A rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued | Hacker News Reader

A rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued

washingtonpost.com

33 pointshelsinkiandrew52 comments

Open articleView on HN

> local governments assured him $400,000 in *checks*

> carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their *personal* vehicles

> Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12.

> post office has banned scheduled sick days

That country is so foreign and bizarre to me.

They work 12 hours shifts in their personal car. And what are "scheduled sick days"? Looking it up those are paid sick days? Are there non-scheduled sick days?

Id just like to know if the people who buy things on that ecommerce can look themselves in a mirror, if they can detach themselves from the pain caused to workers and other people just by clearing their conscience because it should be someone else to regulate or get better contract, sometimes I wish that the hell of dante is true and there is a group made for the ignavi for real where they can suffer the same pain that is suffered for their ignorance

I hate to brake it to you, but those same conditions exist everywhere in every supply chain. Or how do you think products end up in store shelfs?

I hate to break it to you, but there is no doctor’s order that say you must buy anything, it is perfectly fine to exist without consuming, and there are few ethical companies that at least try, or a middle ground between ethics and suppressing unions, etc

A very urban take. Here where I am in a semi-rural place, there are no specialty shops. At least beyond tea and furniture. So if Walmart doesn't carry the products my child needs in order to bath and not have her skin split open and bleed, what should I do? When I was injured after the birth of my kid and couldn't drive, I guess my kid should have starved rather than have amazon deliver a monthly supply of formula. I definitely couldn't drive and covid make support difficult.

Maybe I'm just weird and and specific, but I've found that often Amazon is the only place to get specialty items. Walmart and gang killed a lot of businesses and what's left often only sell via Amazon. Mail order has been the name of the game in rural areas forever. I don't agree with what's happening in the article, but realistically I'm going to keep ordering my high quality supplements that keep the brain fog from covid away and other stuff.

I think you're right, I apologise for my superficial take. But it is also not right to justify everything with a exception take, the volume of business of amazon cannot be made of people far away from everything in rural areas, I think there is people who don't have access to shops, but I don't think it's the majority

Also there must be other ecommerces around that dont exist the same way amazon exist and serve rural areas?

>it is perfectly fine to exist without consuming

So did you borrow someone else's device to post this?

There are also companies that try to have an ethical existence, beware that here i targeted customers of amazon, not customers of everything

> I hate to break it to you, but there is no doctor’s order that say you must buy anything, it is perfectly fine to exist without consuming

That's a very extreme Hobson's choice. Sure there's no "doctor's order," but you can't actually do that without being a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer. And you'd have to be a squatter, because if you own land you'll have to pay taxes on it, and there's no way you're going to be able to do that without buying anything in the broader economy.

This is not a personal or a moral problem. It is a political problem and must be solved through legislation.

Now we can always think about the origin of that political problem as cultural. The free markets, trickle down economics, "pull yourself by your own bootstrap", labor union as a greedy mafia etc. All this encouraged the thinking that regulation and worker protection must be eliminated.

Shaming people is not going to work. Informing them and encouraging common political action will.

But it has also to be made somehow a personal problem, you can’t exist by keep enabling what’s wrong justifying yourself that politics should solve it, at a global level its a political problem, at a personal level its a personal problem, when you read so much shit about this company, how can you keep using it?

I imagine breaking a leg would be an unscheduled sick day, but getting chemo therapy to treat an aggressive cancer would be a scheduled sick day?

Missed this post but for the record these rural post drivers are contractors just like every newspaper delivery driver used to be. If you are sick you get someone else to work for you and if the route is too long hire a helper. Fedex ground is owner operated too where I am and you can hire helpers.

Really surprised at how rural postmen are using their own cars. This must be a huge issue! Imagine having to probably double or triple your driving time because you don't drive a delivery truck!

Though OTOH I don't know how well such delivery trucks would handle less maintained roads.

(Aside: I've always wanted a way to just signal to delivery companies that I'm fine picking things up, just tell me when they arrive at the sorting center. I live close to them, so it's easier for me of course)

Similarly - I'd be happy to get all my parcels just once a week - most of the things I order aren't urgent and I'm likely to not be around to receive the parcel anyway.

There is a tension between regularity of delivery and logistics. If you have things happening once a week, then you're asking yourself "which day of the week". It can't really be all the same day of the week (now you're looking at delivering 7x more packages that one day), but even if you distribute it all on a fixed day per address then people will still have times that they want things.

In a magical world post offices would have some sort of mechanism like just texting people that a package might arrive on a certain date, and maybe you can hit a button to request earlier delivery. Unfortunately the existence of that button requires restraint from the general population to be of any utility (and charging for the button press is a bit gnarly).

Perhaps in rural populations, people would be more reasonable though (especially if downstream of this system you actually had deliveries happen _when they are predicted to_)

It can be done better than today. If I order 3 packages on bol.com,I tend to see 3 delivery vans on the same day,sometimes literally parked behind each other. Or they spread out to 3 consequent days. Or the neighbour gets a delivery van half an hour later. They're mostly from the same company (bpost)

I'd like to tell them: Pick a day next week, and deliver everything together at the same time. Make it a bit more expensive to let the customer choose, and market forces will balance things out.

It could done behind the scenes, although I don't know how much space a typical post office has for storing mail for an extra day or five.

They could hold off delivering to a group of addresses (a street or an apartment building) until they either have a priority letter, for which a premium has been charged, or a non-priority letter is reaching the deadline, which here is 5 days. At that point they deliver everything that's waiting.

Recently the postal service awarded vehicle replacement to a defense contractor (Oshkosh) who knows how to win government contracts but absolutely nothing about building reliable fuel efficiency vehicles. They are fine for the military when making things like trucks which can haul tanks around but an insane choice for building delivery vehicles. The post office could have easily gone with something like the Ford transit which has a known warranty profile and existing history and endless engineering put into it. Instead the post office is going to end up with a low volume turd made by a defense contractor with no experience making daily use vehicles. Government decision making is bonkers because they put ridiculous requirements in contracts, rather than just thinking logically about the most cost effective way to deliver Americans their mail.

The contractor will use Fords.

This shouldn't be too surprising. Doing government contracting isn't easy, so certain companies get really good at it, while others simply decline government work because it's too much hassle. That's why there's very little crossover between government contracting companies and other companies: companies that make stuff for the government generally don't make anything else, and companies that are successful in other places don't generally make anything for the government. There are a few exceptions, with the most notable one probably being Boeing (makes both military and civilian aircraft), and also Honeywell.

Honestly, it makes perfect sense fo the USPS to go with a "low-volume turd": they apparently don't want something off-the-shelf, they want something custom for their unique needs. Who's going to build this for them other than a government contractor? You mention the Ford Transit, but the steering wheel is on the wrong side and it probably has some other problems since it isn't specifically designed as a mail truck. You might suggest here that they could contract with Ford to make a custom version, but look above at what I wrote: most companies have no interest in this, and will simply turn down any government contracts, and I imagine Ford is the same way. Why deal with the hassle? For most companies, it's simply not worth it, otherwise they would be actively bidding on government contracts. So a Ford vehicle probably simply isn't an option here, and the USPS's only options are low-volume turds made by defense contractors.

Regarding your aside, isn’t that what a parcel locker is for?

I presume you have these in the US?

I am not in the US, Though I do have a parcel locker downstairs. But most of the time something will arrive at the shipping center the previous evening of the ship date.

So there's a thing of me wanting to be able to go over there and get it ASAP if I want it, and also not needing for somebody to come to me to give it to me (it's close enough to me to not warrant that anyways!).

I understand legitimate needs (or wants) for people to get things hand delivered. I just feel that I am able and willing to just go pick stuff up myself by default.

I used to live in a small mountain town. The official vehicles were ancient so any time there was snow I'd see the carriers in Tacomas or Jeeps with a magnetic US Mail decal on the side. They also modified their routes slightly to accommodate left side steering wheels.

Don't all cars in the us have the steering wheel on the left??

Why would you need to modify the route for that???

Official USPS trucks are right steer, to put the driver on the same side of the car as the mailboxes on a normal street

No - there's a surprising number of "classic" British cars that are kicking about the US as collectables.

https://www.beverlyhillscarclub.com/1964-rolls-royce-silver-...

Interestingly a mate back in the 90s used to g to the US from Australia and ship back container loads of classic British cars and car parts sourced cheap in the US at a time when that fad was on the wane there and bargains could be had that sold for a good markup in Australia.

Mail delivery trucks have the steering wheel on the right side so that the driver doesn't have to get out in order to reach the mailbox. When using normal cars, they're modifying the routes slightly.

We get this in the UK with other parcel carriers.

My regular delivery man used to have some kei sized thing with a roof box filled to the gunnels with boxes.

He has now invested in a larger car.

"Really surprised at how rural postmen are using their own cars."

In rural areas independent people bid for routes. So they provide their own vehicle and are independent contractors.

Correct - which is effectively the same model employed by FedEx Ground, for what it's worth.

> I'm fine picking things up, just tell me when they arrive at the sorting center.

I have lived in a couple of places (in Europe) where I often had to go to the sorting center to retrieve parcels, due to some customs-related issue or whatever. Staff generally weren’t happy to see me there. The sorting centers didn’t employ dedicated customer-facing staff, because there just aren’t enough customers coming in. And that means that I was either distracting someone from the tasks they are usually assigned, or I was at least shattering the peaceful environment that they normally work in.

I guess it depends on the place, in Tokyo at least there's a dedicated pickup counter at the post office for stuff. Other delivery services it's a bit more chaotic (the sorting centers being basically glorified garages with stuff stacked all over the place).

There's a sort of comforting chaos to deliveries in the downtown area. There are loads of small centers, deliveries happen on foot for the major delivery companies in many cases (people just pushing around carts). And the missed delivery slips just have the cell phone number of the delivery person that you can call and be like "yeah whenever's good for you, I'm home again". I imagine all the fancy logistics happens right up to the delivery centers, and then it's basically YOLO mode.

> I'm fine picking things up

If you know it's being delivered through USPS, have it delivered to 'general delivery'[1]. Problem is Amazon and many others don't let you choose your shipper and most post offices (reasonably so) don't accept general delivery from 3rd party carriers.

Alternatively, ship it to a UPS store that offers 'Package Acceptance' service. They charge per-package - usually $5-$7 though I've seen some as high as $15. Or you could open a UPS POBox if you receive enough packages to make it worth the cost.

[1] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery

The article is frustratingly vague. Who told them to prioritize Amazon packages? Who is not hiring enough people to keep up with their volume?

USPS is operated by a 11-person Board of Governors — the Postmaster General, his deputy, and nine governors appointed by the President and approved by the Senate for seven-year terms. Some of these slots are frequently empty. The Board appoints the Postmaster General, who acts as the CEO.

A separate Postal Regulatory Commission with five members appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate oversees the USPS, including the rates it charges.

From experience, not with the USPS but still, the customer tells the carrier to prioritize. Customer as in the company buying services from the carrier, here Amazon, and notbthe customer of Amazon.

And it is up to, in this example, Amazon and USPS to make sure staffing and capacities are adequat. If you are among the top three customers of a company, you hold a lot of sway regarding prioritization. And during holiday season, stuff like that happens all the time.

> The Postal Service considers the contract proprietary and has declined to disclose its terms.

Am I the only person that finds it crazy that this isn't public information?

Edit:

> The Postal Reorganization Act (at 39 USC 410(c)(2)) exempts the USPS from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure of "information of a commercial nature, including trade secrets, whether or not obtained from a person outside the Postal Service, which under good business practice would not be publicly disclosed".

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

It seems to me prudent to remove that exemption.

Yes. I think natural monopolies should be exploited by government (or government adjacent), rather than by regulated companies, but that comes with the expectation of full disclosure/transparency so bad practice can be voted out.

I'd rather have a publicly traded company own a natural monopoly (with some regulation) than an opaque government agency.

agreed

but then the government also has the power to make any opaque government agency fully transparent

and for cases like USPS the only reason they might want to not do so seems to me to be corruption and/or hidden subventions.

https://archive.ph/L5XSB

Thank you.

Side note on WP's subscription popup there, "A99c every 4 weeks for the first year" is never how you should write that. "A$0.99 [...]" is the way to go.

https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...

I don't live in a particularly rural area -- pretty much on the edge of suburban/rural and in 10 years will be firmly suburban.

I see my local postal carriers working delivering mail most days between 9 and 11 pm.

That's right. PM.

Stupid question: Is it “9 pm to 11 pm” or “9 am to 11 pm”?

I think he means the end time is between 9pm and 11pm. The start of the shift is not mentioned.

Lol, anyone that knows a little about this industry knows that 80pct of parcels come from Amazon - so you can't not prioritize that. The rest is either chewy or some random hotness du jour like starlink terminals.

>the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year

This sounds like an oxymoron. Is this a union thing, or does one have to know when they will be ill is the US/working for the post office?

It means they cannot schedule time off of work to care for an illness, surgery, etc. It would prompt most to search for other lines of work but, in rural counties, not much else is available.

>It would prompt most to search for other lines of work but, in rural counties, not much else is available.

Living in a rural area is a lifestyle choice and a luxury, and this is simply one of the costs of rural living. There's a reason people lived in larger and larger settlements (villages->towns->cities) starting from the very dawn of civilization, and probably before.

Just another failure of capitalism, and a prime example of how the profit of few should not surpass the interest of many.

> government monopoly on a service exists, specified in the federal constitution

> "This is obviously a problem with capitalism"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com