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Postal Service Starting To Use Mobile Point of Sale Tech
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Postal Service is conducting a pilot test of mobile point of sale technology in 50 facilities, using a modified iPod device and printers. During the holiday season, the 50 facilities testing mPOS processed more than 102,000 transactions using the technology."
But but... it's Apple man. It's an iSomething product! That's why it's so newsworthy!!
Otherwise yeah, mobile point of sales with portable printers have been around since the Flinstones...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Many USPS locations already have a kiosk with a scale and a vending machine type arrangement to do that, without the need for a postal employee. Or you can get a USPS account (which is free) and print your own bar-coded package labels with postage. Just like FedEx. There's even a discount for that, and you get free tracking.
When you use either of those methods, no postal employee has to do any data entry.
Because you can't Instagram your rampage with a mere cash register.
Yes, since it's the government, it just has to be inefficient! We need to have FedEx and UPS show USPS how to send letters from Florida to Alaska for 46 cents.
I too am sick of and disappointed in the inaccurate and unsourced assumptions that presume government processes are less efficient that for-profit processes. My unsourced opinion is they're both about equally inefficient, but the for-profit solutions cost more.
Yeah show me which shipping method UPS or FedEx offers that comes close to $0.46... Maybe they can do it for $4.75 or so, but no cheaper!
It's awkward when they're open such a short amount of time, and yes, there usually is quite the line at closing time so they're effectively open until 4:30 or 5:00 anyway.
Oh, I watched them slam their metal window shade at 04:59:50 on a long line of Christmas package shippers a few days before Christmas. Many of them had been there for half an hour or more because they only had one person running a window. Oh, and I went to check my PO BOX at 1PM on New Years Eve and they had closed at noon. Not that I had any end-of-year business to deal with, of course. Every other retail establishment was open until 6 in my area.
I won't miss them when they're gone.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Specifically, what the parent is referring to is the retiree prefunding required of the USPS. They have to fund health benefits for retired employees for 75 years in advance, far beyond what any other company or government agency has, or chooses, to do. Consider that the USPS is currently funding health benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet, and you can see how absurd this concept is - yet Congress still decided this was a smart idea. The USPS appears to be floundering to the outside world, but that's because of that particular $5.5 billion payment they have to make yearly, not due to some competitive pressure, or environmental change like "lower delivery volume". AFAIK, at the beginning of 2013, they had about $44 billion banked for these retirement benefits.
There is evidence that government run out heavily regulated operations can be more efficient. It depends on your definition of efficient though.
For example national energy production was a lot cheaper before it was privatised. It is now not efficient at making profit but worse if you need electricity, which everyone does. We end up paying for new infrastructure through our bills that is then privately owned and used to extract even more money from us. It's horribly inefficient.
Companies like British Telecom used to build new infrastructure when it was needed. Now they are nationalised they do so only when they can make money, so our broadband is slow and crap. Here in Japan my phone has 150mb up and down, while the absolute best the UK has to offer to your home is 120/10 (with shitty traffic management to make it pointless).
Government run operations are far more efficient for consumers and the country/economy as a whole when any kind of essential service or infrastructure is involved.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
On the other hand, I went to a major retail chain (formerly renowned for their catalog) and the guy told me he "had to" use his Apple-powered checkout gadget, because of some kind of quota.
It took at least 5 times longer than if he had use a good-ol' cash register like the one right next to him, on which he still had to type a couple things, and which printed my receipt. Actually, it was the machine 8 feet away which was linked to his toy, making the whole thing patently ridiculous as he went back and forth. He had to scroll on the tiny apple screen to input data which has dedicated keys on the productivity-optimized dedicated hardware.
I'm glad there wasn't a line, because this was a perfect example of not-an-upgrade. As an "extra cashier" tool during black Friday, maybe it's useful, but the place was empty and the registers were running.
I looked at doing something like this at work a while back. It would have been similar to what they have here, an of the shelf touch screen device with some extra hardware attached. One of our competitors used an iPod but it turned out to be to fragile in the field, and because our customers often wear gloves for warmth and safety the capacitative touch screen was annoying.
We considered some rugged Android devices with resistive screens. Development would have been easier too because Android has a better USB stack and more standard hardware (no proprietary interfaces), but in the end sent with a completely custom system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"of-course it's a government program, so there has to be a level of inefficiency", this is true of any program, it isn't special to government. It is just that government is more conspicuous due to it running on taxpayer dollars. The citizenry will complain vociferously about "waste" in a government program but will happily fork over much more as a percentage of their income for things like cable TV, internet access, gasoline. Why? Because they see themselves as getting a direct benefit and hence it okay. Curtail spending on NHTSA, the people who figure out how the public wrecks its cars, and when the rate of accidents goes up, people will not notice, yet it is now more "efficient".
One other thing government has to contend with to a greater extent than private industry is the scale of the programs. Some are extraordinarily large, and require large sums of money. When that happens, the dear American citizenry, well a certain segment of them, will devote much time and effort bilking the government programs. Managing a large operation is quite difficult, companies generally can only get to a certain size before it becomes apparent that breaking them up would be more efficient. Government does not have that luxury. They are tasked with managing an entire program or several at the same time.
Across all government services, government is quite efficient, and some like NASA and DARPA have given back much more than they have received. Some are inefficient but not in ways that are easily amendable. As soon as changes are attempted, there will be special interest groups devoted to explaining LOUDLY how any changes will mean the End-O-World of Biblical Proportions, dogs and cats living together. One would think the Pentagon would be ripe for making more efficient. The Air Force says it doesn't want plane X, Congress forces them to take plane X forgetting the Air Force must now provide the infrastructure for plane X. The F18 program couldn't be made more efficient because parts were made in Mass. where Ted Kennedy prevented any changes. So if a liberal Democrat cannot even be relied upon, what hope is there for the rest of the government programs. And streamlining those programs would create new headaches given their size and their complexity just due to unintended consequences. And then the government can expect to be sued because Grandma lost her dentures due to Medicare changing the way it pays doctors for eyecare.
You know what? That sounds like a very successful test of using iThings for point of sale. Not that the iThing was successful, but I bet your experience helped the retailer understand that those devices sucked for the task. At least temporarily.
POS providers are under constant pressure to "put mobile POS systems in my store" or "the Apple store uses iPods, why can't we?" Apparently every marketer associates being cool with the use of iPhones. They parade a profound lack of knowledge of human interface design, usability, workflow, and productivity as some kind of badge of honor, like "we're breaking through traditions and making our cashiers cool." Then when someone finally runs a real-world test and proves that cashiers will slow down by a factor of five; they have no place for shopping bags, hangers, flat surfaces for folding sweaters, or receipt printers; the sleds triple the bulk and weight of the devices; and the customers are pissed off at the long waits and longer lines, the marketer puts his tail between his legs and slinks back into his cubicle, having failed at the task of bringing "cool iThings" into the stores. The marketing executives blame the failure on the project management, on the project team, or on anything that went wrong, but never seem to learn the failure stems from the limitations of the human interfaces required to actually sell stuff.
Twelve months later, the next fresh face in charge of marketing repeats the cycle. It never ends.
Now get off my lawn.
John
The USPS _can't_ send a letter from Florida to Alaska for 46 cents (49 cents as of 1/24/13). It is able to because it CAN send a letter from Midtown Manhattan to Lower Manhattan for a lot LESS than 46 cents. It's a cross-subsidy, made possible because the USPS has a monopoly on First Class mail. I think that it's a GOOD cross-subsidy (from a public policy perspective), but let's not pretend that it's a comment on USPS's efficiency or lack thereof.
That Japanese phone you mentioned at 150Mbps symmetrical - what carrier is that? Docomo, which is 82% privately-held? Softbank, 100% private?