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Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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