"If you think Amazon Prime is a reasonable deal at $99/year, imagine being a college student who only has to pay half that amount. Apparently, so many college students are using the service that school mailrooms are being overwhelmed with smiling cardboard boxes.
That appears to be the case at the University of Connecticut, where the college’s student newspaper recently reported that the local post office has been receiving 3,000 packages per day headed for campus, at times leaving employees stuck at the office until 3 a.m." …
I can still recall, during a summer program I did a few years ago, the sight of a package one member of my class had ordered. 24 cans of Coke, half a kilo of Oreos, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
No doubt some students are using the service for necessary purchases. I suspect that isn’t the case for all students. The result, unfortunately, can be considerable trouble for post offices like the one near UConn. Classic case of a tragedy of the commons.
I was on one of my kids’ college campuses recently for Family Weekend, and in the course of a few minutes saw MANY students walking by with Amazon packages. I remember thinking to myself that I’m glad I’m an Amazon stockholder.
How is this a tragedy of the commons? Amazon shoppers are not grazing at the post office for free and ruining it for the other users; they are in fact calling on the post office to do exactly what it is supposed to do - transport mail from one place to another. (And, in the process, helping the post office to increase its revenue substantially, enabling it to keep your first-class postage stamp at roughly half the rate it costs in comparable developed countries.)
Not clear from the quote in the OP whether it’s the college mailrooms or the post office that are supposedly “overwhelmed” - seems to refer to both. If it’s the post office, then forgive me if I don’t feel sorry if the employees have to be there till 3 a.m. They are getting handsome overtime, you may be sure. And if it’s the college mailroom, well, I don’t think they actually have much else to do. I’m guessing not one college student in 100 gets more than one or two pieces of mail per year these days.
I wonder if this is part of why the last package I sent to D was “at destination” on a Tuesday and couldn’t be picked up until the following Monday. Priority, yeah, right.
@Snowme- that might have been the college mailroom’s fault. I work in my school’s mailroom and during the times we were really slammed, it took us days to get all the packages logged in.
@Requin This is a tragedy of the commons in the sense that, by overusing a government service, students are adversely affecting its ability to deliver packages in a timely manner. That remains true even when the service has been paid for. Your taxes pay for a local police department, but if every citizen who spotted a group of “shady” teenagers outside their house were to call the police, the P.D. would be so overwhelmed that responding to actual crimes would take half a day. Your taxes also pay for public hospitals and lower the cost of health care, but if we all flocked to the ER every time we had a cold, it would be difficult for people who are actually sick to get the help they need quickly. There may be some small fee for these services, but these would still be tragedies of the commons - overuse of a common resource diminishing its usefulness.
A sizeable chunk of Amazon’s mail is delivered by UPS and Fedex not USPS so I don’t see it as “overusing a government system”.
The way I read the article, it talks about campus mailrooms being overburdened not the USPS. As another poster stated, students receive a lot fewer letters these days so campus mailrooms aren’t busy stuffing mail cubbies, instead they can use their staff to handle the packages. Doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me. Given all the fees students pay, I’m sure it can be covered. If not, UConn can add a few bucks to their administrative fees. Given enrollment size, that will pay for another mailroom employee, or two. Many schools employ students in their mailrooms and its not like the cost per hour is substantial.
Have you all ever been to Storrs, CT? If so, you will agree that Prime is a God-send for those who board there. Same is true for many other universities around the countries. Perhaps something can be done to arrange for a distribution center in the northeastern CT area that will not only provide the capacity for these packages but might also generate some much-needed jobs.
Colleges could always charge another “mailbox” fee to get things to a student faster. Otherwise, they had many years of little to do, so be it. A few more kids get work study…problem solved all around:). For the room and board paid, this should not be a big issue.
As for USPS, far from a tragedy, Amazon is saving them by partnering with them on this. They are thrilled with the volumes.
At my D’s college, they also have two Amazon Locker locations, one of which is much closer to her than the central mailroom. So whenever possible she orders stuff delivered to the Locker. There are size restrictions on what can go in the locker so sometimes her order has to go to the mailroom.
Amazon provides a real service to (1) college students without a car, (2) college students in remote areas without nearby shopping, (3) college students in big/congested cities where lugging heavy items on public transportation would be unwieldy. I love Amazon.
I do wonder if, one day, we will no longer see blue skies when we look up, but will instead see dozens of little drones cluttering up the sky making deliveries… >:D<
It’s been like a zillion years, but this UConn alumna seems to recall the USPS delivering the mail to the dorms. UConn had a lot of small 60 person dorms back in the day and even now has many smaller units as well as some larger complexes. And the Post Office, on Dog Lane IIRC was pretty tiny. There’s a new development downtown – maybe the PO got more space? Or maybe not if this is a real problem.
Huh? The USPS chose to sign the contracts with Amazon. To posit that its over using is preposterous. If the USPS didn’t like the deal, they coulda passed on it.
I do think they are talking more about college mailrooms than the USPS. There is an Amazon locker at my sons school also but a lot of the Amazon deliveries still go to the regular mailroom- I think it only goes to the locker if that is the delivery address designated when the student places their order. My son gets a delivery of refrigerated meds every month from a pharmacy and I know last year when he was on campus, he was having trouble getting his package in a timely manner. The pharmacy always notified him when it was delivered, but the postal center on campus would say they didn’t have it when he went to pick it up. They were so swamped with Amazon packages that it was taking them a long time to log everything in. Eventually, he had to talk to a supervisor and explain that it was a medication that had to stay cold- they got better after that.
Eliminating one Assistant Dean of Diversity would free up more than enough money to pay for four kids on work-study to sort packages for a couple of hours a day. Talk about a win-win!
When I was in London last summer, I ordered a book and had it delivered to an Amazon locker at Imperial College. I wondered why more U.S. colleges did not use this - it takes the mailroom out of the equation (for certain size packages). Package is delivered to the locker, customer types in a code or scans the barcode at a screen and locker pops open.
