The Styrofoam Cube In This Letter Serves A Bureaucratic Purpose
consumerist.com
consumerist.com
Comcast told me that the 6mb internet service would be $50, and that I could only get the 20mb service, the service I wanted for $50 for the first six months, 60 for the next six months, and 70 for the next 12 months after that. They called it a "bundle" because it included local TV channels, channels which I get for free. The didn't offer me the choice of no free TV channels over cable.
Apple continually charges a ridiculous amount on memory upgrades.
Half the places I shop at want me to register with them in some capacity. No REI, I don't need a special card for the 2 annual purchases I do a year. You can keep the $2 I'd get back at the end of the year if I did have the card.
Amazon sells the same kindle at two different prices, depending on whether or not you like advertisements.
Are all these things stupid? Yes. The USPS is not alone, so stop pretending it's some government bureaucracy thing. People sometimes complain that the government should act more like a business, and get upset when they actually do.
The goal for the 3/4 inch minimum dimension regular for the USPS is based upon what logic or reasoning exactly?
The charge for a return receipt is also higher and the USPS takes advantage of this just like all kinds of businesses have higher margins from certain products.
The many savvy people who take advantage of the lower rate for parcel delivery confirmation are like people who bring their own soda to work because it's cheaper then the vending machine.
TLDR: angry mob on the street probably wrong about finer details of world again.
Even so, I think this example is exceptionally atrocious, and it's really hard to imagine a for-profit organization getting away with that for long. It's a matter of degree, and government organizations can go farther out before they die.
Yep, USPS is not a normal government agency. Also "The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters."*
If people point to USPS as example of government waste they do so out of ignorance.
(The only thing that would be any different if they were an officially recognized Federal agency is that instead of worrying about whether they might in the future cost us billions of dollars in pensions by act of Congress, they would have already cost us billions of dollars in pensions by act of Congress.)
I'm way more interested in de facto relationships that de jure. You can say anything you want legally, what matters is the actual relationships.
[1]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/22/justice-depa...
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/08/news/economy/postal_service/...
Edit: Although, apparently they have borrowed $15 billion from the Treasury Department, so I suppose that debt is taxpayer dollars:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/22/justice-depa...
In 2004, they actually made 4 billion in profit, in 2005, 2 billion, and in 2006 a billion. They've had to prepare to make 5.5 billion in payments each year since due to the PAEA, and will do so until 2016.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-pos...
The USPS is waste that endures solely because of government power. It just happens that it isn't government's taxing power that keeps it alive.
You added the word "government". I checked. It doesn't appear anywhere in the original post, or as of this writing, anywhere in a comment not in a reply to you. I don't consider listing other failures anything like a defense for the failure at hand. I'm pretty happy to indict large bureaucratic organizations in general.
I don't know why everyone is up in arms about this. The Indiana people had a problem (how to get the letter mailed via the service they wanted) and solved it creatively.
This is called a "hack", not "bureaucracy". And we should applaud it. Is the rule dumb? Yeah, probably. But it's hardly alone in the world. For every styrofoam cube there are a dozen people putting letters into boxes needlessly, and that is the bad thing. This is cute.
Who adds these items to increase weight? Why? If my item is <50g, I use the Polish monopoly mail service (PMMS?) and pay 1.55pln (40% of what I'd pay with the competition, according to your numbers.) If PMMS is adding this weight, the mind boggles - they're wasting fuel delivering light items. If customers are adding the weight, why would they want to increase their costs to mail light items?
> Who adds these items to increase weight?
Private delivery companies add these items.
> Why?
Because due to the existing PMMS (Poczta Polska to be exact) monopoly on mail <50g, private companies would have to charge 2.5x the PMMS rate to deliver the same piece of mail. Adding the item allows a private company to circumvent the monopoly (by increasing weight >50g) and thus being able to deliver this piece of mail at a lower rate than PMMS. How this ends up being profitable is a bit of a mystery.
> If PMMS is adding this weight
They're not. They have the monopoly so they don't need to.
> they're wasting fuel delivering light items.
No arguing there...
This is what one of those metal plates looks like http://gfx.mmka.pl/newsph/222924/44881.3.jpg
Cost to ship up to three ounces as first-class-PARCEL with tracking is $1.75
Cost to ship 8x11, same three ounces without tracking that is machine-sortable (bendable) is 88 cents.
So you are paying for that as a parcel, it's not just bureaucracy.
They cannot put tracking on every first class item, it would destroy their profitability.
Just try getting FedEx or UPS to deliver anything these days with tracking for only $1.75
edit: Jacob on the consumerist thread explained it better than I did. "I suspect that letters (or flats) are processed through equipment that doesn't scan the barcode for the delivery confirmation system. Only if your letter is really a package and doesn't fit through the equipment that processes letters does it go through the package system which does scan the barcodes."
There's a cost disparity because there's a features and performance disparity between Postal Service tracking, and FedEx/UPS tracking. Better tracking, better reporting, better user experience.
This is the fault of the shipper, not the postal service.
edit: regarding UPS: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22924632-ups-using-USPS-for...
We are far more dependent on the USPS than most nerds realize.
Switched to using earth class mail which scans all my incoming postal mail, deposits checks, etc which has been a huge improvement. (and was able to get all the consequences of missing the last $1.50 of a payment I hadn't seen in the mail reversed, after a lot of letters and phone calls).
Most postal mail is spam, mixed with a few important messages.
It's too bad we can't apply baysean algos to spam snail mail. (yes, I know sender pays and all that).
If they don't change ridiculous rules like this, they'll never survive.