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We mailed one hundred letters to test the postal service

178 points by ystad 5y ago

abduhl 5y ago
The US postal service might not be what it used to be (I didn’t get a Christmas card I was sent until mid-April) but it still remains one of the most impressive logistics systems ever built, in my opinion. Letters sent to me have tracked me through multiple moves with the high point being a letter showing up in a mailbox after I’d moved twice, with one of the moves being across state lines and the other being intracity. Was it late? Yes. Did it arrive? Yes. It’s probably the only portion of the US government that I’m absolutely certain will eventually do its job.
- spamalot159 5y ago
  I feel like this is becoming less certain. I have had multiple packages undelivered in recent months. And many more times I have had things arrive late to the point where they were no longer needed.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  But as recently as a couple of years ago it did its job much better: both more reliably and more rapidly. The reason people are writing about it now is because the new regime of routine delays is very recent, and probably the result of some very significant changes made by politically-appointed leadership. ETA: There is a relatively short window now during which these changes can be rolled back, or people will just get used to the idea that "the reliable Post Office is another of those fantasies my parents' generation enjoyed, oh well: at least I can use UberMail for $22 a letter."
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Let's not mince words: Republicans conspired to fuck up the post office because its successes serve as a counter example to their narrative.
    - shiftpgdn 5y ago
      I've been shipping stuff online for 15 years. The post office has always been a huge mess. The only reason articles are getting written about it now is because A. Covid-era mail volumes have doubled or tripled. And B. You get to blame Trump.
      - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        DeJoy was literally having them tear mail sorting machines out of their facilities, having them discarded in trash bins, and then cut hours for workers. Try again.
        shiftpgdn 5y ago
        The Obama administration had them remove a massive amount of sorting machines too. Those are letter sorting machines. Letter volume is down to literally the lowest it had ever been. There is a reason they are getting ripped out.
        dsr_ 5y ago
        The letter sorting machines are faster and cheaper than manually sorting the same letters... and they were already paid for. You are correct that there is a reason that they are being ripped out, but it's not because letter volume is down.
        shiftpgdn 5y ago
        Letter volume is down and the machines need to be replaced with machines that can handle parcels. How are they supposed to replace them!?
        makomk 5y ago
        Manually sorting letters isn't actually the alternative here - what the US Postal Service was moving towards under DeJoy (and probably before him too) was sorting the same letters using the same kind of automatic machines, but a smaller number of them reconfigured to sort into a larger number of different piles using parts from the scrapped machines. This reduces overall capacity, but should be more efficient so long as they don't actually need the extra capacity.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    There has also been a pretty dramatic change in mail volume over the years. I'd rather service get subsidized than gutted, but I don't think politics are the only driver of change.
    - slickdork 5y ago
      There has been a change in volume... but it's going down. 168 billion in 2011 vs 129 billion in 2020 [1]. [1] https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/ https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/
      - makomk 5y ago
        More specifically, letter volume has been going down and parcel volume has been going up. Basically, there's been a huge shift in what the US Postal Service actually does, and their ability to cope with it has not been helped by - for example - the media creating partisan conspiracy theories about reducing the number of sorting machines that can physically only sort letters to rebalance their infrastructure being an evil right-wing conspiracy to destroy the postal service.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  "it works" is however simply not good enough; it's a service that should NEVER decline. To quote the USPS' own motto: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." They take donkeys down canyons to serve isolated communities.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Unfortunately that’s not their motto. AFAIK they don’t have a motto. It’s just some thing someone put on a federal building. It does make an awesome motto though.
lordnacho 5y ago
I was looking at some NBA history and naturally Karl Malone ended up in my list of people to look at (there's a video about how him and Stockton somehow didn't win the championship, despite being quite good). Dude's nickname was "The Mailman", which I wondered about. Turns out they used to say "The Mailman always delivers", so actually it was a compliment at the time. I think reputations change slowly, but this one had gotten to where I could no longer recognize the original intent.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Even just two years ago, I could count on first class mail always arriving within 3 days, it just happened, so reliably you never doubted it. What happened?
- slickdork 5y ago
  Louis DeJoy was appointed as postmaster general. He has political and financial interests in seeing the USPS fail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy
  - chapium 5y ago
    It seems more likely that he isn't up to the job and should be replaced. Political factions ensured his rise to the position knew this.
    - whbrown 5y ago
      Even if you start with the assumption of incompetence over malice—this is the same guy who paid Duke $750,000 to admit his son, and has well documented conflicts of interests in his role as postmaster general. He's a political appointee for a party interested in undermining USPS while he funnels contracts to XPO, a company of which he still holds $75 million in shares. Simple unadorned corruption, that's all.
- postalrat 5y ago
  Hard to guess when not much at all has been happening over the past year.
forinti 5y ago
There's a push to privatise the postal service in Brazil. UPS, Fedex and such might be faster, but the postal service is a lot cheaper. I would very much like to keep this cheaper and (sometimes) slower option.
- pibechorro 5y ago
  Its not cheaper. You are not seeing the hidden costs which are subsidized via taxes. In the US gov workers retire MUCH earlier than normal working people, this creates a huge financial liability keeping up with decades of pensions. I was an ebay powerseller and dealing with ups was always far better than usps, many times by a big margin.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    The USPS has not received tax money since the 80s. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-postal-service/11433/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-po...
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Is it still cheaper if you factor in the tax dollars used to subsidize it?
- Fabricio20 5y ago
  Is it cheaper if you account the losses that amount from receiving things extremely late (mail that turns into waste)? In my area, every single bank notes or bills arrive at least a month late. I've had water bills arrive 4 months late (bundled together with the ones from the other 3 months). Something is very wrong with Correios, I don't think it's the last mile however, package usually arrives on time (with up to a week of delay in worst cases).
sschueller 5y ago
At 55c to send anywhere in the US I think it is not a bad service. I have to pay the equivalent of 1.10 USD (1.00 CHF) to send a letter "First Class" (A-Post) inside a tiny country (Switzerland) almost the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Edit: Corrected price
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  But I'll bet it gets there in a reasonable time frame. I just received a check sent "2 day priority mail" -- took 14 days, and spent most of them stuck in a mail sorting facility.
  - jopsen 5y ago
    Here in Denmark it's 1.78 USD to mail a letter, and that's delivered within 5 days. Next day delivery is 4.7 USD. I reasonably trust it'll get delivered on time, but I haven't tested it. This is letter pricing, for packages the private options are usually cheaper.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Mind you, Switzerland is a bit more wealthy than the US, and what is the cost of "not first class but regular post" over there?
  - sschueller 5y ago
    Under 100g is 0.93 USD (0.85 CHF) for B-Post.
- ar0 5y ago
  "A-Post" is 1.00 CHF, not 1.20 CHF. Still more expensive, though (but way cheaper than the huge prices quoted for Denmark below!).
  - sschueller 5y ago
    Ah, you're right, not sure what I was thinking. It's 1.30 if it's a thicker envelope.
frob 5y ago
I run a small side business which ships physical goods and I've been seeing similar issues with the "flat rate" priority shipping service from the USPS. These packages are supposed to be delivered to anywhere in the US in 2 to 3 days. When I drop off the box, they will label it with 2-day or 3-day. Since about mid-summer of 2020, those labels are aspirational. I've been tracking by taking to customers I know and the on-time delivery rate is well below 50%. It is not uncommon for 3-day shipments to take 7 days. Mail issues can also be aggrevated by local policies. I know a former regional postmaster from Wisconsin. I've since learned that during the Scott Walker years, they changed the service in WI so that all mail in the entire state is sorted in Milwaukee. So if I'm up in NW WI and I send a letter to someone a town over, the mail needs to be driven all the way across the state to Milwaukee, sorted there, and then driven all the way back. He says it's making what use to be a 1-day delivery into 3+.
- bombcar 5y ago
  That’s strange as everything around here gets sorted in St Paul. Mail used to be sorted at the local post office (many still have the “local” and “long-distance” mail slots but they go into the same bucket) but even now they usually route to the closest sorting facility.
  - frob 5y ago
    Maybe the very NW is lucky and can use St Paul. I know that places like Madison and Plattville go to MKE and back. It seems we did indeed close the Madison sorting facility in '14 as well as other supporting regional facilities. As part of this Eau Claire moved their ops to St Paul. https://madison.com/wsj/business/u-s-postal-service-to-close-madison-processing-and-distribution-center-and-three-others-in/article_3acbb11a-c2cb-52fa-8007-f672b3287f2e.html https://madison.com/wsj/business/u-s-postal-service-to-close... Thanks for the info!
- Kye 5y ago
  There was that whole situation with people voting by mail in unprecedented numbers and an ongoing generation defining pandemic that resulted in a shift from retail to online shopping. On top of continued attacks on the USPS by politicians training for lobbying careers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Jiejeing 5y ago
> The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window. That is still a fantastic result. Considering the size of the delivery area and the very disparate abilities of the delivery network (rural, urban, suburbs, etc), I am impressed. For an underfunded and constantly sabotaged public institution, it still appears to work reasonably well. And yes, the 55p price is absolutely cheap for the expected service. First-class mail in Europe is often 1-2€ for much smaller countries.
- andrewlgood 5y ago
  Do European countries subsidize the residential mail service with commercial bulk mail (aka junk mail) and overnight services?
  - Jiejeing 5y ago
    Speaking for France as I am not too familiar with other countries, no, commercial mail here is distributed manually by people living in poverty who get stacks of junk to distribute every morning. The post office here is a public service that is getting increasingly privatized, losing a bit more of service quality and goodwill every time (if your only KPI is "distribute your stash of mail the fastest way possible", some things like leaving a receipt for a package and fixing off-by one addresses get lost in the race). You can opt-out of the junk with a sticker on your mailbox anyway.
    - soco 5y ago
      Exactly the same goes in Switzerland. I suppose all those people suggesting privatizing the postal services either live in a digital bubble or never sent a postcard to their grandmas.
    - andrewlgood 5y ago
      Wish that were possible in the US. Given the amount of junk mail that goes straight to the trash can, I am surprised there has not been more of an uproar from the environmentalists.
pmorici 5y ago
Things fell off a clif in December I had multiple pieces of mails take months to arrive. One of them was a check mailed to the next zip code over but instead made it’s way to Florida before meandering back to the nearest metro area post office. That particular mail had tracking. Once you lose faith that something sent will arrive in a timely fashion that is the beginning of the end for a mail service.
prepend 5y ago
I find that the problem is last mile. I’ve lived in 4 areas in the Us where I received a lot of mail. 3/4 were amazing and everything came quickly. I assumed all USPS was great. For the last 10 years my post office has had many problems. Packages where tracking shows it “out for delivery” but it never arrives. The electronic delivery email sends scans of letters “arriving today” that don’t come until the next day. Drivers who put “redelivery notices” in the mailbox rather than door saying I wasn’t available, backdated to previous days. It’s very strange because contacting the postmaster just results in odd excuses, for example, I was told that the delivery driver was really busy that day and couldn’t make it to my house. I live in suburbia in a neighborhood with hundreds of houses. So this post office sucks. It seems drivers suck, management sucks and that results in slow and missing mail. I travel a bit and like to send post cards to family, including my own. A post card to my house consistently arrives 2-4 days after the card to a family member in a zip code 50 miles way, an even more remote suburb. This seems consistent from very remote locations as well as domestic. Curious. My soft conclusion is that the “systematic” portions of the USPS are reliable and good. But the “local” portions are hit or miss.
- tchanglington 5y ago
  The problem with the last mile is that there’s a lot of them. Even more if you’re in suburbia, where the number of people living in the last mile is comparable to people living in the last block or so in the city.
  - ohples 5y ago
    Yet another reason why suburbia is expensive and not sustainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
    - sillyquiet 5y ago
      Yeah, remaking society seems like a just and scaleable solution
      - 5y ago
andrewlgood 5y ago
My friends are still getting Christmas cards mailed out on Dec 17, 2020.
- mbauman 5y ago
  I wouldn't believe this if I hadn't seen it myself — my mom's Christmas card to me was returned to her as "not deliverable as addressed" two weeks ago with intermediate postmarks from Feb and March. My address was perfectly legible and complete. Her return address was effectively: A. [her first initial] 123 Main [missing Street] 55555 [just the zip, no city/state] She brought it on a plane to me last week.
pydry 5y ago
For those who might be wondering why it's getting worse from a systemic perspective, this article about the privatization playbook with respect to the TSA might shed some light: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-privatization-playbook-make-an-agency-perform-badly-by-underfunding-it.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-pr... Part of it is also almost certainly due to the public spat Trump had with them: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-post-office-election-funding https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump...
gambiting 5y ago
As much as I enjoy always pointing out things that we do better in the EU, unfortunately the situation here is opposite. Sending a letter from say Germany to France is a complete black box. Even with all the "priority" /airmail whatever stamps it takes 2-3 weeks on average. I understand this is different countries and all, but courier companies have it figured out. I could send a parcel with UPS from Poland to Spain using their cheapest Standard service and it will arrive in 2-3 days. Send the same parcel with national mail and it's any amount of time, with very little reliable tracking.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  We could cross-examine but as far I am concerned every package I ordered (one) from France to Belgium came in less than a week. I thought it'd take longer but I was wrong.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  The problem is that all over, post services have become privatized; it's commercial entities that squeeze their employees dry to maximize profits. They subcontract some things like packages to companies with even worse track records, gig economy type delivery companies where it's a random guy in their personal car with a boot full of packages. The commercial package companies like UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc still have a better track record, but that too depends - a package from the UK was stuck in Brexit limbo for three months before finally arriving, battered by going around the carousel in the sorting / customs center and being sent back and forth. Deprivatize the mail. Make it a respectable service again, with uniformed, unionized and full-time personnel. It doesn't have to be profitable, it's critical infrastructure. Have those that abuse it - e.g. junk mail sent with an address to avoid the 'no junk mail' stickers - pay extra. And in the US, it's the post that connected the country; mail was THE biggest factor in the creation of things like stage coach services, the railway network, and commercial flights which other industries could latch onto. It should be treated with the same budgets and respect as e.g. the highway network. Defund the military and they could pay for the world's greatest postal service ten times over. If done right, it would put an end to the malpractices that companies like Uber and Amazon are trying to do with their employees.
Beltiras 5y ago
How Louis DeJoy is not in cuffs is beyond my understanding.
- Vaslo 5y ago
  Why would he be put in handcuffs instead of just being fired? It's literally pieces of paper for God's sake. He would go to jail because you didn't receive your Chess By Mail fast enough?
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Because he is actively sabotaging a corporation he is supposed to lead. That's why. He had them tear out tens of millions of dollars of custom-built, automatic sorting equipment to sort by hand without adding staff or increasing hours in an attempt to slow down mail delivery.
  - Finnucane 5y ago
    Dejoy's own business would benefit by the collapse of the USPS. It was in his interest to make that happen as fast as possible. Plus blatant manipulation of the election. His management has been pretty corrupt.
  - Beltiras 5y ago
    Actively sabotaging mail delivery in a pandemic for political purposes.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Lucky you that you don't rely on mail for more important things, and can't even imagine doing so.
CountDrewku 5y ago
Probably because they're too busy spying on US citizens.
polygotdomain 5y ago
Society is not maintenance free, and the institutions and services society depends on are not maintenance free either. The Postal Service, like many services that we depend on in society, are just assumed to always work because for years and years they did work. Yet we allowed improvements to be delayed, allowed leaders in who acted in bad faith, and the result is an service that is substandard by it's own measure. What's the answer? Commit to do the work necessary to turn it around. The mail hasn't changed over the last two years in some fundamental way that makes it disruptive. Investment in the system was simply deprioritized. We know what the system needs, so let's just do the work. We need the Postal Service to operate as it should, as it's a key piece of infrastructure that society depends on, whether we recognize it or not.
- jollybean 5y ago
  "The mail hasn't changed over the last two years in some fundamental way that makes it disruptive" COVID has very fundamentally changed the equation. Also, some institutions are more adaptive than others, some are more resilient. I suggest the USPS is very low on 'adaptiveness', but probably fairly resilient.
  - jermaustin1 5y ago
    What does the Patent Office have to do with the Post Office?
    - ptaipale 5y ago
      I suppose it is obvious that the previous writer just used wrong abbreviation, and meant the postal service. Snail-mail is in trouble in most parts of the developed world, because online services have replaced so many processes that were running on paper. Providing an example from my country and neighbours, i.e. the Nordics. Look at the graph that has numbers of delivered letters in different countries - it has roughly halved in 10 years, and the trend continues: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284 Parcel deliveries are growing, but there the postal services have competition. As the volume of letters decreases - particularly in businesses and offices but also in private lives - it becomes increasingly difficult to run the service without financial loss.
leephillips 5y ago
Do not use the USPS for anything important: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-postal-service-employee-charged-throwing-mail-dumpster-absentee-ballots/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-postal-service-employee-ch... https://triblive.com/local/south-hills/2nd-local-postal-worker-suspended-for-allegedly-dumping-mail-in-trash/ https://triblive.com/local/south-hills/2nd-local-postal-work... https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/mailman-throws-away-mail-in-kelso-wa/ https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/mailman-throws-away-m... https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-postal-worker-accused-of-throwing-away-election-ballots https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-postal-worker-accused-of-thro... https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/postal-worker-fired-for-throwing-out-mail-in-shorewood https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/postal-worker-fired-for... https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/10/06/wyoming-mail-carrier-faces-jail-after-throwing-away-voter-guides/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/10/06/wyoming-mail-carrier... https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/25/postal-worker-indicted-on-federal-charges-in-dumping-of-troy-nehls-campaign-fliers/ https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/25/postal-w... https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/11/video-shows-postal-worker-carelessly-throwing-packages-in-miramar/ https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/11/video-shows-po... https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/virginia-beach/mailman-pleads-guilty-to-keeping-undelivered-mail-in-storage-unit-in-virginia-beach/ https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/virginia-beach/mailman-... https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/immigrants-in-elko-area-suffer-after-postal-worker-intentionally-discards-immigration-documents https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/immigrants-in-elko-...
- jopsen 5y ago
  Except the IRS, right? or so I was told when I lived in the US. (if you get PWC to do your taxes as a relocation service, you have to submit in paper, though given the amount of paper it's almost a package, hehe)
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Yes, sometimes using the official mail is a legal requirement. So drop your letter in the box and say a prayer to Hermes that the mailman doesn’t throw it away.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Anecdote: I mail small packages regularly using USPS. I buy and print a label, apply it to the package, and drop in a blue box. I've had a fantastic experience. Very few lost packages, and quick arrival times: 2-3 days if in the region, 4-5 days to somewhere far away but domestic (eg California from NC). 1-2 weeks to Europe, 3-4 to Asia or Australia.
post_break 5y ago
When your letter or package hits the bottomless pit known as the north houston facility, you just have to wait for it to come around the dark side of the moon. Basically everything in houston hits that. Makes me think of toledo too. All mail was routed to detroit and back, even if you mailed it from toledo to maumee.
- mimixco 5y ago
  I'm in the Bayou City as well and all my holiday mail arrives around the next holiday. New Year's cards were coming in around Valentines. All packages and letters appear to be "batch" delivered, regardless of when they're sent. We don't even get regular deliveries every day because supposedly there's "nothing." I imagine it's sitting in that facility you mention.
withinboredom 5y ago
Living overseas, it's always entertaining to get letters from the IRS. Especially when they say "you need to do such-and-such by Feb 15th" and you received the letter on May 1.
chmod775 5y ago
> Scott Hoffman [...] told GBH News the slowdown in the mail has been a direct outcome of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, including a reduction in staff overtime, removal of high speed sorting machines and a decision to hold mail trucks until they are full instead of letting partially-loaded trucks head out to get mail moving. > “The postal service is now walking away from its service commitments” in the new 10-year plan. Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it.
- jonfw 5y ago
  Yes, the evil republicans are dismantling society as we know it so that they can rebuild their anarchist libertarian utopia. There can be no other explanation
obblekk 5y ago
Someone should re-run this test with an airtag in the envelope to see where the delays are. I wonder if a few non-performing nodes are slowing down the whole system...
sneak 5y ago
This isn't an accident. The USPS got partially dismantled last winter in matters related to the election, and has not been repaired since.
bdcravens 5y ago
Perhaps the USPS is less efficient than it used to be, but we can't ignore the pandemic's effect; it's not limited to just USPS. Both Fedex and UPS suspended their on-time guarantees last March, and only a few weeks ago did they restore any of them, and that's only for a small subset of their services (guarantee still suspended for ground deliveries)
- mbostleman 5y ago
  In addition is seems as if UPS has dropped the detail records they expose on the tracking. So now in their tracking UI there is just the origin and estimated date of delivery - nothing in between. I've been curious as to why they did that.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    It's still available, but only to the account owner. You have to log in first.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I don't know if you heard, but under Trump's regime they removed sorting machines in an attempt to undermine the USPS and mail-in voting last year.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    No, I'm well aware of that, and have plenty of strong opinions about that. However, I don't think that's the only issue, so I tried to avoid going there.
  - jonfw 5y ago
    Maybe they removed sorting machines because they don't help with parcels, which are an increasingly large majority of USPS's work.
    - hedora 5y ago
      No. It was definitely an act of deliberate sabotage. It’s well-documented.
grumple 5y ago
I cannot fathom why Louis DeJoy is still in office. He was planted in the USPS for the purpose of disrupting the mail service and his biggest order was the dismantling and destruction of hundreds of automated sorters around the country that do the job of dozens of employees each [1]. You can find hundreds of sources on why this was done: it was done to disrupt mail-in voting for the purpose of aiding Trump's campaign both by losing and slowing liberal-leaning mail-in votes and by reducing confidence in the postal service. I will not beat around that bush. He knows he is destroying the post office (one would have to be a half-wit to argue otherwise). A partisan effort by the Rs disrupted the post office decades ago by requiring pre-funding of benefits (costs them an extra several billion per year) [2]. There have been some efforts to remedy this lately [3]. 1. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/dejoy-says-usps-wont-reinstall-more-than-600-removed-mail-sorting-machines/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/dejoy-says-usps... 2. https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis... 3. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2021/02/congress-reintroduces-usps-reform-bill-to-eliminate-pre-funding-mandate/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2021/02/cong...
godisdad 5y ago
Formulating any analysis of the Postal Service on 100 letters is like formulating an analysis of the internet based on 1000 packets. Something longitudinal with a vaguely statistically significant sample set would be more meaningful
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It seems representative enough to warrant a follow-up investigation, instead of dismissing it as a statistical fluke entirely. All local media AND individuals can try and reproduce this, from anywhere, to anywhere.
igorkraw 5y ago
Gonna repost this reply wherever it seems fitting: The USPS has been legally blocked from adapting by anti-infrastructure ideologues (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A ) in order to set them up to fail. In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure. Any discussion of adaptivity or resilience is incomplete without considering these facts.
- callmeal 5y ago
  >In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure. I know it's the norm here to avoid calling out one political party in particular, but it's way past time to point out that it's overwhelmingly Republicans who are crafting regulations to ensure the post office fails and turns from a world-class institution to something that can be pointed to as an example of government failing.
  - igorkraw 5y ago
    Dang has personally told me to avoid incendiary language and while I personally disagree with the exact definition used at hackernews, it's their playground so I'm trying to be a good citizen. But I agree
  - kyrra 5y ago
    As the video linked calls out, the USPS is between a rock and a hard place. They are not funded by tax dollars at all (they operate as a business), but are required to fund retirement accounts 20-30 years in the future, plus are not allow to increase rates beyond inflation. As they lose money (and have been for the last 10 years), to keep operating they are required to get a "bailout" from congress in the budget plan every year. The post master general under Trump was trying to cut costs within the constraints placed on the USPS by congress, which is to reduce mail drop boxes and other activities. If congress wanted to invest in the USPS, they could, it just hasn't been done yet (no one seemed to agree on what that should look like). One important part with the drop in mail volume is that the cost of mail delivery actually goes up. There are many fixed costs on delivering a letter, and if you can deliver 8 letters vs 4 letters to the same address and are forced to charge the same regardless of how many you end up delivering there, the overall delivery-cost of each letter goes up. So either we need to let the USPS charge more for their services (to offset the reduced volume), or congress needs to decide to subsidize the USPS again to allow it to function properly. Subsidizing would be difficult given how UPS and Fedex abuse the USPS today. (Those two carriers will push delivery to the USPS when they know its unprofitable for them to deliver any given package). So any subsidy that it provided to the USPS will also subsidize Fedex and UPS unless the rules are changed there as well.
igorkraw 5y ago
Gonna repost this reply wherever it seems fitting: The USPS has been legally blocked from adapting by anti-infrastructure ideologues (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A ) in order to set them up to fail. In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure. Any discussion of adaptivity or resilience is incomplete without considering these facts.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- faitswulff 5y ago
  It’s definitely a political problem at its heart and requires political solutions.
IshKebab 5y ago
> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot,” he said. Are people in America actually still paid by physical cheques? They're getting pretty close to the telegram in terms of obsolescence in the UK. The only times I get cheques are tax rebates & the similar. Probably one cheque per year, max. I haven't owned a cheque book for maybe 15 years and I've never been paid by cheque.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  There’s nothing to say you can’t. It’s less efficient and more costly, but you can still do it. And some people do. In all likelihood, when people use them it is for a perfectly rational reason. For most people, receiving a check is a non-issue. You just take a photo of it with your phone using your banking app and it is deposited in your account.
arnmac 5y ago
The USPS from time to time does do testing on delivery. I was part of a test program a few years ago where the USPS was testing the delivery of mail. They would send me addresses and postage and I was to send them from a drop box or at some times send them from the counter. The addresses were both US and domestic. I would also get letters from people around the world or in the US. Inside was just a code that I would have to go put into a website run for the USPS by IBM. As a reward I would get a booklet of stamps or a letter opener. In truth the coolest part was getting the stamps from around the world showing up in my mailbox.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I'm not seeing any references in this thread about the Trump regime's undermining of the USPS. Last year during the election, they removed and disassembled sorting machines from the USPS. They just came in and took them out. They disrupted the mail service. Don't complain about the USPS for things that were done to them in an attempt to undermine your democracy, instead contact your representatives to reinstate the USPS to their full capacity and then some.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I know there are tons of politics and whatnot involved, but this is what I want from the post office. Monthly mail, instead of daily. I only open my mail quarterly anyway. Charge more for bulk mail not less, Junk mail should be punished, not encouraged. Allow me to create a list of blocked senders. Thats it, please and thank you.
wesleyabbey 5y ago
Here are some more benchmarks against USPS and other big brand carriers: https://benchmarks.wonderment.com/ https://benchmarks.wonderment.com/ This also includes UPS, Fedex, and DHL against a much larger sample size.
ilamont 5y ago
I operate a DTC company in the Boston area and send thousands of packages every year. Even the tracked Priority Mail packages have delays. The system promises 2-3 day delivery (and that's what customers are told during checkout, no way to change it) but it's often longer than that, particularly for larger/odd-shaped packages such as the long Priority Mail tubes. In New England, a lot of problems can be traced to COVID outbreaks among USPS staff in processing centers. It was especially bad starting in November and continuing through February. At one point the Post Office stopped scanning parcels (for us, in mid-December) and huge backlogs built up across the system. We heard from our USPS business rep in Boston that 200 workers were out sick at the giant processing facility in Nashua NH, leading to trucks arriving at the parking lot that couldn't be unloaded. They switched to processing Priority Mail at the facility in South Boston and everything else in Stamford CT, but they weren't able to work through the Nashua backlog until January. One Priority Mail parcel we shipped on Nov 30 that was supposed to be "3-day delivery" arrived at its destination in Kentucky 45 days later, on Jan. 13.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  The post holiday COVID surge affected many entities. It’s a viscous cycle, a quarantine in Nashua breaks a process in San Diego! I probably had 50% of my on-site people quarantined during that period, and every vendor was impacted. IIRC, 90% of orders were delivered late.
- flutas 5y ago
  I believe that backup happened at multiple throughout the country, honestly. I had 2 packages, one to San Diego and one to Atlanta. Both have yet to arrive and both were mailed early December. I'm still getting monthly "we're looking but haven't found them yet" emails from them. I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO. Which would make sense that some packages have been lost for months while newer ones seem to be going through the system just fine.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO. queue and FIFO are the same; from context it sounds like you mean LIFO.
pjerem 5y ago
> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot” Is this a bad example or are paychecks a normal thing in US ? If yes, are they sent by mail ? I'm just curious about how this works. Every time I read an article about money in the US, I have the feeling that a lot of money transaction (paycheck, paying your bills ...) is done by paper/mail. I'm surprised each time I read this since I never had to think about paying my bills or receiving my pay on my account. I'm not even sure my parents ever get paid by check (like, with some sort of paper that you have to give to your bank) but here, maybe I'm wrong. And I know it can sometimes happen here for short contracts to get paid by check, but even in this use case, it's pretty rare. If I'm right, is this more a cultural thing or some sort of technical limitation ?
- rp1229 5y ago
  A lot of smaller employers will still do paper checks, not sure if it's because of the cost associated with having a direct deposit system. But also, a subset of people do not trust banks or are unable to have direct deposits. They usually use those check-cashing shops who give out cash for a % fee.
- oasisbob 5y ago
  It's a metaphorical example. Even when I received a physical paycheck years ago, it wasn't typically done in the mail. Personally, I'm more worried as a consumer that legal notice delivery is unreliable. My storage unit (Public Storage) jacked my rent up by over 20% without notice. They claim they mailed notice, and the lease specifically has a provision that there is a presumption of delivery when things are posted via first class mail.
- gen3 5y ago
  When I worked at the YMCA, I remember receiving my first paycheck in the mail. This was because my bank account wasn’t all the way into their system for direct deposit yet. I’m willing to bet for many places of employment, a physical paycheck is also the default. 6.5% of Americans don’t have a bank account, so they can’t do direct deposit at all. There is a good number of people who have always received a physical paycheck who haven’t gone through the process of direct deposit, such as my grandparents. https://apnews.com/article/8b2b93d4e9474c418853e0f20e79aaa8 https://apnews.com/article/8b2b93d4e9474c418853e0f20e79aaa8
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Silly? Its covid time. The post office was hit hard by restrictions. They told us where I live that delivery was going to be affected.
londons_explore 5y ago
UPS should offer a "quote and send" system for letters, so that you type in your address and say when you want it to arrive, and they quote you a price. If it doesn't arrive by the time you said, you get a refund. The quote system could have everything from "1 hour" for door-to-door direct courier (probably costing $50), up to "30 days" for really low priority stuff. The system would give you a barcode to print on your envelope/package instead of a stamp, and an API so it can be integrated into business processes, apps, etc. Then use a fancy algorithm to set pricing to perfectly fill every truck, reduce load at busy times, etc. There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive.
- rovr138 5y ago
  I just read a comment[0] about a package shipped via priority taking 45 days to arrive. I can't expect this to work when they don't have funding, there's a huge backlog, among other things. Then the problem becomes that due to shortage of people and backlogs, the prices just keep going up and up if you want it on a 'reasonable' time. The main issue that seems to need fixing is capacity and this won't solve it. Probably overall but also seasonal due to COVID. I wish more of my taxes would go towards this (and that they switch the postmaster general). > There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive. They do this already though. USPS is used a lot for their last mile and they have UPS and Fedex too as well as their own fleet of delivery drivers in some regions and planes and trucks for distribution around the country. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025166
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > The main issue that seems to need fixing is capacity As evidenced by the fact the vast majority of letters are delivered, it seems capacity isn't the issue. If there were a capacity issue, they would be falling further and further behind as letters were being posted quicker than they could be sorted and delivered. Instead the issue is loadbalancing. Some centers have too much load, while others have spare capacity. That changes day to day, increasing delivery times. The fix is variable pricing to get each local sort center closer and more consistently towards its capacity without exceeding it.
magicalhippo 5y ago
Reminds me of a page I found way back, where a guy tested to see just what kind of things he could get delivered through the postal service. I tried digging it up but can't find it. He mailed a lot of things to himself, but there were two that stood out. One was a brick, IIRC not wrapped, just taped address and stamps to it. It arrived with some delay, in a bag, smashed to pieces, likely in search of drugs. The second was a full-sized cod or similar fish. Can't recall if he wrapped it. In either case, the fish did not arrive. Instead he got a stern warning that if anything like that ever happened again, he wouldn't get any more mail delivered, ever... IIRC apart from those two, most of the weird attempts were delivered successfully.
- derstander 5y ago
  Tangentially related, but here’s the USPS page for the types of live animals that you can send through the mail! https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm There are probably similar pages like it but that’s always the one that comes to my mind when people talk about mailing odd things.
brap 5y ago
Is there any real competition to USPS? Or do they get their check from the government regardless of how poorly they perform? In my own country, the government owned postal service is complete trash. Yeah, it’s almost “free”, but we’re paying for it in taxes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually costs way more than private carriers. Not to mention that the workers are incredibly lazy and rude, and opening hours are ridiculous. I’ve ordered a package which took 5 days to get here from the other side of the planet, by private carriers, and then it got stuck in the national mail service for 3 months. The seller was kind enough to resend the package, but I’m not sure if it’ll ever make it either. What are you gonna do, choose the competitors? They still get their check.
- callmeal 5y ago
  >Is there any real competition to USPS? I don't understand. USPS is not a business. It's civic infrastructure. There is no way any competitor will agree to delivering a letter from one end of the country to another for $0.55.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Letters are a tiny insignificant fraction of the USPS traffic. Is it still important? Are there alternatives? That's very arguable (direct deposit; digital signature etc).
  - brap 5y ago
    So if I understand correctly, through government subsidization and regulation it is virtually impossible to compete with USPS. What are their incentives to improve their service and reduce their costs (including taxpayer costs)?
- dqx 5y ago
  No, the USPS has the Congressional monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent letters and delivery direct to mailboxes at residential and commercial locations. They specifically do not have any competition in those cases.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Lots of defense of the USPS because "important things get mailed" etc. Lets be honest: there are lots of choices these days, and the USPS is just one. One very old, very tradition choice to be sure. It's entirely possible that the USPS could be obsolete. A few examples of niche purposes doesn't end the discussion. It just begins a new one around "How do we do that then, without the USPS?"
- everdrive 5y ago
  Can you describe how the USPS is obsolete whereas FedEx or another private company is not?
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Federally funded, special priviledges re: Congress, requirements to server every resident of every state, price controlled and on and on.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Interesting, this completely contradicts my own experience. Is it possible there is something broken with the Boston area USPS operations that isn't systemic across the rest of USPS?
- rovr138 5y ago
  > The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window. >By Friday of that week, much of our mail had arrived, but there were still ten letters wandering around the country looking for their addressees. A letter to rural Virginia arrived April 13; a letter to Washington, D.C., took another three days. As of April 22, there were still two letters that could not be accounted for. The results were better for mail within Massachusetts: All 10 of the in-state letters GBH staff sent arrived by April 8. and further down, > In our unscientific sample, distance from Boston did not appear to be a determining factor of how long a letter would take. A letter to Baltimore took as long as a letter to Hawaii (a week). On April 7, the U.S. Post Office delivered two dozen of our letters to points in the New England/Northeast corridor — and one to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Letters dropped at the central post office downtown had no apparent advantage for speed of delivery over letters dropped in residential building mail slots. Doesn't look like it's a Boston area issue.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    My interpretation was that the mail all started in Boston, though.
whydoyoucare 5y ago
I believe experience with USPS varies across the board from worst to the best. I am in the Bay Area, and in the last 8 or so years, USPS has been the best among all carriers. Be it package, letter or a Registered Parcel. Of course, my experience does not translate to that of the entire service, but the point I am trying to make is what GBH experienced cannot be generalized to USPS. There are several other factors (some described in the responses here) that can make or break the service. As with any Government provided service, there are inefficiencies, which need to be addressed and removed. I think these are being politicized by various parties to privatize it, which IMO won't solve the problems.
bongobingo 5y ago
> Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it. We don’t need to privatize. We need to get rid of it and switch to digital for everything except physical goods. Revamp USPS as a package delivery company, or just outright get rid of it and let the existing delivery companies handle it. USPS has an $80 billion annual budget. Put that money to use investing in something that has more use in the future. We don’t need to invest more in spam delivery.
wjp3 5y ago
I make every reasonable effort I can to avoid using the USPS. I have for decades. It's terrible, and has only gotten worse. This article is not surprising.
scarmig 5y ago
> Editors, reporters and producers at GBH News sent nearly 100 letters from different places in the metro area at various hours on the same day to correspondents of their own choosing in 38 states, creating a random sample. That's not a representative random sample of the mail the post office delivers. It likely oversamples from long tail requests: reporters are likely to choose zanier locations, and even the fact that they're sending the mail (instead of some kind of an institution) makes for a weird sample. Now, I don't particularly love that the modal mailing is a piece of junk, or that I have to rely on mail to receive certain kinds of institutional communications, but there's no particular reason to think the experiment revealed a failure to meet their SLO.
6510 5y ago
https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h10d190b9?country=BRA&indicator=24709&viz=bar_chart&years=2013 https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h10d190b9?country...

178 points by ystad 5y ago

The US postal service might not be what it used to be (I didn’t get a Christmas card I was sent until mid-April) but it still remains one of the most impressive logistics systems ever built, in my opinion. Letters sent to me have tracked me through multiple moves with the high point being a letter showing up in a mailbox after I’d moved twice, with one of the moves being across state lines and the other being intracity. Was it late? Yes. Did it arrive? Yes. It’s probably the only portion of the US government that I’m absolutely certain will eventually do its job.

spamalot159 5y ago
I feel like this is becoming less certain. I have had multiple packages undelivered in recent months. And many more times I have had things arrive late to the point where they were no longer needed.
matthewdgreen 5y ago
But as recently as a couple of years ago it did its job much better: both more reliably and more rapidly. The reason people are writing about it now is because the new regime of routine delays is very recent, and probably the result of some very significant changes made by politically-appointed leadership. ETA: There is a relatively short window now during which these changes can be rolled back, or people will just get used to the idea that "the reliable Post Office is another of those fantasies my parents' generation enjoyed, oh well: at least I can use UberMail for $22 a letter."
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Let's not mince words: Republicans conspired to fuck up the post office because its successes serve as a counter example to their narrative.
  - shiftpgdn 5y ago
    I've been shipping stuff online for 15 years. The post office has always been a huge mess. The only reason articles are getting written about it now is because A. Covid-era mail volumes have doubled or tripled. And B. You get to blame Trump.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      DeJoy was literally having them tear mail sorting machines out of their facilities, having them discarded in trash bins, and then cut hours for workers. Try again.
      - shiftpgdn 5y ago
        The Obama administration had them remove a massive amount of sorting machines too. Those are letter sorting machines. Letter volume is down to literally the lowest it had ever been. There is a reason they are getting ripped out.
        dsr_ 5y ago
        The letter sorting machines are faster and cheaper than manually sorting the same letters... and they were already paid for. You are correct that there is a reason that they are being ripped out, but it's not because letter volume is down.
        shiftpgdn 5y ago
        Letter volume is down and the machines need to be replaced with machines that can handle parcels. How are they supposed to replace them!?
        makomk 5y ago
        Manually sorting letters isn't actually the alternative here - what the US Postal Service was moving towards under DeJoy (and probably before him too) was sorting the same letters using the same kind of automatic machines, but a smaller number of them reconfigured to sort into a larger number of different piles using parts from the scrapped machines. This reduces overall capacity, but should be more efficient so long as they don't actually need the extra capacity.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  There has also been a pretty dramatic change in mail volume over the years. I'd rather service get subsidized than gutted, but I don't think politics are the only driver of change.
  - slickdork 5y ago
    There has been a change in volume... but it's going down. 168 billion in 2011 vs 129 billion in 2020 [1]. [1] https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/ https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/
    - makomk 5y ago
      More specifically, letter volume has been going down and parcel volume has been going up. Basically, there's been a huge shift in what the US Postal Service actually does, and their ability to cope with it has not been helped by - for example - the media creating partisan conspiracy theories about reducing the number of sorting machines that can physically only sort letters to rebalance their infrastructure being an evil right-wing conspiracy to destroy the postal service.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
"it works" is however simply not good enough; it's a service that should NEVER decline. To quote the USPS' own motto: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." They take donkeys down canyons to serve isolated communities.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Unfortunately that’s not their motto. AFAIK they don’t have a motto. It’s just some thing someone put on a federal building. It does make an awesome motto though.

lordnacho 5y ago

I was looking at some NBA history and naturally Karl Malone ended up in my list of people to look at (there's a video about how him and Stockton somehow didn't win the championship, despite being quite good). Dude's nickname was "The Mailman", which I wondered about. Turns out they used to say "The Mailman always delivers", so actually it was a compliment at the time. I think reputations change slowly, but this one had gotten to where I could no longer recognize the original intent.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Even just two years ago, I could count on first class mail always arriving within 3 days, it just happened, so reliably you never doubted it. What happened?

slickdork 5y ago
Louis DeJoy was appointed as postmaster general. He has political and financial interests in seeing the USPS fail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy
- chapium 5y ago
  It seems more likely that he isn't up to the job and should be replaced. Political factions ensured his rise to the position knew this.
  - whbrown 5y ago
    Even if you start with the assumption of incompetence over malice—this is the same guy who paid Duke $750,000 to admit his son, and has well documented conflicts of interests in his role as postmaster general. He's a political appointee for a party interested in undermining USPS while he funnels contracts to XPO, a company of which he still holds $75 million in shares. Simple unadorned corruption, that's all.
postalrat 5y ago
Hard to guess when not much at all has been happening over the past year.

forinti 5y ago

There's a push to privatise the postal service in Brazil. UPS, Fedex and such might be faster, but the postal service is a lot cheaper. I would very much like to keep this cheaper and (sometimes) slower option.

pibechorro 5y ago
Its not cheaper. You are not seeing the hidden costs which are subsidized via taxes. In the US gov workers retire MUCH earlier than normal working people, this creates a huge financial liability keeping up with decades of pensions. I was an ebay powerseller and dealing with ups was always far better than usps, many times by a big margin.
- notriddle 5y ago
  The USPS has not received tax money since the 80s. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-postal-service/11433/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-po...
CountDrewku 5y ago
Is it still cheaper if you factor in the tax dollars used to subsidize it?
Fabricio20 5y ago
Is it cheaper if you account the losses that amount from receiving things extremely late (mail that turns into waste)? In my area, every single bank notes or bills arrive at least a month late. I've had water bills arrive 4 months late (bundled together with the ones from the other 3 months). Something is very wrong with Correios, I don't think it's the last mile however, package usually arrives on time (with up to a week of delay in worst cases).

sschueller 5y ago

At 55c to send anywhere in the US I think it is not a bad service. I have to pay the equivalent of 1.10 USD (1.00 CHF) to send a letter "First Class" (A-Post) inside a tiny country (Switzerland) almost the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Edit: Corrected price

matthewdgreen 5y ago
But I'll bet it gets there in a reasonable time frame. I just received a check sent "2 day priority mail" -- took 14 days, and spent most of them stuck in a mail sorting facility.
- jopsen 5y ago
  Here in Denmark it's 1.78 USD to mail a letter, and that's delivered within 5 days. Next day delivery is 4.7 USD. I reasonably trust it'll get delivered on time, but I haven't tested it. This is letter pricing, for packages the private options are usually cheaper.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Mind you, Switzerland is a bit more wealthy than the US, and what is the cost of "not first class but regular post" over there?
- sschueller 5y ago
  Under 100g is 0.93 USD (0.85 CHF) for B-Post.
ar0 5y ago
"A-Post" is 1.00 CHF, not 1.20 CHF. Still more expensive, though (but way cheaper than the huge prices quoted for Denmark below!).
- sschueller 5y ago
  Ah, you're right, not sure what I was thinking. It's 1.30 if it's a thicker envelope.

frob 5y ago

I run a small side business which ships physical goods and I've been seeing similar issues with the "flat rate" priority shipping service from the USPS. These packages are supposed to be delivered to anywhere in the US in 2 to 3 days. When I drop off the box, they will label it with 2-day or 3-day. Since about mid-summer of 2020, those labels are aspirational. I've been tracking by taking to customers I know and the on-time delivery rate is well below 50%. It is not uncommon for 3-day shipments to take 7 days. Mail issues can also be aggrevated by local policies. I know a former regional postmaster from Wisconsin. I've since learned that during the Scott Walker years, they changed the service in WI so that all mail in the entire state is sorted in Milwaukee. So if I'm up in NW WI and I send a letter to someone a town over, the mail needs to be driven all the way across the state to Milwaukee, sorted there, and then driven all the way back. He says it's making what use to be a 1-day delivery into 3+.

bombcar 5y ago
That’s strange as everything around here gets sorted in St Paul. Mail used to be sorted at the local post office (many still have the “local” and “long-distance” mail slots but they go into the same bucket) but even now they usually route to the closest sorting facility.
- frob 5y ago
  Maybe the very NW is lucky and can use St Paul. I know that places like Madison and Plattville go to MKE and back. It seems we did indeed close the Madison sorting facility in '14 as well as other supporting regional facilities. As part of this Eau Claire moved their ops to St Paul. https://madison.com/wsj/business/u-s-postal-service-to-close-madison-processing-and-distribution-center-and-three-others-in/article_3acbb11a-c2cb-52fa-8007-f672b3287f2e.html https://madison.com/wsj/business/u-s-postal-service-to-close... Thanks for the info!
Kye 5y ago
There was that whole situation with people voting by mail in unprecedented numbers and an ongoing generation defining pandemic that resulted in a shift from retail to online shopping. On top of continued attacks on the USPS by politicians training for lobbying careers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Jiejeing 5y ago

> The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window. That is still a fantastic result. Considering the size of the delivery area and the very disparate abilities of the delivery network (rural, urban, suburbs, etc), I am impressed. For an underfunded and constantly sabotaged public institution, it still appears to work reasonably well. And yes, the 55p price is absolutely cheap for the expected service. First-class mail in Europe is often 1-2€ for much smaller countries.

andrewlgood 5y ago
Do European countries subsidize the residential mail service with commercial bulk mail (aka junk mail) and overnight services?
- Jiejeing 5y ago
  Speaking for France as I am not too familiar with other countries, no, commercial mail here is distributed manually by people living in poverty who get stacks of junk to distribute every morning. The post office here is a public service that is getting increasingly privatized, losing a bit more of service quality and goodwill every time (if your only KPI is "distribute your stash of mail the fastest way possible", some things like leaving a receipt for a package and fixing off-by one addresses get lost in the race). You can opt-out of the junk with a sticker on your mailbox anyway.
  - soco 5y ago
    Exactly the same goes in Switzerland. I suppose all those people suggesting privatizing the postal services either live in a digital bubble or never sent a postcard to their grandmas.
  - andrewlgood 5y ago
    Wish that were possible in the US. Given the amount of junk mail that goes straight to the trash can, I am surprised there has not been more of an uproar from the environmentalists.

pmorici 5y ago

Things fell off a clif in December I had multiple pieces of mails take months to arrive. One of them was a check mailed to the next zip code over but instead made it’s way to Florida before meandering back to the nearest metro area post office. That particular mail had tracking. Once you lose faith that something sent will arrive in a timely fashion that is the beginning of the end for a mail service.

prepend 5y ago

I find that the problem is last mile. I’ve lived in 4 areas in the Us where I received a lot of mail. 3/4 were amazing and everything came quickly. I assumed all USPS was great. For the last 10 years my post office has had many problems. Packages where tracking shows it “out for delivery” but it never arrives. The electronic delivery email sends scans of letters “arriving today” that don’t come until the next day. Drivers who put “redelivery notices” in the mailbox rather than door saying I wasn’t available, backdated to previous days. It’s very strange because contacting the postmaster just results in odd excuses, for example, I was told that the delivery driver was really busy that day and couldn’t make it to my house. I live in suburbia in a neighborhood with hundreds of houses. So this post office sucks. It seems drivers suck, management sucks and that results in slow and missing mail. I travel a bit and like to send post cards to family, including my own. A post card to my house consistently arrives 2-4 days after the card to a family member in a zip code 50 miles way, an even more remote suburb. This seems consistent from very remote locations as well as domestic. Curious. My soft conclusion is that the “systematic” portions of the USPS are reliable and good. But the “local” portions are hit or miss.

tchanglington 5y ago
The problem with the last mile is that there’s a lot of them. Even more if you’re in suburbia, where the number of people living in the last mile is comparable to people living in the last block or so in the city.
- ohples 5y ago
  Yet another reason why suburbia is expensive and not sustainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
  - sillyquiet 5y ago
    Yeah, remaking society seems like a just and scaleable solution
    - 5y ago

andrewlgood 5y ago

My friends are still getting Christmas cards mailed out on Dec 17, 2020.

mbauman 5y ago
I wouldn't believe this if I hadn't seen it myself — my mom's Christmas card to me was returned to her as "not deliverable as addressed" two weeks ago with intermediate postmarks from Feb and March. My address was perfectly legible and complete. Her return address was effectively: A. [her first initial] 123 Main [missing Street] 55555 [just the zip, no city/state] She brought it on a plane to me last week.

pydry 5y ago

For those who might be wondering why it's getting worse from a systemic perspective, this article about the privatization playbook with respect to the TSA might shed some light: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-privatization-playbook-make-an-agency-perform-badly-by-underfunding-it.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-pr... Part of it is also almost certainly due to the public spat Trump had with them: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-post-office-election-funding https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump...

gambiting 5y ago

As much as I enjoy always pointing out things that we do better in the EU, unfortunately the situation here is opposite. Sending a letter from say Germany to France is a complete black box. Even with all the "priority" /airmail whatever stamps it takes 2-3 weeks on average. I understand this is different countries and all, but courier companies have it figured out. I could send a parcel with UPS from Poland to Spain using their cheapest Standard service and it will arrive in 2-3 days. Send the same parcel with national mail and it's any amount of time, with very little reliable tracking.

johnchristopher 5y ago
We could cross-examine but as far I am concerned every package I ordered (one) from France to Belgium came in less than a week. I thought it'd take longer but I was wrong.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The problem is that all over, post services have become privatized; it's commercial entities that squeeze their employees dry to maximize profits. They subcontract some things like packages to companies with even worse track records, gig economy type delivery companies where it's a random guy in their personal car with a boot full of packages. The commercial package companies like UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc still have a better track record, but that too depends - a package from the UK was stuck in Brexit limbo for three months before finally arriving, battered by going around the carousel in the sorting / customs center and being sent back and forth. Deprivatize the mail. Make it a respectable service again, with uniformed, unionized and full-time personnel. It doesn't have to be profitable, it's critical infrastructure. Have those that abuse it - e.g. junk mail sent with an address to avoid the 'no junk mail' stickers - pay extra. And in the US, it's the post that connected the country; mail was THE biggest factor in the creation of things like stage coach services, the railway network, and commercial flights which other industries could latch onto. It should be treated with the same budgets and respect as e.g. the highway network. Defund the military and they could pay for the world's greatest postal service ten times over. If done right, it would put an end to the malpractices that companies like Uber and Amazon are trying to do with their employees.

Beltiras 5y ago

How Louis DeJoy is not in cuffs is beyond my understanding.

Vaslo 5y ago
Why would he be put in handcuffs instead of just being fired? It's literally pieces of paper for God's sake. He would go to jail because you didn't receive your Chess By Mail fast enough?
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Because he is actively sabotaging a corporation he is supposed to lead. That's why. He had them tear out tens of millions of dollars of custom-built, automatic sorting equipment to sort by hand without adding staff or increasing hours in an attempt to slow down mail delivery.
- Finnucane 5y ago
  Dejoy's own business would benefit by the collapse of the USPS. It was in his interest to make that happen as fast as possible. Plus blatant manipulation of the election. His management has been pretty corrupt.
- Beltiras 5y ago
  Actively sabotaging mail delivery in a pandemic for political purposes.
- detaro 5y ago
  Lucky you that you don't rely on mail for more important things, and can't even imagine doing so.

CountDrewku 5y ago

Probably because they're too busy spying on US citizens.

polygotdomain 5y ago

Society is not maintenance free, and the institutions and services society depends on are not maintenance free either. The Postal Service, like many services that we depend on in society, are just assumed to always work because for years and years they did work. Yet we allowed improvements to be delayed, allowed leaders in who acted in bad faith, and the result is an service that is substandard by it's own measure. What's the answer? Commit to do the work necessary to turn it around. The mail hasn't changed over the last two years in some fundamental way that makes it disruptive. Investment in the system was simply deprioritized. We know what the system needs, so let's just do the work. We need the Postal Service to operate as it should, as it's a key piece of infrastructure that society depends on, whether we recognize it or not.

jollybean 5y ago
"The mail hasn't changed over the last two years in some fundamental way that makes it disruptive" COVID has very fundamentally changed the equation. Also, some institutions are more adaptive than others, some are more resilient. I suggest the USPS is very low on 'adaptiveness', but probably fairly resilient.
- jermaustin1 5y ago
  What does the Patent Office have to do with the Post Office?
  - ptaipale 5y ago
    I suppose it is obvious that the previous writer just used wrong abbreviation, and meant the postal service. Snail-mail is in trouble in most parts of the developed world, because online services have replaced so many processes that were running on paper. Providing an example from my country and neighbours, i.e. the Nordics. Look at the graph that has numbers of delivered letters in different countries - it has roughly halved in 10 years, and the trend continues: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284 Parcel deliveries are growing, but there the postal services have competition. As the volume of letters decreases - particularly in businesses and offices but also in private lives - it becomes increasingly difficult to run the service without financial loss.

leephillips 5y ago

Do not use the USPS for anything important: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-postal-service-employee-charged-throwing-mail-dumpster-absentee-ballots/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-postal-service-employee-ch... https://triblive.com/local/south-hills/2nd-local-postal-worker-suspended-for-allegedly-dumping-mail-in-trash/ https://triblive.com/local/south-hills/2nd-local-postal-work... https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/mailman-throws-away-mail-in-kelso-wa/ https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/mailman-throws-away-m... https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-postal-worker-accused-of-throwing-away-election-ballots https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nj-postal-worker-accused-of-thro... https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/postal-worker-fired-for-throwing-out-mail-in-shorewood https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/postal-worker-fired-for... https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/10/06/wyoming-mail-carrier-faces-jail-after-throwing-away-voter-guides/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2020/10/06/wyoming-mail-carrier... https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/25/postal-worker-indicted-on-federal-charges-in-dumping-of-troy-nehls-campaign-fliers/ https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/09/25/postal-w... https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/11/video-shows-postal-worker-carelessly-throwing-packages-in-miramar/ https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/09/11/video-shows-po... https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/virginia-beach/mailman-pleads-guilty-to-keeping-undelivered-mail-in-storage-unit-in-virginia-beach/ https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/virginia-beach/mailman-... https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/immigrants-in-elko-area-suffer-after-postal-worker-intentionally-discards-immigration-documents https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/immigrants-in-elko-...

jopsen 5y ago
Except the IRS, right? or so I was told when I lived in the US. (if you get PWC to do your taxes as a relocation service, you have to submit in paper, though given the amount of paper it's almost a package, hehe)
- leephillips 5y ago
  Yes, sometimes using the official mail is a legal requirement. So drop your letter in the box and say a prayer to Hermes that the mailman doesn’t throw it away.

the__alchemist 5y ago

Anecdote: I mail small packages regularly using USPS. I buy and print a label, apply it to the package, and drop in a blue box. I've had a fantastic experience. Very few lost packages, and quick arrival times: 2-3 days if in the region, 4-5 days to somewhere far away but domestic (eg California from NC). 1-2 weeks to Europe, 3-4 to Asia or Australia.

post_break 5y ago

When your letter or package hits the bottomless pit known as the north houston facility, you just have to wait for it to come around the dark side of the moon. Basically everything in houston hits that. Makes me think of toledo too. All mail was routed to detroit and back, even if you mailed it from toledo to maumee.

mimixco 5y ago
I'm in the Bayou City as well and all my holiday mail arrives around the next holiday. New Year's cards were coming in around Valentines. All packages and letters appear to be "batch" delivered, regardless of when they're sent. We don't even get regular deliveries every day because supposedly there's "nothing." I imagine it's sitting in that facility you mention.

withinboredom 5y ago

Living overseas, it's always entertaining to get letters from the IRS. Especially when they say "you need to do such-and-such by Feb 15th" and you received the letter on May 1.

chmod775 5y ago

> Scott Hoffman [...] told GBH News the slowdown in the mail has been a direct outcome of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, including a reduction in staff overtime, removal of high speed sorting machines and a decision to hold mail trucks until they are full instead of letting partially-loaded trucks head out to get mail moving. > “The postal service is now walking away from its service commitments” in the new 10-year plan. Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it.

jonfw 5y ago
Yes, the evil republicans are dismantling society as we know it so that they can rebuild their anarchist libertarian utopia. There can be no other explanation

obblekk 5y ago

Someone should re-run this test with an airtag in the envelope to see where the delays are. I wonder if a few non-performing nodes are slowing down the whole system...

sneak 5y ago

This isn't an accident. The USPS got partially dismantled last winter in matters related to the election, and has not been repaired since.

bdcravens 5y ago

Perhaps the USPS is less efficient than it used to be, but we can't ignore the pandemic's effect; it's not limited to just USPS. Both Fedex and UPS suspended their on-time guarantees last March, and only a few weeks ago did they restore any of them, and that's only for a small subset of their services (guarantee still suspended for ground deliveries)

mbostleman 5y ago
In addition is seems as if UPS has dropped the detail records they expose on the tracking. So now in their tracking UI there is just the origin and estimated date of delivery - nothing in between. I've been curious as to why they did that.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  It's still available, but only to the account owner. You have to log in first.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't know if you heard, but under Trump's regime they removed sorting machines in an attempt to undermine the USPS and mail-in voting last year.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  No, I'm well aware of that, and have plenty of strong opinions about that. However, I don't think that's the only issue, so I tried to avoid going there.
- jonfw 5y ago
  Maybe they removed sorting machines because they don't help with parcels, which are an increasingly large majority of USPS's work.
  - hedora 5y ago
    No. It was definitely an act of deliberate sabotage. It’s well-documented.

grumple 5y ago

I cannot fathom why Louis DeJoy is still in office. He was planted in the USPS for the purpose of disrupting the mail service and his biggest order was the dismantling and destruction of hundreds of automated sorters around the country that do the job of dozens of employees each [1]. You can find hundreds of sources on why this was done: it was done to disrupt mail-in voting for the purpose of aiding Trump's campaign both by losing and slowing liberal-leaning mail-in votes and by reducing confidence in the postal service. I will not beat around that bush. He knows he is destroying the post office (one would have to be a half-wit to argue otherwise). A partisan effort by the Rs disrupted the post office decades ago by requiring pre-funding of benefits (costs them an extra several billion per year) [2]. There have been some efforts to remedy this lately [3]. 1. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/dejoy-says-usps-wont-reinstall-more-than-600-removed-mail-sorting-machines/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/dejoy-says-usps... 2. https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis... 3. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2021/02/congress-reintroduces-usps-reform-bill-to-eliminate-pre-funding-mandate/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2021/02/cong...

godisdad 5y ago

Formulating any analysis of the Postal Service on 100 letters is like formulating an analysis of the internet based on 1000 packets. Something longitudinal with a vaguely statistically significant sample set would be more meaningful

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It seems representative enough to warrant a follow-up investigation, instead of dismissing it as a statistical fluke entirely. All local media AND individuals can try and reproduce this, from anywhere, to anywhere.

igorkraw 5y ago

Gonna repost this reply wherever it seems fitting: The USPS has been legally blocked from adapting by anti-infrastructure ideologues (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A ) in order to set them up to fail. In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure. Any discussion of adaptivity or resilience is incomplete without considering these facts.

callmeal 5y ago
>In addition to this, recent administrations have been actively dismantling their infrastructure. I know it's the norm here to avoid calling out one political party in particular, but it's way past time to point out that it's overwhelmingly Republicans who are crafting regulations to ensure the post office fails and turns from a world-class institution to something that can be pointed to as an example of government failing.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  Dang has personally told me to avoid incendiary language and while I personally disagree with the exact definition used at hackernews, it's their playground so I'm trying to be a good citizen. But I agree
- kyrra 5y ago
  As the video linked calls out, the USPS is between a rock and a hard place. They are not funded by tax dollars at all (they operate as a business), but are required to fund retirement accounts 20-30 years in the future, plus are not allow to increase rates beyond inflation. As they lose money (and have been for the last 10 years), to keep operating they are required to get a "bailout" from congress in the budget plan every year. The post master general under Trump was trying to cut costs within the constraints placed on the USPS by congress, which is to reduce mail drop boxes and other activities. If congress wanted to invest in the USPS, they could, it just hasn't been done yet (no one seemed to agree on what that should look like). One important part with the drop in mail volume is that the cost of mail delivery actually goes up. There are many fixed costs on delivering a letter, and if you can deliver 8 letters vs 4 letters to the same address and are forced to charge the same regardless of how many you end up delivering there, the overall delivery-cost of each letter goes up. So either we need to let the USPS charge more for their services (to offset the reduced volume), or congress needs to decide to subsidize the USPS again to allow it to function properly. Subsidizing would be difficult given how UPS and Fedex abuse the USPS today. (Those two carriers will push delivery to the USPS when they know its unprofitable for them to deliver any given package). So any subsidy that it provided to the USPS will also subsidize Fedex and UPS unless the rules are changed there as well.

igorkraw 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
faitswulff 5y ago
It’s definitely a political problem at its heart and requires political solutions.

IshKebab 5y ago

> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot,” he said. Are people in America actually still paid by physical cheques? They're getting pretty close to the telegram in terms of obsolescence in the UK. The only times I get cheques are tax rebates & the similar. Probably one cheque per year, max. I haven't owned a cheque book for maybe 15 years and I've never been paid by cheque.

OldHand2018 5y ago
There’s nothing to say you can’t. It’s less efficient and more costly, but you can still do it. And some people do. In all likelihood, when people use them it is for a perfectly rational reason. For most people, receiving a check is a non-issue. You just take a photo of it with your phone using your banking app and it is deposited in your account.

arnmac 5y ago

The USPS from time to time does do testing on delivery. I was part of a test program a few years ago where the USPS was testing the delivery of mail. They would send me addresses and postage and I was to send them from a drop box or at some times send them from the counter. The addresses were both US and domestic. I would also get letters from people around the world or in the US. Inside was just a code that I would have to go put into a website run for the USPS by IBM. As a reward I would get a booklet of stamps or a letter opener. In truth the coolest part was getting the stamps from around the world showing up in my mailbox.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I'm not seeing any references in this thread about the Trump regime's undermining of the USPS. Last year during the election, they removed and disassembled sorting machines from the USPS. They just came in and took them out. They disrupted the mail service. Don't complain about the USPS for things that were done to them in an attempt to undermine your democracy, instead contact your representatives to reinstate the USPS to their full capacity and then some.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I know there are tons of politics and whatnot involved, but this is what I want from the post office. Monthly mail, instead of daily. I only open my mail quarterly anyway. Charge more for bulk mail not less, Junk mail should be punished, not encouraged. Allow me to create a list of blocked senders. Thats it, please and thank you.

wesleyabbey 5y ago

Here are some more benchmarks against USPS and other big brand carriers: https://benchmarks.wonderment.com/ https://benchmarks.wonderment.com/ This also includes UPS, Fedex, and DHL against a much larger sample size.

ilamont 5y ago

I operate a DTC company in the Boston area and send thousands of packages every year. Even the tracked Priority Mail packages have delays. The system promises 2-3 day delivery (and that's what customers are told during checkout, no way to change it) but it's often longer than that, particularly for larger/odd-shaped packages such as the long Priority Mail tubes. In New England, a lot of problems can be traced to COVID outbreaks among USPS staff in processing centers. It was especially bad starting in November and continuing through February. At one point the Post Office stopped scanning parcels (for us, in mid-December) and huge backlogs built up across the system. We heard from our USPS business rep in Boston that 200 workers were out sick at the giant processing facility in Nashua NH, leading to trucks arriving at the parking lot that couldn't be unloaded. They switched to processing Priority Mail at the facility in South Boston and everything else in Stamford CT, but they weren't able to work through the Nashua backlog until January. One Priority Mail parcel we shipped on Nov 30 that was supposed to be "3-day delivery" arrived at its destination in Kentucky 45 days later, on Jan. 13.

Spooky23 5y ago
The post holiday COVID surge affected many entities. It’s a viscous cycle, a quarantine in Nashua breaks a process in San Diego! I probably had 50% of my on-site people quarantined during that period, and every vendor was impacted. IIRC, 90% of orders were delivered late.
flutas 5y ago
I believe that backup happened at multiple throughout the country, honestly. I had 2 packages, one to San Diego and one to Atlanta. Both have yet to arrive and both were mailed early December. I'm still getting monthly "we're looking but haven't found them yet" emails from them. I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO. Which would make sense that some packages have been lost for months while newer ones seem to be going through the system just fine.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO. queue and FIFO are the same; from context it sounds like you mean LIFO.

pjerem 5y ago

> “If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot” Is this a bad example or are paychecks a normal thing in US ? If yes, are they sent by mail ? I'm just curious about how this works. Every time I read an article about money in the US, I have the feeling that a lot of money transaction (paycheck, paying your bills ...) is done by paper/mail. I'm surprised each time I read this since I never had to think about paying my bills or receiving my pay on my account. I'm not even sure my parents ever get paid by check (like, with some sort of paper that you have to give to your bank) but here, maybe I'm wrong. And I know it can sometimes happen here for short contracts to get paid by check, but even in this use case, it's pretty rare. If I'm right, is this more a cultural thing or some sort of technical limitation ?

rp1229 5y ago
A lot of smaller employers will still do paper checks, not sure if it's because of the cost associated with having a direct deposit system. But also, a subset of people do not trust banks or are unable to have direct deposits. They usually use those check-cashing shops who give out cash for a % fee.
oasisbob 5y ago
It's a metaphorical example. Even when I received a physical paycheck years ago, it wasn't typically done in the mail. Personally, I'm more worried as a consumer that legal notice delivery is unreliable. My storage unit (Public Storage) jacked my rent up by over 20% without notice. They claim they mailed notice, and the lease specifically has a provision that there is a presumption of delivery when things are posted via first class mail.
gen3 5y ago
When I worked at the YMCA, I remember receiving my first paycheck in the mail. This was because my bank account wasn’t all the way into their system for direct deposit yet. I’m willing to bet for many places of employment, a physical paycheck is also the default. 6.5% of Americans don’t have a bank account, so they can’t do direct deposit at all. There is a good number of people who have always received a physical paycheck who haven’t gone through the process of direct deposit, such as my grandparents. https://apnews.com/article/8b2b93d4e9474c418853e0f20e79aaa8 https://apnews.com/article/8b2b93d4e9474c418853e0f20e79aaa8

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Silly? Its covid time. The post office was hit hard by restrictions. They told us where I live that delivery was going to be affected.

londons_explore 5y ago

UPS should offer a "quote and send" system for letters, so that you type in your address and say when you want it to arrive, and they quote you a price. If it doesn't arrive by the time you said, you get a refund. The quote system could have everything from "1 hour" for door-to-door direct courier (probably costing $50), up to "30 days" for really low priority stuff. The system would give you a barcode to print on your envelope/package instead of a stamp, and an API so it can be integrated into business processes, apps, etc. Then use a fancy algorithm to set pricing to perfectly fill every truck, reduce load at busy times, etc. There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive.

rovr138 5y ago
I just read a comment[0] about a package shipped via priority taking 45 days to arrive. I can't expect this to work when they don't have funding, there's a huge backlog, among other things. Then the problem becomes that due to shortage of people and backlogs, the prices just keep going up and up if you want it on a 'reasonable' time. The main issue that seems to need fixing is capacity and this won't solve it. Probably overall but also seasonal due to COVID. I wish more of my taxes would go towards this (and that they switch the postmaster general). > There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive. They do this already though. USPS is used a lot for their last mile and they have UPS and Fedex too as well as their own fleet of delivery drivers in some regions and planes and trucks for distribution around the country. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025166
- londons_explore 5y ago
  > The main issue that seems to need fixing is capacity As evidenced by the fact the vast majority of letters are delivered, it seems capacity isn't the issue. If there were a capacity issue, they would be falling further and further behind as letters were being posted quicker than they could be sorted and delivered. Instead the issue is loadbalancing. Some centers have too much load, while others have spare capacity. That changes day to day, increasing delivery times. The fix is variable pricing to get each local sort center closer and more consistently towards its capacity without exceeding it.

magicalhippo 5y ago

Reminds me of a page I found way back, where a guy tested to see just what kind of things he could get delivered through the postal service. I tried digging it up but can't find it. He mailed a lot of things to himself, but there were two that stood out. One was a brick, IIRC not wrapped, just taped address and stamps to it. It arrived with some delay, in a bag, smashed to pieces, likely in search of drugs. The second was a full-sized cod or similar fish. Can't recall if he wrapped it. In either case, the fish did not arrive. Instead he got a stern warning that if anything like that ever happened again, he wouldn't get any more mail delivered, ever... IIRC apart from those two, most of the weird attempts were delivered successfully.

derstander 5y ago
Tangentially related, but here’s the USPS page for the types of live animals that you can send through the mail! https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm There are probably similar pages like it but that’s always the one that comes to my mind when people talk about mailing odd things.

brap 5y ago

Is there any real competition to USPS? Or do they get their check from the government regardless of how poorly they perform? In my own country, the government owned postal service is complete trash. Yeah, it’s almost “free”, but we’re paying for it in taxes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually costs way more than private carriers. Not to mention that the workers are incredibly lazy and rude, and opening hours are ridiculous. I’ve ordered a package which took 5 days to get here from the other side of the planet, by private carriers, and then it got stuck in the national mail service for 3 months. The seller was kind enough to resend the package, but I’m not sure if it’ll ever make it either. What are you gonna do, choose the competitors? They still get their check.

callmeal 5y ago
>Is there any real competition to USPS? I don't understand. USPS is not a business. It's civic infrastructure. There is no way any competitor will agree to delivering a letter from one end of the country to another for $0.55.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Letters are a tiny insignificant fraction of the USPS traffic. Is it still important? Are there alternatives? That's very arguable (direct deposit; digital signature etc).
- brap 5y ago
  So if I understand correctly, through government subsidization and regulation it is virtually impossible to compete with USPS. What are their incentives to improve their service and reduce their costs (including taxpayer costs)?
dqx 5y ago
No, the USPS has the Congressional monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent letters and delivery direct to mailboxes at residential and commercial locations. They specifically do not have any competition in those cases.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Lots of defense of the USPS because "important things get mailed" etc. Lets be honest: there are lots of choices these days, and the USPS is just one. One very old, very tradition choice to be sure. It's entirely possible that the USPS could be obsolete. A few examples of niche purposes doesn't end the discussion. It just begins a new one around "How do we do that then, without the USPS?"

everdrive 5y ago
Can you describe how the USPS is obsolete whereas FedEx or another private company is not?
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Federally funded, special priviledges re: Congress, requirements to server every resident of every state, price controlled and on and on.

rootusrootus 5y ago

Interesting, this completely contradicts my own experience. Is it possible there is something broken with the Boston area USPS operations that isn't systemic across the rest of USPS?

rovr138 5y ago
> The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window. >By Friday of that week, much of our mail had arrived, but there were still ten letters wandering around the country looking for their addressees. A letter to rural Virginia arrived April 13; a letter to Washington, D.C., took another three days. As of April 22, there were still two letters that could not be accounted for. The results were better for mail within Massachusetts: All 10 of the in-state letters GBH staff sent arrived by April 8. and further down, > In our unscientific sample, distance from Boston did not appear to be a determining factor of how long a letter would take. A letter to Baltimore took as long as a letter to Hawaii (a week). On April 7, the U.S. Post Office delivered two dozen of our letters to points in the New England/Northeast corridor — and one to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Letters dropped at the central post office downtown had no apparent advantage for speed of delivery over letters dropped in residential building mail slots. Doesn't look like it's a Boston area issue.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  My interpretation was that the mail all started in Boston, though.

whydoyoucare 5y ago

I believe experience with USPS varies across the board from worst to the best. I am in the Bay Area, and in the last 8 or so years, USPS has been the best among all carriers. Be it package, letter or a Registered Parcel. Of course, my experience does not translate to that of the entire service, but the point I am trying to make is what GBH experienced cannot be generalized to USPS. There are several other factors (some described in the responses here) that can make or break the service. As with any Government provided service, there are inefficiencies, which need to be addressed and removed. I think these are being politicized by various parties to privatize it, which IMO won't solve the problems.

bongobingo 5y ago

> Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it. We don’t need to privatize. We need to get rid of it and switch to digital for everything except physical goods. Revamp USPS as a package delivery company, or just outright get rid of it and let the existing delivery companies handle it. USPS has an $80 billion annual budget. Put that money to use investing in something that has more use in the future. We don’t need to invest more in spam delivery.

wjp3 5y ago

I make every reasonable effort I can to avoid using the USPS. I have for decades. It's terrible, and has only gotten worse. This article is not surprising.

scarmig 5y ago

> Editors, reporters and producers at GBH News sent nearly 100 letters from different places in the metro area at various hours on the same day to correspondents of their own choosing in 38 states, creating a random sample. That's not a representative random sample of the mail the post office delivers. It likely oversamples from long tail requests: reporters are likely to choose zanier locations, and even the fact that they're sending the mail (instead of some kind of an institution) makes for a weird sample. Now, I don't particularly love that the modal mailing is a piece of junk, or that I have to rely on mail to receive certain kinds of institutional communications, but there's no particular reason to think the experiment revealed a failure to meet their SLO.

6510 5y ago

https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h10d190b9?country=BRA&indicator=24709&viz=bar_chart&years=2013 https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h10d190b9?country...