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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.
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.
Without this "almost free" mail, another segment of the economy collapses. Print shops would disappear, for one.
Look at it this way: Advertisers hire people to create copy and design layout, which goes to print shops that buy ink and paper, then bulk send the result via a postal service to my home - where I retrieve the contents and promptly deposit them in the recycling bin.
But it doesn't end there! Then the waste management company comes to collect those, deliver them to paper mills that supply the print shops... Cue Elton John! It's the "Circle of Life"!
Somebody is gainfully employed at every stage of this pipeline, and it is no more or less absurd than any other form of socially connected human endeavour. Everything is social policy, like it or not. Wait on the mail? Only at an overall social cost which, like the beat of a butterfly wing, may be of inestimable consequence.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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?
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.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Right, because we have never had horrible horrible results when we de-regulated a service and made it for-profit.
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.
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.
Steve Ballmer has already done that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
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...
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.