USPS is pre funding the Health Benefits for people not even in the system yet. There's the problem.

9/10/2011 8:16:57 PM

Quote :

"That's great for you but there are still a lot of people/businesses who use USPS to deliver bills/payments. Are you suggesting a one day pick-up and delivery schedule? Why do you hate small businesses/the elderly/ poor people? "

most bills are monthly so i dont see the problem of once a week delivery. Pickup can be daily at a centralized location. Grocery stores, for example. Most people already buy their stamps there.

If people want to send something that gets there on a specific day they can pay more to offset the cost. They already do for overnight,nextday,2day, etc... so this isnt a problem.

9/10/2011 11:17:02 PM

none of my bills that come in the mail ever get opened. it's all paid online or on auto-draft.

get rid of that shit.

9/11/2011 12:24:19 AM

none of my bills that come in the mail ever get opened. it's all paid online or on auto-draft.

get rid of that shit.

9/11/2011 12:30:45 AM

I open mine, scan them quickly, and throw them in the garbage right at the post office.

9/11/2011 10:02:14 PM

Newsflash: TWW is not an unbiased sampling of America.

9/11/2011 11:40:18 PM

our economy relies on the fact that something can reach anywhere anyday. if you get rid of the post office, you put a huge hamper on our consuming power.

9/12/2011 12:14:40 AM

private companies can do it better and cheaper

9/12/2011 1:30:56 AM

Quote :

"our economy relies on the fact that something can reach anywhere anyday. if you get rid of the post office, you put a huge hamper on our consuming power."

this is mostly bullshit. the post office is best effort delivery. if i send a letter to someone a few miles away it could be there tomorrow or it could be there 3 days from now.

its not unreasonable to change delivery to once a week. its not going to change anything. if your business has a critical need for stuff to be there at a specific date then you arent shipping usps first class right now. those people pay extra for guaranteed delivery times.

I mean can you honestly think of any real world examples of businesses or consumers who would be harmed by once a week delivery?

9/12/2011 9:40:08 AM

But there is no need to curtail delivery that much. I seriously believe it would be profit maximizing to maintain a good delivery schedule. Maybe making delivery every other day to cut down on the number of drivers would make sense, but even if nothing changes and we keep the current 6-day schedule and keep all the unprofitable post offices open, merely eliminating the postal employee union and paying market wages would restore solvency; then eliminating the over-manning the union causes would make the system down-right profitable as it is.

9/12/2011 10:45:18 AM

Maybe I'm missing something, but haven't I read that the USPS is a completely self sufficient entity? Just trying to understand where the "bilking the taxpayer" and "reinvesting" the money comments are coming from.

9/12/2011 12:22:48 PM

If it were self sufficient, it wouldn't be part of the public sector.

9/12/2011 12:42:11 PM

According to the infallible wikipedia...

Quote :

"The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. Revenue has been in freefall due to declining mail volume.[3] The postal service has attempted to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.[4]"

I'm not arguing anything about effectiveness or efficiency, just curious where all of the tax comments are coming from. Am I missing something or is someone else?

9/12/2011 2:21:59 PM

Quote :

"To cover years in which it operates at a deficit, it has a $15 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury."

The post office is currently running a huge deficit and burning through the line of credit it has with the Treasury. When that cash is out, it either shuts down or congress allocates some tax dollars to bail them out.

9/12/2011 4:52:09 PM

Quote :

"private companies can do it better and cheaper"

Clearly why FedEx uses USPS for a lot of its local delivery. Because the USPS is such a shitty system.

9/12/2011 5:33:16 PM

"cutting down on drivers" means laying off workers. We don't want to eliminate jobs. Also, going to once a week delivery would mean a shitton of mail to do in one day which would be nearly impossible and inefficient. Plus, mailboxes would need to get a lot bigger.

Maybe every city could just have garbage collection on the same day so the garbage can could be filled with mail after it is emptied.

9/12/2011 7:18:26 PM

Interesting idea for lowering cost:

Quote :

"The new face of the U.S. post office The post office in the tiny Washington town of Malone sells beer and cigarettes. Live worms for fishing, too. The boxes for fixed-rate shipping are wedged between racks of beef jerky and $6.99 sunglasses. The Malone location is what the U.S. Postal Service has dubbed a "village" post office. It's inside Red's Hop N' Market, the town mini-mart where locals like to buy lottery tickets and a case of beer before the weekend. It's the only village post office in the country, but soon a similar hybrid may be coming to a town near you. As the Postal Service buckles under a $9 billion debt, the mail agency has looked for ways to slash operating costs. "The primary thing we look at is how much revenue they (post offices) generate (and) has that revenue been going down," said Ernie Swanson, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in Seattle. "(At) a lot of these offices, there's a postmaster and no other employee. So do they have an hour or two of work a day, and we are paying them for eight hours?" Some 3,700 post offices may soon face being turned into village post offices, according to the Postal Service. Last week, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe testified at a Senate hearing that as many as 220,000 post office employees could lose their jobs in the restructuring. ..."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/12/mini.mart.post.office/index.html

9/12/2011 8:01:06 PM

Quote :

"Maybe every city could just have garbage collection on the same day so the garbage can could be filled with mail after it is emptied. "

start charging more for spam and that excess mail problem goes away

9/12/2011 8:07:46 PM

let them die.

my car payment didnt reach my lender so i had to pay by phone before it was considered late.

canceled payment on the AWOL check.

fees on both ends totaled $46.

9/13/2011 3:50:56 PM

Quote :

"The post office is currently running a huge deficit and burning through the line of credit it has with the Treasury. When that cash is out, it either shuts down or congress allocates some tax dollars to bail them out."

Or third option, congress removes regulations so that USPS can try to return to profitability...

9/13/2011 4:42:26 PM

The newspaper yesterday said that the number of letter/packages sent in 2001 was 217 billion but in 2011 there were only 170 billion.


Why pay a mailman 8 hours of labor walking door to door when you can put a mailbox at the end of each street and save 7 hours?

9/13/2011 5:37:42 PM

Completely agree GXB

9/14/2011 8:16:44 AM

^^ Because it would be profitable to do. With better service, which without union rules would be cheap to provide, would cause more mail to be sent.

9/14/2011 10:28:57 AM

The idea that USPS is just limping along due to government subsidies is completely wrong. When I order things online, I use USPS whenever possible because most of the time it's the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable choice. Maybe most of you just don't do a lot of online shopping, but since I started buying computer parts off Newegg.com in 1999, UPS and Fedex have fucked me way more times than USPS. Just this past week, my parents were visting me in Utah, shipped a flat rate box to themselves from the USPS office here to their address in North Carolina on Friday around noon, and they got it on Monday. So ~2 business days shipping cross country for $5. Neither UPS or Fedex can touch that. USPS exists because they provide the best service for the lowest cost, bar none.

9/15/2011 11:44:55 AM

ban the unions

for freedom

9/15/2011 11:47:54 AM

http://www.wral.com/federal-ruling-post-office-can-t-cut-saturday-service/12252476/

dumb dumb dumb

3/21/2013 4:25:11 PM

^^^I agree

and definitely F that UPS Mail Innovation crap

3/21/2013 7:41:07 PM

Verizon Wireless switched to first class shipping for their warranty devices and supposedly is saving gobs of money.

The problem with USPS shipping is their tracking is fucking horrible, not that the service is slow or unreliable. It looks like they have been taking slow steps to remedy that, like offering tracking on first class mail parcels.

I had a PO box at the post office and cancelled that because they always lock the door at 4pm and I could never get my mail. It is because someone got murdered in that post office, but they could simply put a lock on the outside door that PO box keys could turn to remedy the problem of unauthorized people getting in after hours. . . I had to switch that to UPS store because they have a door code and 24 hour access.

3/22/2013 12:51:12 PM

I only ship usps when I don't care if it gets there. they've lost more packages than any other carrier I've ever used aside from maybe dhl.

tbh I wouldn't care about the usps if I didn't have to dig through a pile of spam to get to the 1 to 2 legit letters I get a month.

3/22/2013 1:09:47 PM