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I'm more surprised by some of the comments... why don't they cut OT first?

One of the things being seriously considered is to cut mail service to five days a week, instead of six.

MA

The biggest problem with the post office it that they have for the last 20 years charged too little for their services. Where else in the world can you have a package (that's what UPS and FedEx consider a letter) transported 3000 miles or more for only 42 cents?

Tubaryan12 wrote:The biggest problem with the post office it that they have for the last 20 years charged too little for their services. Where else in the world can you have a package (that's what UPS and FedEx consider a letter) transported 3000 miles or more for only 42 cents?

How many of us drive by our post office on a regular basis? How many truly need the mail to be picked up and delivered daily?

I've wondered for quite some time why the USPS doesn't offer different levels of service. Make basic service pick up and deliver only at the post office with no change in rate structure. Offer mid-level service of pick up and delivery at your home 2-3 days per week for a fee of say $5/month. Premium service of daily pick up and delivery could be had for $10/month.

Seems to me that it would reduce cost for USPS while increasing efficiency and revenue. Why not give it a shot?

the elephant wrote:Very few people would opt to pay for such a home delivery scheme.

You're right there. What they should do is adopt the trash collection model. You get home delivery once or twice week on a certain day. That's it.

JPNirschl wrote:The only people still using postal mail really are the internet illiterate.

I take issue with this. True, I can pay most of my bills online; however, my energy provider (Northwestern) requires an additional $4.50 Western Union fee to process credit card transactions online. As a result, I slap a "forever" stamp on their return envelope and stuff my check.

Additionally, I enjoy getting actual personal letters from time to time from friends and family. Often, in order to get those personal letters, I have to send one or two. I enjoy writing actual, handwritten letters on stationary (right now I'm using my "Sportfish of North America" stationary) and find that a personal letter is much more meaningful than an email. While I use email/the internet for 99.9% of my communications these days, sending and receiving personal letters makes them that much more meaningful.

Absolutes are rarely true.

Does the USPS need to streamline? Yes. Is it a long time coming? Yes. Should they charge more for first-class mail? Yes. Would I pay for home delivery service? No. I'm a poor-*** grad student and wouldn't have any problem receiving mail once per week or riding my bike to the post office to pick up mail.

Steve

JPNirschl wrote:..... The only people still using postal mail really are the internet illiterate. ....

HARDLY!

I use email and Internet for many things these days. But... I still like the personal touch of writing a note now and then.

I just mailed a 'special' woodwind mouthpiece to Guy Legere in Canada so he can fashion a reed for an old Linton contra-bass clarinet. I thought I might try, but figured it would be sort of difficult getting that thing to go through the scanner and making a file out of it!

In defense of the USPS, I have shipped several tubas and lots of other instruments vis USPS and never had any damage. My mother-in-law worked for the Post Office in Valdosta, Georgia and was the first female city letter carrier thay had down there. Shortly before she passed away in her mid-50's, she received the "Million Mile Award" for logging that many miles in her postal Jeep (and later postal truck) on her daily route. Her most interesting story? A man who used to stand in the doorway completely naked every day when she showed up with the mail. One or two visits from postal inspectors put an end to that. Working for the post office as a carrier or sorter is physically hard and as stressful as they joke about (the cushy jobs are the counter jobs that she never worked, although those employees are watched over like a hawk by supervisors) but the pay and benefits are very reasonable compensation for honest blue collar labor (unfortunately no longer respected by many in this great country of ours.)

MartyNeilan wrote:My mother-in-law worked for the Post Office in Valdosta, Georgia)

I am much more impressed with you since I found out you married a Georgia Peach.

I go to the USPS every day. I pick up my business mail and send it back out. I enjoy the trip. It gets me out from in front of this computer for a few minutes. I too was not happy with the increase to $.42. My business postage bill is the third highest expensive I incur, just behind auto and phone/data. It's still a bargain though.

steve_decker wrote:
I've wondered for quite some time why the USPS doesn't offer different levels of service. Make basic service pick up and deliver only at the post office with no change in rate structure.

Reply:
Well...there would be a significant difference in rates because of the immense amount of storage (warehouse space) that would have to be purchased to store all the mail. You do have this option already by renting a post office box. You don't get junk mail in the POB because they assume it is already being delivered to your house.

The elephant wrote:
I only ever get real mail about once each week, and that could probably be done electronically. If most people are headed that way (as it seems they are) then we could collectively let the USPS know of how we feel getting all that waste paper in our boxes on a daily basis! Keep it all, baby!
(etc)

Reply:
The bulk (junk) mail is paying most of the bills of the post office, and if it went away, the PO could not afford to do the first class mail that you actually want to receive. So...sending all your junk mail to the Postmaster General doesn't hurt anything except your personal pocketbook. There is a way to opt out of some junk mail; you can eliminiate it by either calling up or writing the sender and requesting to be taken off the list. It takes about three months, and then the carrier will get a notice to not deliver that particular junk mail to that recipient.

There are also some opt-out online methods that may or may not work, specifically for catalogs.

If junk mail went away, the PO would have to start firing people like crazy because of the loss of revenue.

This info from a postal carrier.

MA

DHL is also about to cut 10,000 jobs nationwide.

the elephant wrote:...Now it is a joke. I get mail each week that is MONTHS old. I got a credit card statement from six months ago just yesterday. I regularly get items in the destroyed mail plastic baggie that is months old and mangled. If is send something to a friend here in town, not five miles away, it takes six days. None of this should be happening, but it is. The USPS was wrecked by the advent of modern bulk mailings. In trying to gain income it has gagged, choked and suffocated in oceans of trash.

Must be a regional thing. I have been mailing stuff for many decades, and receiving mail, and in those decades I have had precisely one (1) item of mine go astray. That was a camera lens being sent to me by a guy from the Czech Republic during the height of the anthrax scare here in the DC area.

Yes, I get a huge amount of junk mail and I hate it. But I can't see that it has affected my service all that much, other than I have to be vigilant not to throw away something important in the pile.

Service standards have been declining for a LOT longer than since the USPS started delivering mail for bulk advertisers. The penny post system in Britain ran 12 deliveries a day to most London addresses up until WWI. Yes, that's once per hour during daylight hours. They dropped that to twice a day and charged more than a penny after WWI.

I'm not too young to remember twice-per-day deliveries in the U.S., which ended in the 60's, when the USPS was still a pure government agency.

There are MANY things wrong with the USPS. But my experience suggests that it is extremely reliable in delivering first-class mail for very little money, and I doubt there's a postal system in the world that works better overall.

(For those who didn't know, the USPS has been a private corporation with a publicly enforced monopoly on first-class mail and with the congressional oversight that is the string attached to that enforcement, since 1971.)

Rick "who still mails most packages via USPS" Denney