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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places.

Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.

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Having a P.O. box is a choice: you asked that mail be delivered to the P.O. box instead of to your residence. You may have been throwing away money for 20 years! Instead of complaining, go to your post office and submit a change of address form.

How does that square with their universal service obligation?

Which county is that?

I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.

Thanks! The free PO box is an interesting loophole that USPS can exploit.

My rural PO Box rental is $120/year, for the smallest size. If there's a free option they must keep it quiet.

I didn't know about it for the first few years I lived here, so ask when you're at the counter.

Most extremely rural areas don't have home delivery and never have. It's been this way for literally centuries.

Their web site seems to suggest they have last mile delivery everywhere because they're under universal service obligation. But, when I lived rural, I remember my mom having to drive to the post office to pick up the mail.

The universal service obligation is not that they have to provide home delivery for everyone, but that they can't close your podunk post office and make life even more hellish for the the 12 households that rely on it that it already is.

And if that's the case, then what it indicates is that USPS in your area is chronically understaffed and underfunded.

Like...c'mon, this is not hard stuff to understand. There's no motive for the USPS to be neglecting last-mile service in your area if they have the resources to provide it.

And this is absolutely caused by Republican efforts to destroy it. Because that's what they've been doing for decades, specifically to get people to think it's doing a bad job, specifically so that they can privatize it and farm out the contract to their big-business buddies.

This has been the standard in many rural areas since the post office was founded.

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