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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to get worse, and for other professions not generally getting news coverage.

A close relative of mine for the USPS. Mail volume has dropped dramatically, yet they are desperate for employees to work overtime.

It's because so many are using their vacation/sick time or otherwise not coming in, and I don't blame them. Some are going through cancer treatment, have diabetes, or other complications which put them at risk.

Some in the distribution center have contracted COVID-19, and at least one (but maybe more) has already died.

There are a lot of people endangering their life coming in to work, and not just grocery stores and hospitals.

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> This is going to get worse, and for other professions not generally getting news coverage.

Flight attendants. Airline baggage handlers. Hotel desk clerks. Hotel maintenance workers. Bus drivers. For that matter, truck drivers. I'm sure there are others.

Other than grocery store workers, truck drivers might be the one that scares me the most. If the trucks stop, this is going to get really ugly.

Meat packing has already stopped. Feel free to get scared.

https://time.com/5819878/smithfield-pork-plant-closes-corona...

Some meatpacking has stopped. How much, though?

The one Smithfield facility mentioned in that article represents 4-5% of US production. The governor has asked it to close for 14 days. That's not the only meat packing/food supply chain breakdown. Here's another article mentioning a major Tyson meat processing plant shutdown. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

So we're down maybe 10 or 20% of US meatpacking capacity? That's... not good. (Depends on how much spare capacity there is in the system, of course.)

(The 10-20% is a guess, based on one large plant and some other plants, without hard data. If anyone has real data, step right up.)

I was in Richmond, Virginia 10 days ago, and people were saying there was no meat in grocery stores, so they went to Texas Roadhouse in order to be able to eat non-vegitarian, because Texas Roadhouse still had steaks.

I work on a team that's mostly offshore in India. One of them remarked that they went to multiple stores and couldn't find any vegetables. Like many Indians, my coworker is a vegetarian. That's just an anecdote, but I worry things are going to get bad there.

There's locust swarms in Africa, and it's potentially heading towards China. I expect there to be widespread food shortages in the coming weeks/months. I'm not sure about how life will be here in the US. We're rich, we're a net food exporter, etc. as long as the processing and other supply chain parts keep mostly working I think we'll be okay-ish. You might not get the exact product you want, but you probably won't face starvation. But in many poor countries in Africa and Asia, I think it's about to get really, really bad.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/locust-outbreak-africa-congo

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-locusts/china-urges...

> Mail volume has dropped dramatically, yet they are desperate for employees to work overtime.

I thought mail volume was dramatically up because everyone’s ordering online?

Anecdotally, I've seen much less junk mail, which happens to be a significant portion of the mail delivered to our house.

Does that get sent by the mail system? At least here it's mostly minimum wage folks employed by marketing companies (not the postal service) going door to door to put leaflets in.

The postal service might add a flyer to your actual mail delivery, but only if they're delivering to your address anyway.

A lot goes through the mail system.

The Data and Marketing Association says American businesses sent 149 billion pieces of direct mail and nearly 10 billion catalogues in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/how-to-stop-ju...

This is just a counter-anecdote, but for every flyer on the door I get (once or twice a week), I get scores of pieces of junk mail. I assume you don't own a home, because that alone is good for 10 a week.

Yes, most of it is delivered by USPS https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm

99% of my junk mail is sent via USPS. Junk mail actually gets a better rate than regular 1st class mail. It's something like 20 cents for marketing mail vs 50 cents for a piece of regular mail. In exchange I think the marketer has to do some presorting of their own, and they lose the ability to do things like forwarding or return to sender.

USPS actually has a monopoly on mailboxes. It's illegal for FedEx or anyone else to put a letter/package in your mailbox, although I don't know how much that's enforced.

It is not legal, in the US, for anyone except the USPS to put anything into your mailbox.

That's crazy. You can't hand-post your neighbours invitations to a party, for example?

Not legally, though it sounds like if you put postage on it, it would be: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1725

What about FedEx, UPS, and DHL?

USPS only.

I live in an apartment complex, and my mailbox doesn't have a slot in it.

All of the junk mail I've received has come via the USPS, however since this all started happening I have received almost none.

The drop-off of junk mail delivery has been both welcome, and a sign of troubles for the USPS.

To clarify, "here" is Ireland, not the US. The comments indicate in the US, USPS has a much greater share of spam delivery. (too late to edit the original post)

Most of my Amazon packages now come via Amazon's own logistics system at this point.

I talked to the franchise owner of a UPS store outside of Boston, and he reported a 50% dropoff in business, as well as a shift in the types of orders for people working from home as well as people shipping things like toilet paper.

The big issue for the post office is the amount commercial mail has fallen off a cliff and will likely continue to drop. Anecdotally, we have seen very little junk mail in the past month other than grocery fliers. I predict serial publications like regional magazines will fail, too -- running a magazine was already tough, but now it's even worse now that many advertisers have gone out of business or are cutting back on marketing costs. If they don't have enough subscribers to keep the presses running, it's game over.

Interesting yet in retrospect not too surprising given that even Amazon is bottlenecking - even with increased demand in general that they could have issues keeping demand up.

I have started to order for at-home delivery, including groceries. That is anec-data but I wouldn't be surprised if it is also the case for a lot of other people.

Also I know that ads of all kinds have dropped of a cliff.

I am in Denmark, but I imagine that people are people everywhere.

This is also hitting meat processors very hard. Fabrication (the processing of slaughter to produce cuts of meat ready to ship) is human labor intensive and must be done in refrigerated spaces, so the work is elbow to elbow in many places because space is at a premium.

Mail volume in the US is down? Interesting, here in Germany it's reported as being at christmas-time levels.

Maybe Germans have a good residual letter-writing culture which has otherwise been wiped out by electronic communications, at least in the US.

Would be interested to know if that's the case.

I doubt mail volume is driven by hand written letters at any point.

USPS volume is said to be down in the US, not total residential mail & shipping volume.

Ah of course, letters vs parcels etc.

Yes, also USPS is only one of several carriers here. Each has a slightly different market. Decrease in one could occur simultaneous with increase of another.

Most of my mail is advertisement. Maybe a lot of the advertisers are closed so they can send less mail.

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