Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I find that the problem is last mile. I’ve lived in 4 areas in the Us where I received a lot of mail. 3/4 were amazing and everything came quickly. I assumed all USPS was great.

For the last 10 years my post office has had many problems. Packages where tracking shows it “out for delivery” but it never arrives. The electronic delivery email sends scans of letters “arriving today” that don’t come until the next day. Drivers who put “redelivery notices” in the mailbox rather than door saying I wasn’t available, backdated to previous days.

It’s very strange because contacting the postmaster just results in odd excuses, for example, I was told that the delivery driver was really busy that day and couldn’t make it to my house. I live in suburbia in a neighborhood with hundreds of houses.

So this post office sucks. It seems drivers suck, management sucks and that results in slow and missing mail.

I travel a bit and like to send post cards to family, including my own. A post card to my house consistently arrives 2-4 days after the card to a family member in a zip code 50 miles way, an even more remote suburb. This seems consistent from very remote locations as well as domestic. Curious.

My soft conclusion is that the “systematic” portions of the USPS are reliable and good. But the “local” portions are hit or miss.

In my rural area, one of the "last mile" problems is that there's now an extra leg. Since the small local post offices no longer hand-sort mail, but drive it to a larger hub post office that has the address OCR machines to auto-sort it, a cross-town letter that used to be delivered same day or next day now takes 3 days or more due to the extra round trip. Add that on top of all the extra work the USPS is doing with pandemic-related package shipment and I'm sure there is a lot of backlog at many points in the system.

Through work we deal with Japan Post, and there a letter can get basically anywhere in the mainland from anywhere else in one business day.

Granted, the nation is one-dimensional in shape so things are helped there, but the reliability is expected.

On one hand, I think overworking mail workers isn’t worth it. On the other hand tho, surely there’s a way to make this stuff work better than requiring 3 days to move a letter across town.

Well, if you really want that thing delivered you have other options, right? FedEx, DHL, other private companies.

The whole problem is that USPS has a lot of obligations that those other courier services don't, and it has to amortize costs.

To further point out the ridiculousness of preventing local post offices from sorting mail: For 8 years, my landlord and I had PO Boxes at the same small town post office. You'd think one could just hand rent to the teller, who my landlord and I both knew by name, so she could walk the ~8 feet and put it in my landlord's box. But that wasn't allowed. Delivery to the same post office the letter was mailed from took a few days to a week because they had to send it off to a sorting center and wait for it to be sent back.

Yes, mail just put in the slot in my town goes to another town 40 miles away for sorting and comes back the next day.

We used to have a basket at the window where one could drop PO box mail for the same town, and it would be distributed directly. COVID killed that.

How was that related to covid? (Risk for virus on the envelopes somehow? or too crowded over at the window?)

The plastic shields took up the counter space.

Exactly 33 days ago I sent 8 letters from Long Island, New York. 7 of the letters were destined for New York City (a 40 min drive from its origin) and 1 letter destined for Georgia. Within the first seven days 6 of the letters arrived, 5 to NYC and the 1 to GA. Letter #7 arrived in NYC 3 weeks after being sent. As of today letter #8 still hasn't arrived or been returned.

I'm amazed that USPS can somehow keep up with all the sprawl. It has to cost a lot to run out all these trucks to suburbia, for what? $0.40 per piece?

I used to love USPS and was kind of in awe of them because they do just what you describe.

However, they have a fixed, predictable surface that they must cover and should be able to plan costs better than most organizations.

They also frequently increase prices so should be able to factor driving a jeep every day over, effectively, the surface area of every street in the US where someone lives.

So it seems like the cost is high, but predictable so just work it out.

It’s a weird situation where they have a monopoly, set a cost-plus price, and yet still fail to meet the need.

It doesn't help that the USPS was gutted last year on purpose by someone who stood and still stands to profit off of killing it.

How and by whom?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy

That's an interesting thought and would certainly explain why I haven't been able to relate to the issues people say they have the USPS.

There’s always been local politics and issues around mail delivery.

The GOP crusade against the post office is sort of like a weaponization of certain types of resentment in the south that worked it’s way into conservative media over the years at a national scale.

It’s an organization that has adapted over the centuries to new technology and needs. USPS fundamentally transformed most recently when rail-based mail sorting changed 50 years ago.

The difference now is that some people feel that government should not work.

I hear this a lot, but the problems I’ve had seem to be during dem and republican administrations and in dem and republication controlled states and counties.

So the problems that I’ve witnessed seem unrelated to budget pressure issues.

So I suppose it’s curious how some places are awesome despite the “crusade” while other places suck.

Of course I’ve only had my own experiences as I can’t find any real performance data. Seems actually odd how USPS doesn’t track these metrics much less publish them. For example, what percent letters delivered within 2-3 days. Why isn’t this tracked to the sorting level? Seems like it would actually be pretty easy to add a code to the postmark when received and track it in the sorting machines, etc etc. But this isn’t done.

Anyway, this may be the fault. But perhaps it’s a result of the crappiness and lack of efficiency, etc. It’s hard to tell, but hard for me to do anything with as it seems to me like performance depends so much on local post offices and performance was either good or bad consistently, over time.

If there was a crusade against the post office that affected performance, I would expect degradation over time, over all locations.

USPS post quarterly delivery statistics.

Look under Mailing Services Measurement Results: https://about.usps.com/what/performance/service-performance/

Each table for a service type has ~10 years worth of nationwide annual percent on-time delivery. It's harder to compare individual geographic areas (you can change the URL to go back a year or two, not sure where older reports are).

A big entity like USPS will have its share of effective and shitty branches. And no political party has a monopoly on incompetence.

It’s very evident that the GOP has taken many actions to weaken the finances of the Postal Service and systematically politicize and dismantle parts of it.

The problem with the last mile is that there’s a lot of them. Even more if you’re in suburbia, where the number of people living in the last mile is comparable to people living in the last block or so in the city.

Yet another reason why suburbia is expensive and not sustainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0

Yeah, remaking society seems like a just and scaleable solution

Ladies and gentlemen I present Sunk Cost Mentality.

Yep, such costs such as the freedom to choose not to live in some utopian urban beehive. Find a better solution.

You don't have to remake the whole of society. Just stop making more of the bits that don't work.

As simple as that huh? Wonder why that hasn't been tried before.

> This is where Americans go to vacation then return to their depressingly soul-crushingly dystopian car dependent suburbs

This video probably isn't the best source to build a persuasive argument from.

Out of my 4 spots, 2 are urban and 2 are suburban. I’ve had a great suburban experience, 1 bad. Both urban were really good.

It seems like suburban mail delivery should be easy to predict and factor into cost.

Let’s not pretend the USPS was anywhere near this bad before Trump’s appointment of Louis DeJoy to postmaster general: “Mail Service Deteriorated After Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s Arrival, Watchdog Found” (wsj) https://www.wsj.com/articles/mail-service-deteriorated-after...

My most recent post office has sucked since I moved here in 2009. To me, it seems like it has been consistently terrible. I wish we had more objective performance measures.

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