<p>Except for the dysfunctional part, this is all very true. A restructuring should be in order based on a smaller operation. There is a problem you failed the mention is that there are too many costly employees and that the volume of “lucrative” mail has decreased. The USPS is limping around based on uncompetitive services and junkmail. The day it will be drastically transformed or shut down is the day we will wonder why we kept that inefficient service for so long. And nobody would miss those tons of catalogs that flood our mailboxes. </p>
<p>Again, look what the German did with the Deutsche Post. We just do not have the heart to recognize that some services are not worth keeping, and especially not worth keeping the type of persons who flock to those jobs. For some, we still should have the Pony Express.</p>
<p>My understanding is that Amazon is piggy backing on express delivery which the post office already offers and delivers on Sundays. So the drivers that are now carrying the express mail on Sundays will now also carry the Amazon packages.</p>
<p>This Sunday delivery thing won’t affect me here in flyover country, though I am a prime member.</p>
<p>I LOVE my PO. Around here letters are delivered locally overnight 90% of the time. For 44 cents. Can’t beat it. Mail comes to my door - mail is picked up from my door, the PO has a friendly staff, and it’s very rare that something is given to my neighbor that’s mine. I’d be incredibly sad if the PO went away.</p>
<p>Look, if the PO could consolidate operations, it would. It can’t because Congress won’t let it. So it’s extremely unfair to say it’s the PO’s fault they can’t consolidate. If you look at the votes, one oddity is the most votes against allowing the PO to reduce the number of post offices, reduce hours, get rid of Saturday delivery, etc. come from GOP controlled and thus presumably “pro-business” districts. It’s not an oddity if you think of these as relatively more rural. </p>
<p>Some offices are of course run better than others. The carriers I know can complain at length. But at the same time they’ve pulled off a massive shift to technology - like using remote viewing centers to evaluate mail labels - without any of us noticing. To the point where people don’t think the PO uses technology at all.</p>
<p>Our postal carrier complains about our icy road (0.4 mile in length) every winter. It’s private, so we all pitch in for the cost of snowplowing. If it gets too bad, we do pay to have it sanded. But now the local postmaster has come out with an edict that ALL roads have to be sanded after EVERY snowstorm. Really? That’s not even logical. We can’t figure out why a JEEP can’t make it down the road when all of our vehicles do just fine.</p>
<p>The technology advances are a red herring. Did the Lance Cycling team sponsors invent the technology? That would be a first! They simply play the same game as the Pentagon and bought it from a technology company that has the brains and talents to respond to an inquiry. </p>
<p>The fact that the Congress does not do this or that is also irrelevant. All one needs to do is look how that sorry bunch operates. None of the elected officials wants to go home and tell the voters that they lose some vested benefit. If every voter would receive an itemized bill of the cost of maintaining that boondoggle of an outfit, he or she might rethink that canard of “they deliver my letter for 44 cents and with a smile.” </p>
<p>The 44 cents are a mere downpayment on the full cost that will ultimately be shouldered by the generations to come, and well after all the clowns who allowed this to develop and supported the notion that a full-service government is needed and warranted are buried and forgotten.</p>
<p>Be it from operations or decades of socialized welfare in the form of generous and unaffordable pensions, it remains that this outfit cannot operate in the black without playing with smoke and mirrors. The only difference with the other “agencies” is that they are not allowed to be masters at hiding the real costs of the services provided. The PO has to show “some” numbers. They are simply a part of this giant web of deceit and creative accounting that postpones the real expenses and balances the book by kicking the can down the street. </p>
<p>We deserve better leaders, a better postal delivery system, and do not need all that deadwood that hides in public “service.” And if we want to keep it, have the real costs be presented to the recipients without smoke and mirrors.</p>
<p>And to be clear, I am not naive enough to believe that the PO will disappear anytime soon. Other countries have been able to transform the vestiges of a centralized system into enterprises that compete on a worldwide basis. “We” simply prefer to wait to do the right thing only after exhausting all other alternatives. And again hide the true costs until the day of reckoning arrives.</p>
<p>I love my UPS driver. We have had the same driver for 25 yrs. He is willing to actually get out of his truck and leave the package behind my gate where my dog can’t get it.I find the stuff I order arrives in a timely manor. I finally have a decent mail carrier. I used to have one who would never leave a package. He would not bother to get out of his car and ring my gate, nor would he leave a package behind my gate or at my driveway. Any USPS package meant a trip to the post office. I never order anything that comes USPS if I can help it. The Fedex people will leave the package but don’t seem to want to bother putting it behind my driveway gate. They will leave it on the call box which anyone driving by can steal.
When my D’s were living in another state I would use USPS flat rate boxes. We had good luck with them getting to the location in 2 days and the carrier leaving the package at the porch. One of my children is living in San Francisco now. I sent her a package USPS flat rate. The mail carrier tried to deliver it two days later when my D was at work. She went online and requested the package to be redelivered. She got confirmation back that it would be delivered on a certain date. It never came. Due to tracking we knew they had never attempted to redeliver the package. Finally it came back to me. I think her USPS carrier did not want to bother carrying a heavy box on a city mail route. I will never send her another oversized letter or package again via USPS at her present location.</p>
<p>Agree with Lergnom. I’m reluctant to criticize the USPS because many of the problems at USPS can be laid at the feet of the nitwits in Congress. The way Congress rules the post office reminds me of the way the city of Washington, D.C. essentially used to be a fiefdom for one particularly committee of Congress, an organization that had no interest in seeing the city run for the benefits of its residents.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve had the occasional delivery problems with USPS, but in the main USPS has been very customer friendly in the locations where I have lived. And when I have found the need to write to the local postmaster, I’ve gotten a prompt response, often by telephone.</p>
<p>Unleash the USPS and let’s see what they can do.</p>
<p>By the way, thanks for the correction, Busdriver11.</p>
<p>I am sorry, but I can’t excuse absolutely horrible service and incompetence, or blame congress for their terrible service. Sure they’ve had cutbacks, but so have many of us. I’ve seen my income drop due to reimbursement changes while overhead costs rise, but still provide the same quality service. </p>
<p>It is a shame that we never seem to have the same letter carrier for any length of time, there are constant subs, late and misdelivered mail all the time, and as I said before, forget about trying to put in a mail hold. They either held partial mail on some of the days and delivered on others, or or failed to deliver on the day it was supposed to resume (and claimed, when I went to the PO, that the letter carrier must still be out delivering when all along she’d finished and gone home, and they just didnt want to look in the back), etc etc. My favorite was when they delivered a massive stack of rubber-banded mail to my home that was a mish mosh of mail for 3 people in my neighborhood I do not know, and a bunch for an elementary school more than a mile away. Does my house LOOK like an elementary school???</p>
<p>To save money, the PO has cut routes. The process for this has been brutal - speaking from what I’ve seen and from talking to carriers. I watched people follow around mail carriers, partly to check efficiency but partly to force some to retire and partly for reasons hard to explain. Our route was extended by about a third, which means it is impossible to deliver in a day, so they now have an extra carrier meet another carrier part way through the route. Why do this? Management isn’t very good at managing people and management has an absolute mandate to cut costs no matter what. It must fit into their accounting better to have our route - and others around me - covered in part by a slew of back-ups than to have assigned carriers for more routes. I have no idea if this generates actual cost savings or if it’s a shell game in which they avoid putting money in one area but they can pull it out of another. Companies of all sorts do that kind of manipulation, both on the costs and revenues sides. (GE, for example, would generate the needed “profit” from its financial arm after determining the results from other operating divisions … and for that GE was lionized and Jack Welch attained the status of a corporate god.)</p>
<p>Not that long ago, it was typical for a carrier to sort his or her own route, though the size and business of that PO would affect how that worked. Other carriers might sort in the morning and deliver in the afternoon. As they’ve cut routes, they’ve jumbled those responsibilities. And that sometimes causes weird failures. </p>
<p>In other words, the problems of delivery occur mostly these days in the local post office. And that is driven by cost cutting and what that has done to work levels per staffer and how carriers are allocated to routes, etc. Some of this is bad management at lower levels. But some is the upper management’s fault and by that I mean the ultimate managers are Congress.</p>
<p>Fwiw, the focus on the efficiency and the “low cost” delivery system is almost irrelevant. The reality is that the value proposition of the USPS has disappeared in the same way as the … fax machine. A contraption that had languished for 100 years and enjoyed a brief success when it became ubiquitous. The real question should be about what the USPS should be doing and what services are still needed. In today’s communication-filled world, we rely less and less on handwritten notes and bills sent in snailmail. The USPS clings to serve a … dying population of dinosaurs who have failed to adapt. As a society, while we have to address the needs of all people, including the luddites, it has to be based on a viable future. </p>
<p>And there is the entire problem. There is no future for the USPS current business model. Blaming the problems on the clueless Congress is not new. They are responsible --so to speak-- for the entire growth of a clueless and inefficient goverment. Watch your TV AS someone is displaying our government at its best. Right now! </p>
<p>The USPS in fact is forced to show the depth of its financial burden on the taxpayers by having to account for the pension costs. And that is a problem that is too easily buried as the cost of the ill-advised benefits given to public servants has and will continue to be an albatros around the neck of the United States. But the pension losses are only a part of the USPS problem. It bleeds money and will continue to do so until its size if halved, and ultimately reduced to nothing. </p>
<p>In a world that pretends that all should be equal, time has come to stop the asinine benefits offered to public servants. Let’s all have the same pension, the same health care, and the same expection of a LONG career of real work. We have flipped the pendulum. The days that the benefits were necessary to balance a lower salary are long gone. The public sector is often the highest paying job available, and most definitely if one factors the education level and qualifications of the employees.</p>
<p>We are slowly creating a dual society. Service providers versus productive workers. Perhaps we ought to send our leaders to Greece or Spain for a few weeks. It might be great training for the future that some are determined to develop further.</p>
<p>–give up Saturday delivery
–reduce weekday delivery by one day, maybe two days
–restructure the pension system for NEW hires
–offer buyouts for early retirement
–contract with private agents to deliver to remote areas</p>
<p>The people support this quasi-agency that is “supposed” to be revenue neutral:</p>
<p><a href=“a”>quote</a> The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Supported by the people is not an idle word. In addition to the direct support via taxes, the agency’s operations will ultimately become a problem for all the people. Despite all the traffic to the North Pole, the elves won’t bail us out, and real dollars will be needed to cover the deficits.</p>
<p>I’ll have to say my experience with the USPS has been heavily dependent upon the local region. By my parents, they’ve had the same postal worker for the last 10 years or so. She’s had her route shifted about a billion times, and the mail keeps getting delivered at different parts of the day, but our dogs love her, and she’s always willing to drop a package off on the back porch if we leave a note.</p>
<p>Across the country, meanwhile, we’ve had a ton of our smaller post offices and three years in a row they’ve failed at doing our mail holds properly when we go on vacation. Luckily mail forwarding seems to have worked decently. Since our most recent move about five miles, though, we’ve had a good postman who always leaves our packages in a way that makes them hidden from the street.</p>
<p>Lake, that would indeed be a nice start. Again, there is little chance that drastic changes will be brought to the USPS. There is no way the US will walk away from the pension obligations, and the only way to move forward is to lick our wounds, assume the cost, and make sure the same heresy is not repeated with such abject regularity.</p>
<p>If the necessary changes are made, one we might see the end of the unfunded obligations that cripple everyone who will have a pulse in 2050.</p>
<p>The list of reforms is what the PO has been trying to do for years. Congress just rejected their attempts to shut on Saturday and to close money losing/less used post offices. </p>
<p>And remember, they lose money because they’re required to fund their healthcare costs in their entirety over a set period of time.</p>
<p>They lose money AND accumulated unfunded liabilities. Not one or the other! And who will ultimately pay those expenses? Does the term Medicare ring a bell? </p>
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<p>Is it improving? News from 2013 from the same source:</p>