7 ms·

Rethinking The Postal System

26 points by frasierman 14y ago

dmschulman 14y ago
The post office already offers a lot of the services you described: "You could specify the to and return adress, you could pay with a credit card, and you could add whatever options you want." What would the point of obfuscating your address with a 16 digit ID number be? You'd be adding another layer of complexity to an already simple system of names and addresses on a designed letter carrier's route. If you want obscurity you can always register a PO box. Your solution also relies on other businesses easily and quickly adopting your idea, which in reality is never quick and easy unfortunately. Truth be told, the mail system isn't perfect, but USPS has done a lot in the last 3-4 years to innovate their own business. I don't have to wait in line anymore because I can print out postage and tape it to my package and leave that at the post office. Unfortunately a lot of post office customers don't seem to realize the online system exists.
- frasierman 14y ago
  I totally see where you're coming from, but since the system is mostly automated (as far as I can tell), it'd be just as easy for them to grab from a DB than to try and parse out an adress and postage. I didn't really start mailing things until the last 3-4 years, so I must admit that I don't know how the system worked previously. While I agree that it wouldn't be immediately adopted, I don't think it would require too much work on their end to make it work. It's probably naive, and I don't fully understand the system now, so I may be totally wrong, but this was just my idea.
  - dmschulman 14y ago
    Realistically too, the post office is running on a shoestring budget. I don't quite understand their biggest overhead costs (beyond paying out salaries and pension benefits to postal employees) but there has to be a way to make the mail system work the way it's worked but at less cost to tax payers.
    - wildgift 14y ago
      Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient. Postage paid for everything. No cost to the taxpayer. I remember when this was achieved in the 80s - it was on TV. This link has a lot of detail about the USPS. http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout.htm http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout....
      - yummyfajitas 14y ago
        Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient. Well, self sufficient if you ignore their pension obligations. The same logic says that if I run a business with $100 in revenue, that pays $50 in cash and $75 in IOUs to suppliers, it's profitable.
  - egypturnash 14y ago
    Have you ever gotten things in the mail? Even junk mail? If so, you may have noticed that your mail is ultimately delivered by a human. Someone who has to be able to grab a handful of mail out of their bag and perform a quick visual check that yes, everything in this bundle actually goes to this address. Someone who might have a hundred bundles destined for an apartment building, and would like to be able to quickly parse the addresses to put them into the proper mailbox instead of having to type a long, cryptic ID into a smartphone, and hope they continue to have connectivity. Any proposed new addressing system also needs to deal with the fact that the postal service serves EVERYONE. Even people way out in the middle of nowhere who have no cellular service. The ONLY processing power available to those mail carriers is their own brain, so it pretty much HAS to be human-readable. All of the things you complain about in the address are USEFUL redundancy. Including all of that stuff makes it more likely that mail will get to its destination in the event of the ink being smeared (or running due to being rained on). It's more data that's useful in error correction. Also, if you are mailing out many things and hate copying the info manually, let me introduce you to a concept called "printable address labels" and "mail merge". I recently had to mail out about a hundred books after a successful Kickstarter; I manually addressed maybe three of them. I put books in mailing envelopes, put the labels on the envelopes, sealed them shut, and brought them to the post office. They figured out how much it would cost me to mail them. I paid with a credit card. It really wasn't a major hassle at all.
    - wildgift 14y ago
      This is true. Presently, I don't know my mail carrier, because I moved, but where I grew up, we knew them. If someone mis-addressed a letter, the carrier would deliver it to the right person. They could deliver using the family's name, rather than the address. Back when people hand-addressed personal letters, errors were common. back in the day, back in the day...
wereHamster 14y ago
SilkRoad customers and merchants would love this!
- frasierman 14y ago
  Well, maybe... If the police were to work with the postal service, they could find the originating post office. Then again, they could more or less do this now, and they don't.
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure the postal police take a dim view of people using USPS to ship illegal goods. Or at least I've always assumed they do.
- esrauch 14y ago
  Is that actually true? If some police organization actually does a honeypot on SR, they would presumably be able to get the address from the USPS easily. SR getting raided or hacked is alleviated by public key encryption, and this couldn't replace that since the USPS would presumably keep historical records that would be accessible to law enforcement.
joshualastdon 14y ago
That's smart! But if you get the number wrong, there might just be no way to link the package to whoever was sending or tracking it. Well, then at least the problem will be on the end of users other than what we currently have.
- frasierman 14y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to prevent human error without everyone having barcode sticker printers, which seems extremely unlikely.
  - Kliment 14y ago
    Automated barcode sticker vending machines attached to parking meters?
rdl 14y ago
IMO it would be pretty easy to change the USPS to be profitable or sustainable, but politically difficult. Preserving universal service (expensive rural routes and facilities) should be done via direct government subsidy, vs. commercial cross subsidization. Reducing or contractorizing staff (to cut medical and retirement costs) would have been done already by a really private company, but would have political and economic consequences given the size of USPS and government affiliation. It is probably easier to cut facilities and routes, lower delivery frequency, vs change employment terms. The USPS is increasingly b2c and spam delivery service; used a lot less for b2b and c2c, so reducing frequency to even twice a week would be fine.
- wildgift 14y ago
  The first thing they need to do is reduce the pension funding requirement, which was forced by a 2006 law. They have to fully fund the pension for 75 years, and do that in 10 years. That would reduce their operating budget deficit. Second, they need to push their parcel service, and open the counter all week long. The internet has caused a reduction in regular first class postal mail, but is also increasing the number of packages people send. Rising fuel costs make sending packages locally a good option. I like Saturday home delivery, but from a business perspective, it's not critical. Parcels, however, I think are critical.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    The first thing they need to do is reduce the pension funding requirement, which was forced by a 2006 law. Yes, rather than fully funding their pensions like any private company, they should be allowed to push massive problems into the future like the public sector does.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Private companies don't really fully fund their pensions, but during the period where pensions were common in private companies, those companies were expanding in revenue and headcount, so it was ok. Was. High-risk private enterprises don't do pensions now (can you imagine a Zynga Pension Plan?). Approximately everyone has shifted to defined-contribution from defined-benefit. The problem is USPS and the fully-private companies with legacy pension plans are both in long-term decline and have underfunded pensions, but USPS is particularly large in workforce and obvious in long-term decline (and political).
wildgift 14y ago
I think there's already a system where you pre-pay postage online, print a barcoded label, and then drop it off. The label contains routing information. There's no anonymity. Rather, there's redundancy because they print the destination address. If you need to hide you address, you can buy a PO Box at the post office or a private box seller. I wish they'd innovate by having the post office retail windows open on Sundays, rather than these current cutbacks. (The cutbacks are due to overfunding their pensions, and that a 2006 law is forcing that.)
jivatmanx 14y ago
Why do they need giant, expensive buildings in the center of every town, rather than partnering with convenience stores like in Europe?
- tallanvor 14y ago
  I don't know if that would be impossible, but based on the federal laws around the USPS and who is allowed to handle mail, it would be very difficult.
- wildgift 14y ago
  They already do this. There are postal counters that are contracted out. I went to one in LA's Koreatown. It was croweded but OK, and was a little faster than the perpetually understaffed USPS windows in Pico Union. (It's often 5+ people in line, and one clerk.) They took their large sorting facility property, Terminal Annex, and leased it to a server colocation company. It's at 900 Alameda, Los Angeles. Look it up. They stil have PO Boxes and a counter there. I recently tried to drop off a letter there on the weekend, but THERE WAS NO FREAKING MAILBOX. USPS needs to stop eliminating mailboxes. There are even post offices without mailboxes outside. Do they not want to make money?
- Anechoic 14y ago
  rather than partnering with convenience stores like in Europe? As others have pointed out, they already do. Go to http://www.usps.com http://www.usps.com and click on "Find Locations." Put in your zip code, click on "See More Results" and sort by "Approved Postal Providers" to find those non-USPS-owned locations.
- russell 14y ago
  Post Offices in small towns were often located in other businesses, like a Starbucks in a supermarket, although they may have all been closed by now as a cost cutting move.
rdouble 14y ago
You can already do most of this. The bigger issue with the post office is even if you do everything right (delivery confirmation , insurance) they still lose your packages and have customer service a bit south of what's depicted in the movie Brazil. The perception of the USPS as incompetent and surly is not unwarranted.
ericclemmons 14y ago
You can get a bar code that pretty much handles the automation when you order postage online. What the author is missing is that somebody has to physically deliver the package or letter, and that's why you need the destination printed on the package. Doing that with IDs alone is needlessly complex.
CleanedStar 14y ago
"But the truth is, the USPS needs to innovate." Tell your congressional representative, not USPS. FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. Congressional legislation is what prevents USPS from innovating.
- bajsejohannes 14y ago
  > FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. It's hardly surprising, but do you have any sources for this claim?
  - jwcooper 14y ago
    From the recent Esquire article[1]: Over the past five years, FedEx and UPS have spent a combined $100 million lobbying Congress. Because neither company has a delivery network nearly as sprawling as Donahoe's, they contract with the postal service to deliver the "final mile" of much of their cargo. For instance, more than 21 percent of all FedEx deliveries are dropped off by a postal carrier. Meanwhile, millions of postal-service letters hitch rides on FedEx flights every day, for which the company gets paid $1 billion a year. FedEx and UPS don't want the postal service to go out of business but to remain contained, out of the way — one reason many of the addresses on packages that pass through Medford are handwritten by mothers and grandfathers and eBay minimoguls, rather than printed by manufacturers and retailers. [1] http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-trouble-0213?page=all http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-troub...
adestefan 14y ago
Once again someone is trying to engineer a fix to a political problem.
mkadlec 14y ago
It's not fair to think that everyone has an internet connection though, should be posed as an alternate solution, then I think it makes a lot of sense.
orky56 14y ago
USPS is an institution that provides a low margin business to the masses. The majority of mail is not the glamorous packages that can demand shipping rates in the $20-$50 range. It's the letter-sized envelopes and mailers that ensure that a postman stops at every residential & business address on a daily basis. That basic service the federal government guarantees ensures the USPS can't bring itself out of this rut until this changes. One solution would be to spin off the profitable portion to compete head-on and finance the low-margin side.
glabifrons 14y ago
They've raised the postal rates for first-class mail (that normal humans all use) many, many times. Not a complaint, just an observation. Why not raise the rates for junk-mail? Sure, megacorps will scream and cry that it'll put them out of business, but it won't. They'll continue sending out junk-mail as it draws in far more in customers than they spend on it. If some don't, that much better for the environment, since I'd guess >99% of junk-mail goes straight into the garbage (with a small percentage of that being recycled). Seeing as the vast majority of mail I've received over the decades has been junk-mail, it should be an easy way to increase revenue.
bdunbar 14y ago
I suspect the poster is neglecting the cost to switch over from the current system of scanning packages to the new one. Either you need to add the ability for reading a 16 digit code to the existing system, or build a second, new, system to handle 'the new codes'. Either solution ain't gonna be cheap.
- russell 14y ago
  I think you can do that now. Pay by credit card and it prints out a label. The current system converts the address into some sort of coded tracking information, so I dont think the article is proposing anything that doesnt exist in some form. However, the website needs vast improvement. I once tried to find out how much it would cost to send a package from my house in CA to Richmond, VA. It should need only the package type, weight, and the two zip codes, but it took 10 or 15 minutes of filling out forms.

26 points by frasierman 14y ago

The post office already offers a lot of the services you described: "You could specify the to and return adress, you could pay with a credit card, and you could add whatever options you want." What would the point of obfuscating your address with a 16 digit ID number be? You'd be adding another layer of complexity to an already simple system of names and addresses on a designed letter carrier's route. If you want obscurity you can always register a PO box. Your solution also relies on other businesses easily and quickly adopting your idea, which in reality is never quick and easy unfortunately. Truth be told, the mail system isn't perfect, but USPS has done a lot in the last 3-4 years to innovate their own business. I don't have to wait in line anymore because I can print out postage and tape it to my package and leave that at the post office. Unfortunately a lot of post office customers don't seem to realize the online system exists.

frasierman 14y ago
I totally see where you're coming from, but since the system is mostly automated (as far as I can tell), it'd be just as easy for them to grab from a DB than to try and parse out an adress and postage. I didn't really start mailing things until the last 3-4 years, so I must admit that I don't know how the system worked previously. While I agree that it wouldn't be immediately adopted, I don't think it would require too much work on their end to make it work. It's probably naive, and I don't fully understand the system now, so I may be totally wrong, but this was just my idea.
- dmschulman 14y ago
  Realistically too, the post office is running on a shoestring budget. I don't quite understand their biggest overhead costs (beyond paying out salaries and pension benefits to postal employees) but there has to be a way to make the mail system work the way it's worked but at less cost to tax payers.
  - wildgift 14y ago
    Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient. Postage paid for everything. No cost to the taxpayer. I remember when this was achieved in the 80s - it was on TV. This link has a lot of detail about the USPS. http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout.htm http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout....
    - yummyfajitas 14y ago
      Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient. Well, self sufficient if you ignore their pension obligations. The same logic says that if I run a business with $100 in revenue, that pays $50 in cash and $75 in IOUs to suppliers, it's profitable.
- egypturnash 14y ago
  Have you ever gotten things in the mail? Even junk mail? If so, you may have noticed that your mail is ultimately delivered by a human. Someone who has to be able to grab a handful of mail out of their bag and perform a quick visual check that yes, everything in this bundle actually goes to this address. Someone who might have a hundred bundles destined for an apartment building, and would like to be able to quickly parse the addresses to put them into the proper mailbox instead of having to type a long, cryptic ID into a smartphone, and hope they continue to have connectivity. Any proposed new addressing system also needs to deal with the fact that the postal service serves EVERYONE. Even people way out in the middle of nowhere who have no cellular service. The ONLY processing power available to those mail carriers is their own brain, so it pretty much HAS to be human-readable. All of the things you complain about in the address are USEFUL redundancy. Including all of that stuff makes it more likely that mail will get to its destination in the event of the ink being smeared (or running due to being rained on). It's more data that's useful in error correction. Also, if you are mailing out many things and hate copying the info manually, let me introduce you to a concept called "printable address labels" and "mail merge". I recently had to mail out about a hundred books after a successful Kickstarter; I manually addressed maybe three of them. I put books in mailing envelopes, put the labels on the envelopes, sealed them shut, and brought them to the post office. They figured out how much it would cost me to mail them. I paid with a credit card. It really wasn't a major hassle at all.
  - wildgift 14y ago
    This is true. Presently, I don't know my mail carrier, because I moved, but where I grew up, we knew them. If someone mis-addressed a letter, the carrier would deliver it to the right person. They could deliver using the family's name, rather than the address. Back when people hand-addressed personal letters, errors were common. back in the day, back in the day...

wereHamster 14y ago

SilkRoad customers and merchants would love this!

frasierman 14y ago
Well, maybe... If the police were to work with the postal service, they could find the originating post office. Then again, they could more or less do this now, and they don't.
- bdunbar 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the postal police take a dim view of people using USPS to ship illegal goods. Or at least I've always assumed they do.
esrauch 14y ago
Is that actually true? If some police organization actually does a honeypot on SR, they would presumably be able to get the address from the USPS easily. SR getting raided or hacked is alleviated by public key encryption, and this couldn't replace that since the USPS would presumably keep historical records that would be accessible to law enforcement.

joshualastdon 14y ago

That's smart! But if you get the number wrong, there might just be no way to link the package to whoever was sending or tracking it. Well, then at least the problem will be on the end of users other than what we currently have.

frasierman 14y ago
Thanks! Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to prevent human error without everyone having barcode sticker printers, which seems extremely unlikely.
- Kliment 14y ago
  Automated barcode sticker vending machines attached to parking meters?

rdl 14y ago

IMO it would be pretty easy to change the USPS to be profitable or sustainable, but politically difficult. Preserving universal service (expensive rural routes and facilities) should be done via direct government subsidy, vs. commercial cross subsidization. Reducing or contractorizing staff (to cut medical and retirement costs) would have been done already by a really private company, but would have political and economic consequences given the size of USPS and government affiliation. It is probably easier to cut facilities and routes, lower delivery frequency, vs change employment terms. The USPS is increasingly b2c and spam delivery service; used a lot less for b2b and c2c, so reducing frequency to even twice a week would be fine.

wildgift 14y ago
The first thing they need to do is reduce the pension funding requirement, which was forced by a 2006 law. They have to fully fund the pension for 75 years, and do that in 10 years. That would reduce their operating budget deficit. Second, they need to push their parcel service, and open the counter all week long. The internet has caused a reduction in regular first class postal mail, but is also increasing the number of packages people send. Rising fuel costs make sending packages locally a good option. I like Saturday home delivery, but from a business perspective, it's not critical. Parcels, however, I think are critical.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  The first thing they need to do is reduce the pension funding requirement, which was forced by a 2006 law. Yes, rather than fully funding their pensions like any private company, they should be allowed to push massive problems into the future like the public sector does.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Private companies don't really fully fund their pensions, but during the period where pensions were common in private companies, those companies were expanding in revenue and headcount, so it was ok. Was. High-risk private enterprises don't do pensions now (can you imagine a Zynga Pension Plan?). Approximately everyone has shifted to defined-contribution from defined-benefit. The problem is USPS and the fully-private companies with legacy pension plans are both in long-term decline and have underfunded pensions, but USPS is particularly large in workforce and obvious in long-term decline (and political).

wildgift 14y ago

I think there's already a system where you pre-pay postage online, print a barcoded label, and then drop it off. The label contains routing information. There's no anonymity. Rather, there's redundancy because they print the destination address. If you need to hide you address, you can buy a PO Box at the post office or a private box seller. I wish they'd innovate by having the post office retail windows open on Sundays, rather than these current cutbacks. (The cutbacks are due to overfunding their pensions, and that a 2006 law is forcing that.)

jivatmanx 14y ago

Why do they need giant, expensive buildings in the center of every town, rather than partnering with convenience stores like in Europe?

tallanvor 14y ago
I don't know if that would be impossible, but based on the federal laws around the USPS and who is allowed to handle mail, it would be very difficult.
wildgift 14y ago
They already do this. There are postal counters that are contracted out. I went to one in LA's Koreatown. It was croweded but OK, and was a little faster than the perpetually understaffed USPS windows in Pico Union. (It's often 5+ people in line, and one clerk.) They took their large sorting facility property, Terminal Annex, and leased it to a server colocation company. It's at 900 Alameda, Los Angeles. Look it up. They stil have PO Boxes and a counter there. I recently tried to drop off a letter there on the weekend, but THERE WAS NO FREAKING MAILBOX. USPS needs to stop eliminating mailboxes. There are even post offices without mailboxes outside. Do they not want to make money?
Anechoic 14y ago
rather than partnering with convenience stores like in Europe? As others have pointed out, they already do. Go to http://www.usps.com http://www.usps.com and click on "Find Locations." Put in your zip code, click on "See More Results" and sort by "Approved Postal Providers" to find those non-USPS-owned locations.
russell 14y ago
Post Offices in small towns were often located in other businesses, like a Starbucks in a supermarket, although they may have all been closed by now as a cost cutting move.

rdouble 14y ago

You can already do most of this. The bigger issue with the post office is even if you do everything right (delivery confirmation , insurance) they still lose your packages and have customer service a bit south of what's depicted in the movie Brazil. The perception of the USPS as incompetent and surly is not unwarranted.

ericclemmons 14y ago

You can get a bar code that pretty much handles the automation when you order postage online. What the author is missing is that somebody has to physically deliver the package or letter, and that's why you need the destination printed on the package. Doing that with IDs alone is needlessly complex.

CleanedStar 14y ago

"But the truth is, the USPS needs to innovate." Tell your congressional representative, not USPS. FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. Congressional legislation is what prevents USPS from innovating.

bajsejohannes 14y ago
> FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. It's hardly surprising, but do you have any sources for this claim?
- jwcooper 14y ago
  From the recent Esquire article[1]: Over the past five years, FedEx and UPS have spent a combined $100 million lobbying Congress. Because neither company has a delivery network nearly as sprawling as Donahoe's, they contract with the postal service to deliver the "final mile" of much of their cargo. For instance, more than 21 percent of all FedEx deliveries are dropped off by a postal carrier. Meanwhile, millions of postal-service letters hitch rides on FedEx flights every day, for which the company gets paid $1 billion a year. FedEx and UPS don't want the postal service to go out of business but to remain contained, out of the way — one reason many of the addresses on packages that pass through Medford are handwritten by mothers and grandfathers and eBay minimoguls, rather than printed by manufacturers and retailers. [1] http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-trouble-0213?page=all http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-troub...

adestefan 14y ago

Once again someone is trying to engineer a fix to a political problem.

mkadlec 14y ago

It's not fair to think that everyone has an internet connection though, should be posed as an alternate solution, then I think it makes a lot of sense.

orky56 14y ago

USPS is an institution that provides a low margin business to the masses. The majority of mail is not the glamorous packages that can demand shipping rates in the $20-$50 range. It's the letter-sized envelopes and mailers that ensure that a postman stops at every residential & business address on a daily basis. That basic service the federal government guarantees ensures the USPS can't bring itself out of this rut until this changes. One solution would be to spin off the profitable portion to compete head-on and finance the low-margin side.

glabifrons 14y ago

They've raised the postal rates for first-class mail (that normal humans all use) many, many times. Not a complaint, just an observation. Why not raise the rates for junk-mail? Sure, megacorps will scream and cry that it'll put them out of business, but it won't. They'll continue sending out junk-mail as it draws in far more in customers than they spend on it. If some don't, that much better for the environment, since I'd guess >99% of junk-mail goes straight into the garbage (with a small percentage of that being recycled). Seeing as the vast majority of mail I've received over the decades has been junk-mail, it should be an easy way to increase revenue.

bdunbar 14y ago

I suspect the poster is neglecting the cost to switch over from the current system of scanning packages to the new one. Either you need to add the ability for reading a 16 digit code to the existing system, or build a second, new, system to handle 'the new codes'. Either solution ain't gonna be cheap.

russell 14y ago
I think you can do that now. Pay by credit card and it prints out a label. The current system converts the address into some sort of coded tracking information, so I dont think the article is proposing anything that doesnt exist in some form. However, the website needs vast improvement. I once tried to find out how much it would cost to send a package from my house in CA to Richmond, VA. It should need only the package type, weight, and the two zip codes, but it took 10 or 15 minutes of filling out forms.