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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

The most sensible suggestion I've heard recently was from a co-worker who said it would make sense to not sound out postal workers to every house, but instead to keep all the mail at the Post Office. If you want your mail delivered to your door, then you can pay extra. Otherwise pick it up yourself. This would greatly cut down on the USPS expenses.

I also would love a premium service where I get one address (just like Google Voice) that I give out and then the mail is actually forwarded to my new location if/when I move. UPS provides something like this, I believe, but why not USPS?

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The post office already can and does get this efficiency with community mailboxes. My grandmother and I both use a key to get our mail from a large mail drop. She lives in an newly constructed old person neighborhood in rural Florida, and I live in a Manhattan apartment building. My parents get their mail delivered by car to a personal mailbox. I agree with your suggestion, but how do we get existing neighborhoods to build a mail drop? Who pays for it? Who maintains the keyed mailboxes? My parents would be completely okay with having a mail drop and picking their mail up at the entrance to the neighborhood, but I don't think they are interested paying to build it.

I think we should combine some of the ideas:

If your neighborhood has community mailboxes, then you get mail every day. If you have personal mailboxes, then you get mail 3 days per week. If you want mail everyday, then organize your neighborhood to have a community mailbox.

I like your compromise. It still gives everyone access to door to door delivered mail but also cuts costs significantly. And the best part is that people who live in larger communities get the opportunity to get their mail delivered every day if they so choose.

The cost to build it would be recovered in the first few months if people were actually charged for the cost of having a person walk around for a half hour 6 days a week. That's got to cost $200 a month for a small community. Of course, government specializes in hiding the true costs of things, so who knows.

Would just shift cost from delivery to storage. Might be a net gain (or a net loss), but would also have deployment costs.

USPS does offer that, NCOA.

This is assuming that the amount of mail goes down. Would also naturally cut down on the amount of junk mail, since most people won't bother to go check their mail if it's always just junk.

As with the rest of the modern world, junk mail (advertisers) are the backbone of the USPS. Cutting down the amount of junk mail might be bad for the post office.

I disagree. The post office depends on junk mail only so long as it has to make door to door deliveries. If the door to door delivery is paid for by the subscriber directly the USPS can ditch junk mail as the main source of income. My main point is that USPS relying on junk mail is not sustainable. Either it will go bankrupt, or it will get huge tax subsidies, or it will get a bit creative. It is going to lose some of its work force either way.

> If you want your mail delivered to your door, then you can pay extra. Otherwise pick it up yourself.

The funny part of that is, that is the inverse of how it is now. The post office charges for PO Box rental [0], but delivers to your house for free. Keep in mind that most post offices do not have sufficient PO Box numbers to cover all teh points they currently deliver to.

[0] the exception being those places with insufficient density to justify street/rural delivery. In those places the customers must travel to the post office to collect their mail, and they get the PO Box for free.

This would also result in the firing of a very large amount of postal workers. Now you and I don't really care, logically you would only keep a job around as long as it is needed, but politically this would be a massive problem.

Agreed. But that goes into a very different discussion of how we are now so productive that having a job becomes a priviledge. I personally do not know if pure capitalism with unregulated markets scales well along the productivuty curve with a large population as a given.

You want me to pay extra for the privilege of having junk mail delivered? I can't see this being a very popular option. Sorting through the junk to make sure I catch the rare piece of important mail is a chore. I would pay extra to opt out of all mass mailings, and have the occasional piece of actual mail delivered. They'd probably only have to open my mailbox 5-6 times a month. Win-win.

The amount of junk mail will go down. Since nobody is willing to go and pick it up and then will actually discard junk immediately at the pickup location, the value derived from sending junk mail will go down. Thus there will be less of it sent out.

A better solution would be mailboxes all in one area for the neighborhood. Eliminate door to door.

That could be the intermediary solution. Or a neighborhood could get together and deliver from post office to the neighborhood boxes via a third-party delivery provider. I think that we cannot completely eliminate door to door. There are lots of people out there that are not able to make the trip even down the street to the community mailbox and that rely on the mail system daily. However, saying that door to door delivery is a premium service would at least help USPS not go bankrupt.

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