Logistics Is Dying; Or – Dude, Where's My Mail?
lagomor.ph
lagomor.ph
If you need overnight shipping, you can have it, but it is not cheap, so most people won't do it. As for documents, is is all electronic now.
Logistics is very much alive, but it is adapted to our needs, that is massive containerships for worldwide trade, local warehouses for fast delivery of common items, reliability that is in balance with the cost of losing items, speed matching what people are ready to pay for, and specialized services for special needs, like overnight shipping.
EDIT:
It made me think about the "Lettre Verte" in France, named after the green stamp, and also supposedly because it is good for the planet. It was introduced early 2010s as a cheaper, slower (2 days instead of 1) alternative to the "priority" red stamp. And now the red stamp is gone, replaced with an electronic service and the green stamp is now 3 days instead of 2. Mail has become much slower overall, because there is much less mail than before, and fast service is not economically viable nor essential on a day-to-day basis. La Poste used to have a dedicated high speed train, equipped with sorting center for overnight mail across the country, now decommissioned, not enough mail to fill a train.
These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value.
Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.
Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible.
The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
The complaint isn't that logistics should follow Moore's Law or that we need same-day delivery for everything. It's that we're paying more for objectively worse service than we had a decade ago. Services aren't "adapting to consumer needs", its just objective decay being masked as optimization.
The Lettre Verte example actually reinforces the point: service got slower, then slower again, not because physics demanded it but because maintaining the previous standard became inconvenient. The dedicated sorting train wasn't decommissioned because trains stopped working; it was decommissioned because the institution decided the mail didn't matter enough to run it.
Nobody expects sea transport to break the sound barrier. But when 73% of consumers experience an outright delivery failure in a three-month period, that's not bumping against hard physical limits. That's drivers marking packages "delivered" that weren't, because lying clears the route faster. That's solvable. We're just in a system that doesn't incentive fixing it.
The asymptotic argument would land if we were approaching some theoretical maximum. We're not. We're sliding backward from where we were, while costs rise. I'm not asking for magic, I'm asking where went the reliability we already had, at the prices we're already paying.
> I'm not asking for magic, I'm asking where went the reliability we already had, at the prices we're already paying.
My god thank you! My partner and I have been talking about this for the past 2 years in the context of food service and delivery service industry.
Greater than 50% of all our restaurant orders are straight up wrong or missing items, whether it’s from local places, chains, or fast food restaurants.
The unreliability is staggering, especially because we’re paying so much more!
It’s gotten so bad that we’re done with certain services and establishments for good now, or we make sure to QC before leaving the restaurant to ensure everything is in the bag.
Even more ironic, this happened a couple weeks ago at Texas Roadhouse — the same restaurant I worked in decades ago as a teenager, so I remember the process we had to go through for to-go orders.
First, we’d take the order over the phone. We’d repeat the order back to the customer to confirm everything (1st QC). When the food came up in the window, we’d pack the food in bags, crossing off every item on the receipt before stapling it to the bag (2nd QC). When the customer came to pick up their food, we’d have to take every box out of the bag, show the customer the food, and confirm that everything they expected in their order was there (3rd QC).
No customer. Every left. With an incorrect order. Simple.
That process is gone now. We paid more and came home missing my partner’s meal. Wtf.
The more I look into these systematic changes the less sense it makes.
Decades ago, when OP worked there, I'm guessing Texas Roadhouse only took takeout orders over the phone and in person, and didn't receive that many. It was less common to order takeout from sit-down restaurants. There was one procedure, the steps made logical sense, it could be implemented entirely within the restaurant without a lot of IT. And it worked, and it probably didn't take that much staff time on a normal night.
Now, you can still order by phone, but I see you can also at least order online for pickup, order via UberEats for delivery, and order via DoorDash for pickup or delivery. They've likely added these various modes over time, and I'm sure each has its own subtly different procedure reflecting various IT systems nobody in the restaurant has any control over.
The three-part QC process might still work for phone orders but those are probably rare. Orders picked up by the actual end customer could use a two-part QC process, verifying the items against the receipt and presenting them for visual inspection. But orders getting picked up by a delivery person can practically only get a quick check as they're loaded in the bag, because the delivery person is in a hurry and won't want to stand there and help check the receipt against what's in the bag. They also may not be able to effectively do so if they don't know the menu (for instance, there are several sides that could be "steamed vegetables" at a quick glance https://www.texasroadhouse.com/location/457-countrysideil/di...) and aren't sufficiently fluent in English.
Rather than have a complex flowchart for the overworked staff maximizing QC for every case, it's very easy to default to the minimum which works in every case, which is hurriedly comparing the menu items that come out of the kitchen to what's on the receipt as they're loaded into the bag. It's very easy to get this wrong, especially if you're overworked and distracted and loading multiple bags at once.
> At its fastest, a message (Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address) was carried between St. Joseph and Sacramento in only 7 days and 17 hours.
> With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days.
> Two days. In 165 years.
You are comparing the best the Pony Express could do with the worst the USPS estimates could happen, and then rounding 2.7 down to 2 to make it look even worse.
But the improvement is really 5 days 17 hours (most mail is delivered in 2 business days), or nearly three times faster.
And your final statement reiterates this numeric fallacy... which again sounds like you think the problem is that things haven't improved enough in 165 years. I believe you wanted to make another point, but focused on something else instead.
The humans who do work in logistics have been demanding higher standards of living and therefore better pay and healthcare in first-world countries.
UPS drivers are unionized in the US and their cost to the company (salary + healthcare + pension) is now over $170,000/year each.
Well, it did indeed become inconvenient... for the customers!
Rule no. 0 of economics states that a decreasing demand yields decreasing prices, but rule no. 1 concerns fixed costs: when demand is too low, each customer has to bear a larger share of them.
It seems to me that modern freight ships are optimized for capacity/cost ratio and not for speed - hull shape is very close to a box with a short bow/stern attached. I'm not an expert but it looks like if you make the hull longer and a bow/stern narrow you can go faster. Military ships are optimized for speed and their hull shape is not a box.
Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next.
Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value.
It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
I've not had issues with the USPS, but I don't doubt that it is getting worse. Private delivery (Amazon and the like) has been pretty much flawless. Order from McMaster, and it almost invariably arrives within two days (continental US)
I just don't experience what the author is getting at.
Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything. And where the old system of 50 NDC (National Distribution Centers) are being consolidated to ~30 RPDC (Regional Processing and Distribution Centers) leading to a whole new strategy of how mail moves East to West and West to East. And mail sorting for delivery used to happen by mail carriers at local Post Offices, is now happening at LSDC (Local Sorting and Delivery Centers) set up service all mail carriers in a 50 - 70 mile radius.
And all of these changes are happening while still having to deliver mail (It never stops Jerry. It just keeps coming and coming)
So if you’re in the Midwest like Chicago, stuff coming from the Midwest or Eastcoast has been getting stuck in Indianapolis-taking 10 to 15 days. Stuff coming from West Coast gets here in 5.
There are 42,000 active zip codes and 640,000 employees. Making changes to that organization is hard and takes time.
What’s really cool is the work going on with Amazon, Walmart, Target and others for them to deliver packages directly to LSDC for same day delivery. Once you get away from the cities, no one can compare with the USPS for last mile delivery.
TLDR USPS is changing. Things may get worse before they get better.
User guides on PostalPro are probably the best place to start. The Domestic Mail Manual is highly recommended if you have trouble sleeping.
This stuff gets discussed with industry via MTAC (Mailer’s Technical Advisory Committee) and the various special topic User Groups.
I like to say, things ALWAYS get worse before they get better!
Halfway through a remodel your kitchen is now torn up and nonfunctional.
Halfway through a surgery you have an open gut wound AND a tumor.
Halfway through combing your hair you look like you had a stroke halfway through combing your hair.
The simple "elimination" of nightly mail pickup from rural post offices has resulted in multi-day backlogs just getting anything out of your local Post Office. If I walk into any of my local POs in the county this morning to ship a Priority Mail Express letter overnight, they will not guarantee that it will be received tomorrow. The envelope will sit for nearly 24 hours locally for tomorrow morning's mail truck before it is brought back to a processing center tomorrow night to be introduced into the mailstream and finally processed outbound.
Basically anything being shipped cross-country is going to be snared in Rural Delay Hell and it absolutely sucks. Combine this with the recent postmarking changes and we're in for an absolute fun treat when it comes for mail-in-voting time.
Swisspost had been cutting its budget back consolidating locations but despite this is delivering even better service using tech.
but i do agree, Swiss Post is great. live-tracking while they're delivering, nice app which shows you all info etc.
This sentence sounds straight out of ChatGPT (along with the general substance-less nature of the article).
Living in Germany I find the contrast always interesting and often, unfortunately, annoying. Almost anything legal has to be done on paper via letter. Fax (yes, really) is one of the only other alternatives that is accepted. Im just really glad that after moving, my new hometown is significantly stepping up their digital game and making it as easy as possible. They even respond to emails in city hall!
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-ser...
I give you that. Most organisations are paper first and you have to login and select "digital communication only" once.
Any communication from water and garbage utilities is always in paper form. No option for digital in any way. When asked it was for "legal" reasons.
Property owner's insurance also sends their legal information and billing updates via letter.
Property tax updates and bills also come exclusively on paper. Even though they have my email and communicate non-billing and legal stuff over that.
I made an inquiry with local Bauamt about something and asked for email communication. The email I got said: "You've requested communication via email. So we're letting you know that we've sent a response to your question via letter.
USPS has been a disaster by comparison. We've been dealing with actual criminal elements in my local post office stealing and tampering with mail. I don't know of anyone in my community who hasnt filed a complaint with the USPIS. I don't even care about the packages anymore. I'm more worried about the tax forms, vehicle titles and replacement credit cards getting lost now.
Any merchant who only offers USPS or uses them as the last mile of delivery is a no-go for me. Amazon is the most stressful experience because you never know. The best approach I've found is to use their pickup box and batch things to coincide with my grocery trip.
I'm not familiar with US law in this, but I know the FBI has stepped in for some cases that are over state borders. Anecdotally, that is.
And I also know that private citizens can bring criminal cases to the prosecutor if the police aren't. If there are a lot of you, it wouldn't be too expensive to jointly hire a lawyer. Because this is absolutely not normal, at all.
And it should be squashed, and hard, with people led away in cuffs.
If this problem is persistent, the local city should get involved too.
The issue is that management of all shipping companies is expected to run their services 100% resource-efficiently and without any slack (wasted money). The problem is that the only way to do that you are essentially constantly above capacity.
I had certain services where literally every second month a new unfortunate subcontractor with yet another beaten up white van would show up. Needless to say their service quality was absolutely shit, since those subcontractors didn't even get a chance to learn how to do the job properly.
Extracting as much money as possible from shipping isn't the same as providing a good service. Reliable service needs redundancy and underutilized capacity. If your laptops CPU was constantly at 150% load you wouldn't say "Great I am not wasting resources", you would get a beefier CPU that gives you enough headroom for your daily tasks.
> Two days. In 165 years.
Going back to the start of the article, just like the Pony Express was closed due to telegrams, letter speed is not that important most of the time thanks to phones, internet, etc.
It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.
1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency
2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot
That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."
Plus the trend being fixated on is between 2022 and 2024/2025. I feel like the author is being abit disingenuous here by not acknowledging the black swan in the room with those numbers