Door-To-Door Mail Delivery To End Under New Plan 867
First time accepted submitter Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that under a cost-saving plan by the US Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters. 'Converting delivery away from door delivery to either curb line or centralized delivery would enable the Postal Service to provide service to more customers in less time,' says Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan. More than 30 million American homes get door-to-door delivery and another 50 million get their mail dropped at their curbside mailboxes. But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses, sees savings in centralized mail delivery. Door-to-door delivery costs the Postal Service about $353 per address each year while curbside delivery costs $224, and cluster boxes cost $160 per address. But unions say it's a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled. 'It's madness,' says Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. 'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"
How about .. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about un-funding the massive health fund payments that they were forced to make?
Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Frequency vs. Distance (Score:3, Insightful)
You are the pinnacle of a lazy ass! I'd much rather walk a few yards but be able to get a package any day than MWF delivery. day vs. 5 min. walk.
The Post Office is not buckling.... (Score:4, Insightful)
under massive financial losses. It is buckling under the massive stupidity of Congress.
This would also mean that you have to go to the Post Office every time you have a letter/package to sign for, as they are probably not going to come to your front door for that anymore, either. Even though I live less than a half mile from a Post Office, due to the insanity of current cost cutting, I have to drive 8 miles away to get to the Post Office that serves my house.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a problem in apartments, where it is safe and easy to get down to the mailboxes. However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away. Do you want to drive for 12 minutes to just get useless ads? If they go ahead with this method, I would be tempted to cancel mail service. Those who I deal with have email, and I can pay them electronically.
Re:How about .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, it's not the "detroit model." It's the "we're going to impose unreasonable costs on you in an attempt to make you look bad and justify shutting you down" model. Forcing the USPS to maintain a fund for worker retirement up to 75 years from now is completely and totally unreasonable and serves only one purpose.
What is happening to you guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-American here.
What is happening to the largest economy in the world? You guys have the largest military, largest economy, dominant currency and you need to cut back on the mail service? I am even more flabbergasted at this than the lack of universal healthcare and the furor surrounding Obamacare.
Mail delivery for me is as basic as clean water and electricity; a basic staple of civilization that is part of every modern society.
Please don't take this as a veiled anti-American rant because it is not. I honestly wonder if I am witnessing the decline of a once might country. The other possibility is that the political stalemate in govt. is responsible for these basic things not getting fixed. If so this is almost scary: institutions in a superpower are crumbling because the politicians cannot work together.
Any American that cares to enlightens this foreigner?
Re:Already happening (Score:3, Insightful)
Which operate over the PUBLIC airwaves, which by rights should also be under the appropriate level of management as national infrastructure - serving the purpose of a great nation, subject to the consent of it's people as a whole.
What's true for the post should have been true for the Telegraph - as it was in much of Europe after Napoleon.
That is, until the pirates and grafters took over completely, and brainwashed you lot into believing that if it didn't turn profit, then it had no value.
Re:End the monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the Constitutional Nature.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the Post Office is the one thing we shouldn't care about losing money on since it's a necessary and constitutionally required function of government. When's the last time we complained about the military losing money?
What is a much bigger problem is the absurd amount of money losing ventures the government embarks on that it's not even supposed to be involved in.
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
We lived in an apartment complex--a gated apartment complex as if that meant the USPS letter carrier, UPS courier, FedEx courier, Cops, Firemen, Pizza Delivery guys (every pizza place within two miles), florists, etc., etc. didn't have the code. Well, anyway, the kids in the complex would take the delivered mail after each delivery and toss in the trash, take it home, put it in other boxes, etc., etc. A central delivery point doesn't work too well for us.
You should ask your apartment manager for a locked delivery point. I've never lived in an apartment without locked mailboxes (the USPS has a master key that opens the entire cabinet at once so they can quickly drop off the mail in each box).
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Well in my newish (~10yr) house we also have cluster mailboxes that are a block away, and it's not exactly a hardship for me it's just a nuisance to be a slave to junk mail I take from the mailbox, run through a shredder (because some of these people have personal information they shouldn't even have), and then deposit in recycling, unopened and unread. But, tempted though I might be to cancel mail service, you normally have to give mailing addresses for a few critical life elements: job applications, credit cards, bank accounts, taxes, and children school forms.
Whether any of those places actually USE mail afterwards is another point, but you have to get through that barrier. Mail has always been the "default" communication, guaranteed to make it to the recipient.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a problem in apartments, where it is safe and easy to get down to the mailboxes. However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away. Do you want to drive for 12 minutes to just get useless ads? If they go ahead with this method, I would be tempted to cancel mail service. Those who I deal with have email, and I can pay them electronically.
You are part of the reason home delivery is so expensive. If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the volume of letters has dropped significantly. Nobody denies that. All the while junk mail has been proliferating.
If they really want to balance the Post Office's books, all they have to do is stop subsidizing junk mail. They complain that "they need the cash flow" from junk mail but they admit that they cannot handle the load under their current budget. When they argue this way, they are neglecting to account for the fact that if they stop delivering subsidized junk mail, their costs will go way down, too. And those cost savings will be larger in proportion to the volume, because it's subsidized mail.
Get them back in the business of doing what they are supposed to do: deliver letters from place to place, for a fee. No matter how big the Internet gets, there will always be a need for physical papers to be sent.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall it's more efficient for one guy to go from house to house (especially in a vehicle designed specifically to make the efficient) in a ring topology than for a bunch of people to each drive to a central point in a star topology. The mailbox clusters can work well with areas designed around them from the beginning (so you naturally pass the cluster on your way in/out of the neighborhood).
Why don't we just let the price of stamps rise to where it makes sense, instead?
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
This is so obviously untrue. Math to the rescue. USPS requires one customer per mile. Let's say there are two, and the road (dead end) is 10 miles long. There are 20 customers. A carrier has to travel 20 miles to make all deliveries if he starts at the mile 0 (and let's posit that the USPS office is there too.)
I don't recall the USPS say they were wanted to increase efficiency for their customers, they said they want to cut costs. If the USPS can deliver mail to 20 customers with a single stop, then they save money.
Now, if the carrier doesn't deliver then every resident has to drive to the USPS office. Let's even disregard the waiting time and focus only on miles driven. The fist customer drives one mile (0.5 mile * 2.) The second customer drives 2 miles (1 mile * 2). The third customer drives 3 miles. An obvious arithmetic progression here (every next resident has to drive extra to his neighbor and back.)
Rumor says that the sum of an arithmetic progression is often found as n*(a1+an)/2. Since the a1 is 1 and an is 20, we suddenly learn that all residents have to drive 20*(1+20)/2 = 210 miles per day!!! Compare to 20 miles that the carrier has to drive. If we force residents to drive to their mailbox cluster (under those conditions, that are typical in rural areas) then it would generate a lot more pollution and wear of vehicles.
You're assuming random placement of mailbox clusters - in general they'd be placed along main highways where customers would likely already be driving to run errands, so there may be 0 extra miles. There would have to be a much more intensive study to see what the environmental cost is.
Of course there is one simple solution to that - let's outlaw rural homes and make everyone live in 100-storey skyscrapers; Gil the Arm visited one of such buildings, as I recall. Arcologies are very efficient this way. And who needs all that nature anyway?
Or you could charge extra for rural delivery to make up for the higher costs. If you want to live in a rural area, that's fine, but why should others subsidize your lifestyle? Some people *have* to live in rural areas (farmers, for example), so they can charge the city folk more to make up for their unsubsidized cost of living.
Humans are born and bred to live in caves of steel and eat yeast products. They don't need all that dusty and dirty nature.
Were humans bred to live in sprawling 2000 square foot houses on 2 acre lots that are so far away from town that the only way to run errands is to drive a 3000 lb car (or 6000 lb SUV)?
Re:Already happening (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. Your points are taken. It does seem that a healthy economy might treat the USPS like a WPA works program: employ as many as possible in a function that binds the social fabric more tightly than without it.
Then? Get rid of FastTrack, and begin offering employment domestically in Toll-booths. :-) Instead of in Malaysian or Vietnamese RFID factories...
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you considered just putting that credit card in a drawer and never using it? They might take the hint after a while.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away.
You mean like these...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Canadian_rural_mailboxes.jpg [wikimedia.org]
Canada's had them for decades. Although those are from the 70s... new ones look more like this:
http://www.rcmpveteransvancouver.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_0206_edited-1.jpg [rcmpvetera...couver.com]
I'm having a really hard time working up the level of apparent outrage you have over this.
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. The existing economy of institutionalised graft, extortion and threat of incarceration is infinitely preferable.
Inefficiency is a point of view - a pipe through which one may look at a system. Efficient to what end? Are you accumulating fat for winter? Or are you efficiently burning everything from your intake?
Some inefficiencies are virtues.
Re:Already happening (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, what's being proposed here is going to affect city carriers only, as they are the ones that have to deliver large parts of their routes on foot. And I bet they will have similar setup for hardship boxes like us Rural guys have for disabled residents. In all fairness, I'm surprised the post office didn't do this a long time ago. It always seemed extremely inefficient to keep these walking routes going. I mean, just the amount of health benefits that have to be paid out due to all the injuries must be staggering. I knew a guy who had to get hip replacement and he was only in his early 40s. This is actually I think a much better plan than ending Saturday delivery (plus it might actually have a chance to go through as it's only affecting one of the postal unions instead of at least three).
Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Already happening (Score:4, Insightful)
Different is not better. I live in a city in a nice apartment, a 2 minute walk to the train that takes me to work (2 or 3 days/week I make the 30 minute bike ride to work), a thousand acre park nearby where I can do my morning runs and attend concerts and other events throughout the year, a grocery store 3 blocks away, over a dozen bars and restaurants within a 15 minute walk from home, a real butcher and baker within a 10 minute walk. I have a car, but only use it on weekends and since I only fill up the tank once a month or less, I don't care if gas is $3/gallon or $6/gallon.
And a lot of us don't dream of living in an ant colony. Different people have different needs and want. Amazing how that works, isn't it?
Sure, I don't care if you want to live in a rural house 50 miles from the nearest town, just stop asking me to pay extra to have your mail delivered or provide your rural broadband.
Re:What is happening to you guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're doing just fine. What the congress did is to make them fully fund the defined benefit retirement plan for all workers over a very, very short period of time (I'm actually not up on the details, but that's the broad version). The result is that they've got billions of dollars a year in costs which magically appeared over night, and the congress - who sets the postal rates - will not increase the rates to cover the shortfall. The USPS isn't funded by the government, but is a stand-alone, semi-private organization with governmental oversight.
Understand that Postal Workers in the US have a very good union, and kick ass benefits for a position which doesn't require a college degree. I worked in the government for a while and the postal service health and retirement plans were far better than the mainstream civil servant (which, btw, are pretty good). By squeezing the USPS, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is intentionally setting the service up for failure so that they can point to how the federal government is incompetent at what they do.
Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Democrats want to live up to the responsibility of pay for the government we have, and the services it provides. Republicans want to run up the debt by giving the wealthiest more money, at the expense of the poor, while putting all the cost onto future generations. The largest expansion of government since Medicare/Medicaid = Department of Homeland Security under Bush.... put on the federal credit card.
Are you truly as fucking stupid as your post makes you out to be? The problem with this country is stupid fucking ideologues that have their heads so far up their ass they can't even remember what reality looked like; also known as republican politician and their fanbois.
Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes. (Score:5, Insightful)
When did this happen? During the time when the Republicans last had control of all three branches of elected government? No. What happened was an astonishing turn-around from budgets with surpluses that could have been used to pay down the debt, to huge budget deficits. Most of it was funded on tax cuts without performing corresponding cuts to services to balance the budget. While this may have been justified on the hypothesis that "starving the beast" might work, the reality has been that the richest have paid much less in taxes and the bill for the difference has been passed on to the next generation, by which time the people who should have been paying into the system for the last couple of decades will have retired. It was very bad financial and demographic management. At least one important Republican of the day actually said "deficits don't matter". It was an idiotic move.
So, you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little skeptical of Republican's dedication to balancing budgets, because the history of the last 2 decades shows no sign of that when they had the opportunity to enact them. On top of that, they also managed to lead the country into the worst financial crisis in decades, then handed the keys to the next guy and tried to pin it all on him as if he created the problem, while obstructing every attempt to fix it.
Re:door to door delivery boosted USPS profits (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today
That bears repeating. A very large fraction of society's ills can be laid ultimately at its door; too many asses thinking only what the world can do for them.
Re:I don't know about the 'cluster' mailboxes. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, both parties are on the fiduciary needle. They just want to spend all that money on slightly different things. Why is it that we never hear of Democrat plans to reform and cut social program waste, and never hear of Republican plans to reform and cut military waste?
Second, Clinton had a Republican Congress practically the whole way because of his completely botched attempt to pass national health care that scared voters into a Republican Revolution in 1994. He had to work with them in order to get a budget passed, and they weren't going to accept anything that wasn't balanced or in surplus. Thus, the government shutdown (well, and Gingrich being an egotistical ass).
Third, it's real easy to talk about the surplus that Clinton left behind, and forget that immediately after he left office, the whole Dot Com bubble imploded. Oh, and he was the one who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall which set the table for the Bear Stearns / AIG collapse. Bush had a small version of what he left for Obama to deal with right out of the gate, and then a massive stock market dive that we like to call 9/11/2001. Oh, and he had a Republican majority in Congress who forgot why they were sent there, so they started spending like teenagers that found a suitcase full of money. Bush is not without blame though - the two wars that he put on the federal American Express absolutely didn't help things, and everyone seems to forget that TARP was his walk off shot - for some reason Obama gets tagged with that one.
There's plenty of blame to go around - none of these politicians can get the stink off of them, but that doesn't mean they won't try. The whole world shines shit and tries to pass it off as gold.