.
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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
The better suggestion would be to quit letting those in government who know nothing, and who's only goal is to disrupt everything the government is doing in an effort to destroy the federal government, from fucking up the USPS. If it weren't for republicans passing that fucked up bill requiring USPS to pre-fund retirement 75 years out, the USPS would be making a profit.
...of course, and even better suggestion would be to treat those idiot trying to destroy the federal government as treasonous traitors and insurgents.
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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.
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).
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.
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.
First, both parties are on the fiduciary needle. They just want to spend all that money on slightly different things. Why is it that we never hear of Democrat plans to reform and cut social program waste, and never hear of Republican plans to reform and cut military waste?
Second, Clinton had a Republican Congress practically the whole way because of his completely botched attempt to pass national health care that scared voters into a Republican Revolution in 1994. He had to work with them in order to get a budget passed, and they weren't going to accept anything that wasn't balanced or in surplus. Thus, the government shutdown (well, and Gingrich being an egotistical ass).
Third, it's real easy to talk about the surplus that Clinton left behind, and forget that immediately after he left office, the whole Dot Com bubble imploded. Oh, and he was the one who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall which set the table for the Bear Stearns / AIG collapse. Bush had a small version of what he left for Obama to deal with right out of the gate, and then a massive stock market dive that we like to call 9/11/2001. Oh, and he had a Republican majority in Congress who forgot why they were sent there, so they started spending like teenagers that found a suitcase full of money. Bush is not without blame though - the two wars that he put on the federal American Express absolutely didn't help things, and everyone seems to forget that TARP was his walk off shot - for some reason Obama gets tagged with that one.
There's plenty of blame to go around - none of these politicians can get the stink off of them, but that doesn't mean they won't try. The whole world shines shit and tries to pass it off as gold.
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