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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

> DeJoy instructed USPS employees to leave mail behind if it delayed carriers from their routes

I mean, this does make sense. The more time you can spend doing the route itself, instead of waiting or coming back mid-way for whatever couldn’t be sorted in time in the morning is more “lean” efficient.

While some mail would take an extra day, it results in more mail delivered per carrier-hour.

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But should the USPS operate that way? The purpose of a government-operated mail service arguably is to guarantee the quality and types of services that free-market competitors can’t or don’t want to offer.

The irony of so many anti-service people is that most of them turn around and hate big corporations just as much. It's like they envision a Comcast-esque corporation taking over USPS, but forget that they hate Comcast.

Disliking corporations and anti-competitive behavior of big corporations seems to be a non-partisan issue; and yet there seems to be much support for making everything ran by massive corporations. I don't understand their line of thinking here.

I'm not sure if they're the same people or not -- but I don't think it really matters. There are pros-and-cons to any system of organization. Whether you have chosen the right one depends on the goals of the organization.

Be wary of anyone who fanboys too hard for anything in particular without discussing its merits and weaknesses versus the alternatives. They likely don't have a full understanding of either.

It makes sense in isolation except that it’s illegal and leads to delays in delivering or attempting to deliver, say, first class mail.

If they already have stuff waiting for days to be delivered, I don’t understand the insistence on delivering stuff that arrived in the afternoon. Either way they’re out of compliance with the law.

Are they? How is "detains" and "delays" defined? It doesn't seem like requiring delivery of late-arriving mail on the same day is the intent of that law.

Hmm, it does make sense, but I think delaying carriers from starting their routes probably put backpressure on the upstream team to complete their work on time. Really hard to say if this is good or bad without more knowledge of the internal incentive structures that keep the system running smoothly.

According to mail carriers, the actual result is an ever-growing backlog of undelivered mail. The first mail to be delayed may only be one day late, but as the backlog grows, the undelivered mail gets later and later on average.

It sounds like carriers are being given more than they could possibly deliver in a day.

If that’s true, it’s still better to leave with what you can first-thing in the morning, than wait at the depot or return to the depot mid-shift.

Trying to deliver something that arrived at noon today doesn’t make sense when you have stuff from 2-3 days ago still waiting.

Somehow I suspect that the folks at the USPS have put at least as much thought into the logistics of mail delivery as HN commenters in this thread have—maybe even a little more if such a thing can be conceived!

If we all thought that way, this place would be dead.

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