USPS Ending Overnight First-Class Letter Service 713
New submitter cstacy writes "The United States Postal Service will be closing half of its processing centers this spring. Currently, 42% of first-class mail is delivered the following day for nearby residential and business customers. But that overnight mail will be a thing of the past, with delivery guaranteed only for 2-3 days. About 51% will be delivered in two days. Periodicals may take up to nine days. (Additional delays beyond this may come into play when Congress also authorizes USPS to close operations for some days each week.)"
Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
Best solution... (Score:5, Interesting)
Get Congress to allow 3 day a week delivery on residential routes (and maybe commercial routes), Mon-Wed-Fri for half, Tue-Thu-Sat for the other half. Still offer daily delivery to post office boxes. Anyone who thinks they really need daily delivery can rent a PO Box and pick it up daily.
They could have undone the pension requirement (Score:5, Interesting)
This just sounds like someone wants to kill the USPS and loot it.
Get rid of the pre-loading of pensions for 75 years as required by Congress, and they'd be a LOT closer to solvent - and no need to have slower packages.
My mailbox is filled with bulk mail! (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to ask that the post office only deliver once a week. And that should be the day before garbage/recycling day. 60% of the mail I get goes straight into recycling. The next 30% goes into the shredder and into yard waste bin.
We get so little mail which is direct and important correspondence any more that we only check our mail once or twice a week. Every few months the mailman puts a slip in our box saying we have to go the post office to pick things up because our box is full.
We had 9lbs of mail last time we picked it up. We kept two letters out of everything (2oz).
The problem is not with their service, rather, they have discounted their service so much for things that people don't care about that it has degraded and made the delivery of important items a secondary item. Those who say "they make all their profit on bulk mail". I argue, if they didn't have to stop at EVERY BOX and transport TONS of material every day, they should be able to deliver the first class mail much faster and require half the staff.
And talking about staffing, when they closed a mail processing center in the midwest recently, I saw that nobody lost their jobs. Instead, the unions said the employees took new jobs and were "forced" to deliver mail door to door.
I have no sympathy.
Re:Netflix (Score:4, Interesting)
totally depends on the region, some hubs are great, some hubs play forklift hokey with your packages, take a guess and flip a coin
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to get too off topics, but that's something I never quite got.
As society gets larger and more spread out there are certain services such as the USPS/Fire dept that will become a nesesity reagrdless of their bottom line.
Re:The USPS is *not* a traditional business (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Netflix (Score:4, Interesting)
Let the free market succeed where the USPS only exists by monopoly.
No, USPS is no monopoly. If you think you can deliver letters across the country for less than half a dollar, you're free to do so. And unlike the USPS, you're not required to do so.
And therein lies the problem - USPS, which is a private company, doesn't get to fight against other companies because laws and regulations hinder them. Which is fair enough, but then We The People need to foot the bill for this extra service we demand of them.
My advice: Nationalize the postal service[*].
The government owned and run postal services of many other countries do pretty well at low cost.
Where they have privatized them, the expenses have skyrocketed and service has taken a dive.
[*]: As well as any other essential services now run as private companies. The US Mint and the USPS are good starters, but there are dozens.
Re:"People are still...." (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Netflix (Score:4, Interesting)
Let the free market succeed where the USPS only exists by monopoly.
Yep, without a low cost alternative to UPS, FedEx and DHL, prices will all of a sudden drop through the floor.
That was sarcasm in case you didn't get it. The invisible hand is only ever preparing to pull down your pants and give you a wedgie.
The USPS needs to get rid of it's bad, underutilised services and focus on it's core, money making units. Australia Post has managed to compete well with private couriers and are keeping up to date with technology as well as offering new services. Here lies the success of Aus Post, they diversified and now only 50% of their revenue comes from postal services, of the last 5 times I went into a post shop only 1 time was to post something. Why bother posting a cheque to the power company when I can pay it at the post shop (grandma still hasn't figured out how to pay online, but she can give the money to the clerk at the post shop), hell, what we used to call the post office is now the post shop because it's become more of a shop then an office.
If I want to send something across Australia in 24 hours with guaranteed delivery, I'll pay a courier to make sure it gets there on time. I have to do this with some documents and even data as 6 GB takes a long time to transmit but can be contained on 2 DVD's. But if I dont care how long it takes to get there and just want the cheapest option, I'll take Aus Post. I have to ask why the USPS didn't restructure like this years ago.
Don't know what you'll miss... (Score:5, Interesting)
Overnight delivery? We're used to four to seven days, even in town.
Saturday delivery? We lost that in the seventies.
Mail pickup at your rural mailbox? I'm assuming we don't have that either.
Most amazing to us though was that people used USPS to send important things, and assumed that they'd arrive, and on time. No way do you do that with Canada Post.
Convergence probably is the ticket (Score:5, Interesting)
For the past 9 years, my kids have had media center PCs in their rooms... no TV signal as it isn't important. From collecting seasons of TV shows, they have an assortment of roughly 1500 cartoons on their PCs which they can watch by clicking a few buttons. My daughter has a 22" TV as a screen which was handed down by mamma when she bullied me to give her a bigger TV in the bedroom. My son has a 24" BenQ screen with some Logitech speakers. Their computers are their TVs, video game consoles and web browsers etc... I can safely say that with the exception of maybe on show a night before bed... lasting about 20 minutes, they never really watched TV... well except when visiting houses with technonoobs.
On the top floor, I have a laser/led projector that gives me a 110" screen and a sound system able to do the room it is in justice. It's connected to a media center PC where we often play games we buy from Steam or movies we buy from iTunes and I often find myself web browsing from the couch there.
On the bottom floor we have a 46" Sony LCD with the cable box which my wife watches reality TV on.
All of us have iPhones, we have two iPads and I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate) which I use as a PC for Windows, Mac and Linux development as well as watching films, playing games and pretty much everything else. These are our books. I am entirely unable to throw away a paper book on principal. So, I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have received a single piece of mail in the past 13 years which was addressed to me other than a bill. I haven't received a bill in the mail in about 6 years as they come through email. The one piece of mail I received was actually a paper based Nigerian 419 scam presenting itself as a letter from a law firm.
We get out mail on any of the screens in the house. We get our movies entirely electronically. We get our games and music also electronically. If we want to watch broadcast TV, we do it through a streaming web site. If we want to listen to the radio, we do it through a streaming site. Of course, we have a sling box setup just in case someone calls and says "You have to turn on channel 9!" But, it's collecting dust.
I just opened a new bank account inside the U.S. (I'm an American abroad) and I was in utter shock how ridiculously paper based the U.S. still is. I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages? They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that. In the end, they agreed to let my dad send them a bank check or money order for $1 to get it open. They also required a color photocopy of my passport picture page and social security card. It wasn't good enough to e-mail them. They had to have genuine photocopies. So, I scanned them, sent them to my dad and he mailed them to the bank.
I didn't have a social security card anymore and although I provided them with my number, they needed proof it was mine... so I asked the american embassy for a letter saying so... it was printed out and signed. After all... somehow a piece of linen stationary from 1975 which was printed in blue ink by a cheap press and then put into an IBM electric type writer is obviously more proof that the number is mine than me saying so.. DUH!!!!
Raise the price on junk mail, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
95% of what the USPS delivers to my mailbox goes directly into the recycling bin. This is no great loss.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, it's deceptive because the nationalised postal services have a mandate to provide universal service, while private companies do not. That is, they need to be able to deliver first class mail to the most remote rural Danish island, the same as they do to downtown Copenhagen. This means that you pay more (with your national service) for simple deliveries to subsidise the more difficult ones.
Privatising (or even liberalising) postal services can lead to several bad consequences. The most obvious would be this situation: the national service is still mandated by law to provide universal service. They still charge more on simple urban deliveries to balance the books. A private service comes in and competes only for the simple jobs- they refuse service to anywhere tricky. As all their deliveries are simple, they can massively undercut the national service on these jobs, depriving the service of it's main revenue stream. Therefore, either "non-simple" jobs become massively more expensive, or taxpayers need to step in to subsidise, or the service goes bust and you lose universal service.
The situation in the UK is even more daft. The Royal Mail is still a monopoly, but they're now required by law to sell their "last mile" delivery capabilities on to competitors- and do so practically at cost. The above paragraph is still true, with the added irony that the RM is still delivering the letters- but for no profit! And they still have to provide universal service to the Outer Hebrides, also at massive loss. Competitors such as UK Mail or TNT cherry pick the profitable routes- and don't even need to worry about having any infrastructure past the sorting office. And obviously it's the taxpayer who picks up the bill.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/ [thinkprogress.org]
So basically, we shouldn't have to deal with this. But the Republicans want to kill the post office.
Fedex isn't any better (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.
Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's to stop me from making an identical copy of your signet ring (the seal on the envelope provides a convenient mould) melting the wax off, opening, copying and resealing the letter and then resealing it with my signet ring copy?
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
When we developed packaging for shipping, one of our qualification tests was to stand at the top of a 15' tall no-switchback stairwell and throw the package overhead down the stairs (was required to hit the midway landing and then bounce the rest of the way down.) 4x with no internal damage was a pass.
That worked pretty well for domestic shipping, trans-oceanic also required 16 hours in a paint mixer to be sure that the boards wouldn't vibrate out of their sockets by the time they got to Europe/Australia.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly, you've never suffered the horrors of FedEx Ground. I've caught them RED HANDED skipping delivery attempts, and gotten them to admit (off camera, unfortunately) that drivers who skip stops are known to be an "occasional" problem. A few years ago, I was home for the day getting my roof replaced. FedEx Ground claimed that there was "nobody home" and said they "left a note". At that point, there were no fewer than 7 people roaming around, including at least 1 or 2 in the front yard (possibly including myself). The NEXT day, I left a webcam pointed at the driveway & recording. 6pm arrived, no package, no note... and they claimed there was. When I confronted the FedEx manager, he first got irate, then broke down and grudgingly admitted that there "might" be a problem with the driver and said he'd "talk" to him.
The impression I've gotten from various sites is that due to the way FedEx Ground (a.k.a. "RPS") works is that the packages end up at a depot, and drivers (who own their own trucks and are basically free agents) grab the ones they want to try and deliver. Apparently, there's an official process for making unwilling drivers attempt to deliver other packages, but they don't push it unless somebody escalates. In the meantime, they'll automatically log a package left at the depot as a failed delivery attempt.
The worst delivery record of all (in terms of packages that FedEx Ground either doesn't try to deliver) are packages that require a signature. FedEx Ground drivers get paid by the successful delivery, so when there are LOTS of packages waiting to be delivered, they intentionally bypass as many that require signature releases as they can, especially if you live in a gated community and they aren't certain you'll be home. It wouldn't be so bad if their depots were at least open until 9 and on weekends for pickup, but they're not. Getting them to pull a package from a truck so you can pick it up (within a fairly restricted range of hours) almost takes an act of god. UPS, in comparison, will let you camp out at their facility the day of a missed delivery and grab the package off the truck when the driver gets back to the depot.
UPS might not be perfect, but they're infinitely better than FedEx Ground.
Re:Netflix (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, you want running water way out there? I dont want to pay for it even though you help pay for my schools, my roads, my police, and my firefighters.
Keep your creepy water lines away from my property - my well is perfectly well maintained, monitored, and free of 'necessary' chemicals.