Comment by wallacoloo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallacoloo | Hacker News Reader

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So I don't know much about how mailmen are employed, but there are a few scenarios in which it could turn out that the mailman would have been paid those 3 cents regardless.

The simplest: he's salaried. However, I don't think mailmen generally are.

Alternatively, the mailman is paid hourly but is expected to put in 40 (or some other constant) hours of work per week. His primary role is to deliver mail, but any extra time he has after doing his route he fills by sorting packages, filling out paperwork, etc. If he had a longer route that morning, he'll try to work through the sorting faster. If it was a shorter route, he might pace himself more casually.

You might say - in response to either of these - "but this doesn't scale! If there were fewer packages, the company wouldn't have hired as many mailmen and would have saved money!" Again, I don't know much about this industry, but in some (e.g. rural) areas, staffing might be done based more upon geographical coverage than the expected number of packages to be delivered per day. Furthermore, the company may be choosing to deliver such a package in order to secure its branding. Does offering to deliver this unprofitable (on its own) package lead to a promise of further, profitable delivery contracts? In the case of Alibaba & its courier, it probably did have some weight. Maybe the extra cost of having the deliveryman out on his route longer is offset by the advertising painted onto the delivery van.

It's difficult to measure the value of one very small piece of a big system because its the system as a whole which generates revenue, rather than each individual component.

I was a mailman in Sweden for about 3 years in the early 2000s. One year full time, temping while doing uni for another two.

Full time employees were salaried, with 8h work day averaged over a month. When work was done, you went home. If you worked 6h one day, 10h the next you would not get overtime. Overall, I would guess I worked about 80% of the monthly hours, and I never hit overtime. Longest day I worked was 13h, shortest day was 3.5h.

Temps were hourly.

The extra time cost of adding a piece of mail to a route is mostly negligible. There are a few exceptions.

The first piece of mail that will take you inside an apartment complex adds a good bit of time (since you have to get off your bike and go into the building). I may have occasionally have forgotten to deliver something that was going to the 4th floor if that was the only thing in that apartment complex on a given day, and delivered it the next day instead.

The first piece of mail to a house doesn't matter - 95% of the time delivering to houses is the transport time between houses, not the delivery.

For us, routes were typically limited by physical effort and in-between transportation time, not the volume.

Houses were limited by the time of going from house to house, to about 2.5h time total. Apartments were limited by the effort of going up and down stairs to about the same time.

A usual route would be ~600 houses, or ~80 4-story apartment entrances. High rises were more limited by volume (and were typically mixed with 4-stories for that reason) so that a normal route would be maybe 8 high rises and 70ish apartment entrances.

Were you delivering mail or packages? Because apartment complexes around here usually have a set of letterboxes just inside or even outside the building, so the mailman doesn't have to climb to the 4th floor.

Mail. In the area I worked there was one apartment area with letterboxes at the door and about 20 areas with the mailbox in the doors of the apartments.

Sweden built a ton of housing (the goal was a million apartments in 10 years or so) back in the 50s and 60s. Those buildings didn't have letterboxes inside, all with letter gaps in the doors (at least where I worked). Newer places typically have them downstairs now.

Yikes. I presume that's just one of many brilliant design choices made for those 50s/60s apartment buildings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme

The houses themselves are pretty good actually, but sadly due to where they are and the amount of them many have become undesirable neighbourhoods.

Thanks so much for weighing in. I'm sure the details vary by country, but it's still great insight into the business.

Letter carriers were customarily paid to run their route. In the old days, that meant you could find the mailman in the pub after his rounds.

Nowadays they audit them very aggressively. Also the migration away from letters to packages has led to the decline of the route and an increase in other mechanisms.

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