8 ms·

Logistics Is Dying; Or – Dude, Where's My Mail?

66 points by ChilledTonic 9mo ago

GuB-42 9mo ago
When "free shipping" is what consumers expect, do you think people are ready to pay for better service? It the package is lost, it is often cheaper to write it off as a loss and send another item or refund. If you need overnight shipping, you can have it, but it is not cheap, so most people won't do it. As for documents, is is all electronic now. Logistics is very much alive, but it is adapted to our needs, that is massive containerships for worldwide trade, local warehouses for fast delivery of common items, reliability that is in balance with the cost of losing items, speed matching what people are ready to pay for, and specialized services for special needs, like overnight shipping. EDIT: It made me think about the "Lettre Verte" in France, named after the green stamp, and also supposedly because it is good for the planet. It was introduced early 2010s as a cheaper, slower (2 days instead of 1) alternative to the "priority" red stamp. And now the red stamp is gone, replaced with an electronic service and the green stamp is now 3 days instead of 2. Mail has become much slower overall, because there is much less mail than before, and fast service is not economically viable nor essential on a day-to-day basis. La Poste used to have a dedicated high speed train, equipped with sorting center for overnight mail across the country, now decommissioned, not enough mail to fill a train.
- IAmBroom 9mo ago
  Agreed. The author seems to think that logistics should be like memory and Moore's Law, but in fact there are very rigid limits on the system. Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Air transport is subsonic. Ground transport is limited to highway speeds for trucks, and about the same in the US for rail (because we suck and can't have nice things). These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value. Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.
  - HWR_14 9mo ago
    > Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
    - IAmBroom 9mo ago
      > With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
      - rcxdude 9mo ago
        Electricity is dirt cheap compared to the useful output you get from fuel, even before you consider buying it wholesale and at times when demand is otherwise low.
        amoshebb 9mo ago
        We should run electric third rail along the Mississippi. It’s already barges with tugs so a few electric tugboats mostly running during daylight hours, we could electrify most of this by just replacing a few tugboats. Make the lines high capacity enough to run along the coasts, and a fleet of tugs could be a huge dispatchable load, slow steaming could free up a lot, and going just a few kts faster would mop up a ton of what may be otherwise curtailed
        HWR_14 9mo ago
        Tugs could afford the weight of a bunch of even lead-acid batteries and go electric without the need for a huge amount of infrastructure going the entire length of the Mississippi.
- fennecfoxy 9mo ago
  This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards. Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next. Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
  - Tade0 9mo ago
    > make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
    - red-iron-pine 9mo ago
      Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
      - Tade0 9mo ago
        That is very in character for him, but I guess he was referring to the case which originally established this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
comrade1234 9mo ago
Speak for yourself. My mail is usually delivered next-day and I can track it live on the truck. I get annoyed when something I ordered is being delivered by someone other than swisspost. I get notifications the day before and day of delivery. Swisspost had been cutting its budget back consolidating locations but despite this is delivering even better service using tech.
- 4ggr0 9mo ago
  it could help that our country is pretty small, rich, and has about the same population size as New York City :) but i do agree, Swiss Post is great. live-tracking while they're delivering, nice app which shows you all info etc.
altcognito 9mo ago
The article makes a claim that it is no better in Canada and proceeds to remark about financial conditions. The mail is being delivered just fine, just not profitably. I've not had issues with the USPS, but I don't doubt that it is getting worse. Private delivery (Amazon and the like) has been pretty much flawless. Order from McMaster, and it almost invariably arrives within two days (continental US) I just don't experience what the author is getting at.
- ChilledTonic 9mo ago
  How many packages a year do you order, do you think? Just curious.
  - altcognito 9mo ago
    Sorry this was late -- a decent amount, probably 2-3 a week minimum.
- wombatpm 9mo ago
  The USPS is in year 4 of a 10 year overhaul of its infrastructure. New facilities with new equipment optimized for the current mail mix. Magazines and catalogs used to be huge. Now they are a fraction of their volume. First class letter volume is crashing as everyone goes paperless. Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything. And where the old system of 50 NDC (National Distribution Centers) are being consolidated to ~30 RPDC (Regional Processing and Distribution Centers) leading to a whole new strategy of how mail moves East to West and West to East. And mail sorting for delivery used to happen by mail carriers at local Post Offices, is now happening at LSDC (Local Sorting and Delivery Centers) set up service all mail carriers in a 50 - 70 mile radius. And all of these changes are happening while still having to deliver mail (It never stops Jerry. It just keeps coming and coming) So if you’re in the Midwest like Chicago, stuff coming from the Midwest or Eastcoast has been getting stuck in Indianapolis-taking 10 to 15 days. Stuff coming from West Coast gets here in 5. There are 42,000 active zip codes and 640,000 employees. Making changes to that organization is hard and takes time. What’s really cool is the work going on with Amazon, Walmart, Target and others for them to deliver packages directly to LSDC for same day delivery. Once you get away from the cities, no one can compare with the USPS for last mile delivery. TLDR USPS is changing. Things may get worse before they get better.
OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
> Mail not working is a symptom of something larger—a preference for metrics over outcomes, for cost-cutting over capability, for whatever can be measured over what actually matters. This sentence sounds straight out of ChatGPT (along with the general substance-less nature of the article).
- nbernard 9mo ago
  Sounds literary, if a bit grandiloquent, more than anything. It was once considered "good style" and books from the XIXth and XXth centuries are full of such sentences. See the works of James Jeans, John McPhee, Carl Sagan, and the like for instance.
gritzko 9mo ago
I had some dramatic episodes. Surprisingly, FedEx is very bad in Germany too. Once I had to retrieve a laptop from a FedEx station to prevent it from going back to China. The trick is, it was addressed to a different name. The truck just went by the door for three days, "nobody home". That was a situation.
- lifestyleguru 9mo ago
  It's not FedEx, fluent usage of "c/o" when receiving post and packages in Germany is an absolute necessity. Once colleague from workplace ordered a modem from vodafone hoping he'll set up the internet by the end of the week, in the end the set up took over a month and almost led to his mental breakdown.
lifestyleguru 9mo ago
I find the withdrawal of post services very unsettling. How do you enforce anything with fintechs, banks, insurance companies? You realize that they can freeze your funds and accounts at will, ignore emails, and outright lie over the phone?
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  A couple of years ago I sent a letter to HMRC (UK tax collectors). It took them more than a year to reply.
  - lifestyleguru 9mo ago
    When I requested a form from HMRC they diligently used every maximum legally allowed time for processing, response, and shipping;)... and also were grumpy over the phone.
- lmm 9mo ago
  How does post help with any of that?
  - lifestyleguru 9mo ago
    They are legally obliged to respond to registered letter. Request over registered letter is potential first step in subsequent legal procedure.
mschild 9mo ago
Denmarks main postal carrier discontinued letter delivery last year. Living in Germany I find the contrast always interesting and often, unfortunately, annoying. Almost anything legal has to be done on paper via letter. Fax (yes, really) is one of the only other alternatives that is accepted. Im just really glad that after moving, my new hometown is significantly stepping up their digital game and making it as easy as possible. They even respond to emails in city hall! https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-service-letters-intl-scli?Profile=CNN+International https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-ser...
- noAnswer 9mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if I'm doing something wrong (as a German citizen). What are all this legal letters, people supposedly get all the time? Since I have "Briefankündigung" where I get a picture of the envelope via e-mail the night before it gets delivered I just checked all my mail of 2025. (Excluding Spam, not even 10 letters. The majority where RFID-card delivers.) I got the voting card for the 2025 Bundestag election and the car tax guys did sent me something because of a new car. Why the later didn't use Elster for that, I have no idea. I give you that. Most organisations are paper first and you have to login and select "digital communication only" once.
  - mschild 9mo ago
    I bought a house 2 years ago. Any communication from water and garbage utilities is always in paper form. No option for digital in any way. When asked it was for "legal" reasons. Property owner's insurance also sends their legal information and billing updates via letter. Property tax updates and bills also come exclusively on paper. Even though they have my email and communicate non-billing and legal stuff over that. I made an inquiry with local Bauamt about something and asked for email communication. The email I got said: "You've requested communication via email. So we're letting you know that we've sent a response to your question via letter.
cjs_ac 9mo ago
The postal service doesn't need to be fast, but it does need to be reliable. The natures of one's promises are less important than whether or not they are kept.
bob1029 9mo ago
FedEx is easily the best carrier in my area right now. It's not even close. If I need absolute certainty that something will arrive, I'm paying extra for the overnight priority option. All of my employers have seen it the same way. Even the holiday gift packages are sent FedEx. USPS has been a disaster by comparison. We've been dealing with actual criminal elements in my local post office stealing and tampering with mail. I don't know of anyone in my community who hasnt filed a complaint with the USPIS. I don't even care about the packages anymore. I'm more worried about the tax forms, vehicle titles and replacement credit cards getting lost now. Any merchant who only offers USPS or uses them as the last mile of delivery is a no-go for me. Amazon is the most stressful experience because you never know. The best approach I've found is to use their pickup box and batch things to coincide with my grocery trip.
- b112 9mo ago
  Obviously you're summarizing a frustrating problem, so my suggestion may be unhelpful. However, mail tampering is a serious crime. If everyone is complaining, and the USPS is doing nothing, it should be handled as a crime. I'm not familiar with US law in this, but I know the FBI has stepped in for some cases that are over state borders. Anecdotally, that is. And I also know that private citizens can bring criminal cases to the prosecutor if the police aren't. If there are a lot of you, it wouldn't be too expensive to jointly hire a lawyer. Because this is absolutely not normal, at all. And it should be squashed, and hard, with people led away in cuffs. If this problem is persistent, the local city should get involved too.
hahahahhaah 9mo ago
No one cares because couriers do super urgent physical items like blood and for everything digitial email cam get it there in 5 seconds. So if general logistics is a bit slower doesnt matter.
atoav 9mo ago
I worked in the shipping department of an online store as a side job during my studies, so I know a bit or two about this. The issue is that management of all shipping companies is expected to run their services 100% resource-efficiently and without any slack (wasted money). The problem is that the only way to do that you are essentially constantly above capacity. I had certain services where literally every second month a new unfortunate subcontractor with yet another beaten up white van would show up. Needless to say their service quality was absolutely shit, since those subcontractors didn't even get a chance to learn how to do the job properly. Extracting as much money as possible from shipping isn't the same as providing a good service. Reliable service needs redundancy and underutilized capacity. If your laptops CPU was constantly at 150% load you wouldn't say "Great I am not wasting resources", you would get a beefier CPU that gives you enough headroom for your daily tasks.
Zababa 9mo ago
> With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days. > Two days. In 165 years. Going back to the start of the article, just like the Pony Express was closed due to telegrams, letter speed is not that important most of the time thanks to phones, internet, etc.
rootsudo 9mo ago
I'm surprised someone registered a .ph TLD for a blog, it costs minimal almost $50/yr if not a bit more afaik.
- ChilledTonic 9mo ago
  I like rabbits. The domain came to me in a dream.
self_awareness 9mo ago
I don't know about USA, but in the place I live, I can get a package 24 hours after buying it on-line, even on Saturday. It depends on when the shop will actually send the package.
pu_pe 9mo ago
I think two phenomena are at play here, other than plain-old enshittification: 1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency 2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot
- klatchex_too 9mo ago
  > In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."
  - lmm 9mo ago
    Note that that's for a service that ran for 18 months total.
joelthelion 9mo ago
> Modern logistics companies succeed financially while failing at the task. Stock prices go up. Service goes down. The quarterly report looks great. Your package is in a warehouse two states away marked “delivered.” It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.
samrus 9mo ago
The metric used to gauge the efficacy of the usps was rate of ontime delivery, but whe. The same point was made about the canadian postal service, that was never brought up. Plus the trend being fixated on is between 2022 and 2024/2025. I feel like the author is being abit disingenuous here by not acknowledging the black swan in the room with those numbers

66 points by ChilledTonic 9mo ago

When "free shipping" is what consumers expect, do you think people are ready to pay for better service? It the package is lost, it is often cheaper to write it off as a loss and send another item or refund. If you need overnight shipping, you can have it, but it is not cheap, so most people won't do it. As for documents, is is all electronic now. Logistics is very much alive, but it is adapted to our needs, that is massive containerships for worldwide trade, local warehouses for fast delivery of common items, reliability that is in balance with the cost of losing items, speed matching what people are ready to pay for, and specialized services for special needs, like overnight shipping. EDIT: It made me think about the "Lettre Verte" in France, named after the green stamp, and also supposedly because it is good for the planet. It was introduced early 2010s as a cheaper, slower (2 days instead of 1) alternative to the "priority" red stamp. And now the red stamp is gone, replaced with an electronic service and the green stamp is now 3 days instead of 2. Mail has become much slower overall, because there is much less mail than before, and fast service is not economically viable nor essential on a day-to-day basis. La Poste used to have a dedicated high speed train, equipped with sorting center for overnight mail across the country, now decommissioned, not enough mail to fill a train.

IAmBroom 9mo ago
Agreed. The author seems to think that logistics should be like memory and Moore's Law, but in fact there are very rigid limits on the system. Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Air transport is subsonic. Ground transport is limited to highway speeds for trucks, and about the same in the US for rail (because we suck and can't have nice things). These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value. Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.
- HWR_14 9mo ago
  > Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
  - IAmBroom 9mo ago
    > With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
    - rcxdude 9mo ago
      Electricity is dirt cheap compared to the useful output you get from fuel, even before you consider buying it wholesale and at times when demand is otherwise low.
      - amoshebb 9mo ago
        We should run electric third rail along the Mississippi. It’s already barges with tugs so a few electric tugboats mostly running during daylight hours, we could electrify most of this by just replacing a few tugboats. Make the lines high capacity enough to run along the coasts, and a fleet of tugs could be a huge dispatchable load, slow steaming could free up a lot, and going just a few kts faster would mop up a ton of what may be otherwise curtailed
        HWR_14 9mo ago
        Tugs could afford the weight of a bunch of even lead-acid batteries and go electric without the need for a huge amount of infrastructure going the entire length of the Mississippi.
fennecfoxy 9mo ago
This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards. Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next. Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
- Tade0 9mo ago
  > make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
  - red-iron-pine 9mo ago
    Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
    - Tade0 9mo ago
      That is very in character for him, but I guess he was referring to the case which originally established this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

comrade1234 9mo ago

Speak for yourself. My mail is usually delivered next-day and I can track it live on the truck. I get annoyed when something I ordered is being delivered by someone other than swisspost. I get notifications the day before and day of delivery. Swisspost had been cutting its budget back consolidating locations but despite this is delivering even better service using tech.

4ggr0 9mo ago
it could help that our country is pretty small, rich, and has about the same population size as New York City :) but i do agree, Swiss Post is great. live-tracking while they're delivering, nice app which shows you all info etc.

altcognito 9mo ago

The article makes a claim that it is no better in Canada and proceeds to remark about financial conditions. The mail is being delivered just fine, just not profitably. I've not had issues with the USPS, but I don't doubt that it is getting worse. Private delivery (Amazon and the like) has been pretty much flawless. Order from McMaster, and it almost invariably arrives within two days (continental US) I just don't experience what the author is getting at.

ChilledTonic 9mo ago
How many packages a year do you order, do you think? Just curious.
- altcognito 9mo ago
  Sorry this was late -- a decent amount, probably 2-3 a week minimum.
wombatpm 9mo ago
The USPS is in year 4 of a 10 year overhaul of its infrastructure. New facilities with new equipment optimized for the current mail mix. Magazines and catalogs used to be huge. Now they are a fraction of their volume. First class letter volume is crashing as everyone goes paperless. Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything. And where the old system of 50 NDC (National Distribution Centers) are being consolidated to ~30 RPDC (Regional Processing and Distribution Centers) leading to a whole new strategy of how mail moves East to West and West to East. And mail sorting for delivery used to happen by mail carriers at local Post Offices, is now happening at LSDC (Local Sorting and Delivery Centers) set up service all mail carriers in a 50 - 70 mile radius. And all of these changes are happening while still having to deliver mail (It never stops Jerry. It just keeps coming and coming) So if you’re in the Midwest like Chicago, stuff coming from the Midwest or Eastcoast has been getting stuck in Indianapolis-taking 10 to 15 days. Stuff coming from West Coast gets here in 5. There are 42,000 active zip codes and 640,000 employees. Making changes to that organization is hard and takes time. What’s really cool is the work going on with Amazon, Walmart, Target and others for them to deliver packages directly to LSDC for same day delivery. Once you get away from the cities, no one can compare with the USPS for last mile delivery. TLDR USPS is changing. Things may get worse before they get better.

OGEnthusiast 9mo ago

> Mail not working is a symptom of something larger—a preference for metrics over outcomes, for cost-cutting over capability, for whatever can be measured over what actually matters. This sentence sounds straight out of ChatGPT (along with the general substance-less nature of the article).

nbernard 9mo ago
Sounds literary, if a bit grandiloquent, more than anything. It was once considered "good style" and books from the XIXth and XXth centuries are full of such sentences. See the works of James Jeans, John McPhee, Carl Sagan, and the like for instance.

gritzko 9mo ago

I had some dramatic episodes. Surprisingly, FedEx is very bad in Germany too. Once I had to retrieve a laptop from a FedEx station to prevent it from going back to China. The trick is, it was addressed to a different name. The truck just went by the door for three days, "nobody home". That was a situation.

lifestyleguru 9mo ago
It's not FedEx, fluent usage of "c/o" when receiving post and packages in Germany is an absolute necessity. Once colleague from workplace ordered a modem from vodafone hoping he'll set up the internet by the end of the week, in the end the set up took over a month and almost led to his mental breakdown.

lifestyleguru 9mo ago

I find the withdrawal of post services very unsettling. How do you enforce anything with fintechs, banks, insurance companies? You realize that they can freeze your funds and accounts at will, ignore emails, and outright lie over the phone?

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
A couple of years ago I sent a letter to HMRC (UK tax collectors). It took them more than a year to reply.
- lifestyleguru 9mo ago
  When I requested a form from HMRC they diligently used every maximum legally allowed time for processing, response, and shipping;)... and also were grumpy over the phone.
lmm 9mo ago
How does post help with any of that?
- lifestyleguru 9mo ago
  They are legally obliged to respond to registered letter. Request over registered letter is potential first step in subsequent legal procedure.

mschild 9mo ago

Denmarks main postal carrier discontinued letter delivery last year. Living in Germany I find the contrast always interesting and often, unfortunately, annoying. Almost anything legal has to be done on paper via letter. Fax (yes, really) is one of the only other alternatives that is accepted. Im just really glad that after moving, my new hometown is significantly stepping up their digital game and making it as easy as possible. They even respond to emails in city hall! https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-service-letters-intl-scli?Profile=CNN+International https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-ser...

noAnswer 9mo ago
I sometimes wonder if I'm doing something wrong (as a German citizen). What are all this legal letters, people supposedly get all the time? Since I have "Briefankündigung" where I get a picture of the envelope via e-mail the night before it gets delivered I just checked all my mail of 2025. (Excluding Spam, not even 10 letters. The majority where RFID-card delivers.) I got the voting card for the 2025 Bundestag election and the car tax guys did sent me something because of a new car. Why the later didn't use Elster for that, I have no idea. I give you that. Most organisations are paper first and you have to login and select "digital communication only" once.
- mschild 9mo ago
  I bought a house 2 years ago. Any communication from water and garbage utilities is always in paper form. No option for digital in any way. When asked it was for "legal" reasons. Property owner's insurance also sends their legal information and billing updates via letter. Property tax updates and bills also come exclusively on paper. Even though they have my email and communicate non-billing and legal stuff over that. I made an inquiry with local Bauamt about something and asked for email communication. The email I got said: "You've requested communication via email. So we're letting you know that we've sent a response to your question via letter.

cjs_ac 9mo ago

The postal service doesn't need to be fast, but it does need to be reliable. The natures of one's promises are less important than whether or not they are kept.

bob1029 9mo ago

FedEx is easily the best carrier in my area right now. It's not even close. If I need absolute certainty that something will arrive, I'm paying extra for the overnight priority option. All of my employers have seen it the same way. Even the holiday gift packages are sent FedEx. USPS has been a disaster by comparison. We've been dealing with actual criminal elements in my local post office stealing and tampering with mail. I don't know of anyone in my community who hasnt filed a complaint with the USPIS. I don't even care about the packages anymore. I'm more worried about the tax forms, vehicle titles and replacement credit cards getting lost now. Any merchant who only offers USPS or uses them as the last mile of delivery is a no-go for me. Amazon is the most stressful experience because you never know. The best approach I've found is to use their pickup box and batch things to coincide with my grocery trip.

b112 9mo ago
Obviously you're summarizing a frustrating problem, so my suggestion may be unhelpful. However, mail tampering is a serious crime. If everyone is complaining, and the USPS is doing nothing, it should be handled as a crime. I'm not familiar with US law in this, but I know the FBI has stepped in for some cases that are over state borders. Anecdotally, that is. And I also know that private citizens can bring criminal cases to the prosecutor if the police aren't. If there are a lot of you, it wouldn't be too expensive to jointly hire a lawyer. Because this is absolutely not normal, at all. And it should be squashed, and hard, with people led away in cuffs. If this problem is persistent, the local city should get involved too.

hahahahhaah 9mo ago

No one cares because couriers do super urgent physical items like blood and for everything digitial email cam get it there in 5 seconds. So if general logistics is a bit slower doesnt matter.

atoav 9mo ago

I worked in the shipping department of an online store as a side job during my studies, so I know a bit or two about this. The issue is that management of all shipping companies is expected to run their services 100% resource-efficiently and without any slack (wasted money). The problem is that the only way to do that you are essentially constantly above capacity. I had certain services where literally every second month a new unfortunate subcontractor with yet another beaten up white van would show up. Needless to say their service quality was absolutely shit, since those subcontractors didn't even get a chance to learn how to do the job properly. Extracting as much money as possible from shipping isn't the same as providing a good service. Reliable service needs redundancy and underutilized capacity. If your laptops CPU was constantly at 150% load you wouldn't say "Great I am not wasting resources", you would get a beefier CPU that gives you enough headroom for your daily tasks.

Zababa 9mo ago

> With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days. > Two days. In 165 years. Going back to the start of the article, just like the Pony Express was closed due to telegrams, letter speed is not that important most of the time thanks to phones, internet, etc.

rootsudo 9mo ago

I'm surprised someone registered a .ph TLD for a blog, it costs minimal almost $50/yr if not a bit more afaik.

ChilledTonic 9mo ago
I like rabbits. The domain came to me in a dream.

self_awareness 9mo ago

I don't know about USA, but in the place I live, I can get a package 24 hours after buying it on-line, even on Saturday. It depends on when the shop will actually send the package.

pu_pe 9mo ago

I think two phenomena are at play here, other than plain-old enshittification: 1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency 2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot

klatchex_too 9mo ago
> In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."
- lmm 9mo ago
  Note that that's for a service that ran for 18 months total.

joelthelion 9mo ago

> Modern logistics companies succeed financially while failing at the task. Stock prices go up. Service goes down. The quarterly report looks great. Your package is in a warehouse two states away marked “delivered.” It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.

samrus 9mo ago

The metric used to gauge the efficacy of the usps was rate of ontime delivery, but whe. The same point was made about the canadian postal service, that was never brought up. Plus the trend being fixated on is between 2022 and 2024/2025. I feel like the author is being abit disingenuous here by not acknowledging the black swan in the room with those numbers