How Much Will the Post Office Put Up With? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Will the Post Office Put Up With?

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127 pointssplat47 comments

Moving to Argentina has given me a newfound respect for the USPS - their reliability, sense of duty, and their humanity. In many ways they are a representative slice of America - flawed but generally reliable, hard working, and flexible.

Losing things in the mail, spending hours waiting in line to pick up a package, christmas presents delayed for three months for no apparent reason, all of these experiences down here make me miss those guys.

I loved the daily show bit about how the government can't efficiently run health care - he mentioned how the USPS can deliver a letter across the country in a few days for a few cents.

It really is an impressively efficient distributed system considering the hassles involved, specifically the diversity of items as listed in this article!

I hope you realize that it doesn't really cost few cents. The taxes paid by us keeps USPS running. FYI: USPS lost 2.8 billion dollars in 2008.

The USPS operates under an insane number of constraints that private competitors don't. They have to serve every single residental address in America, no matter how remote (UPS, and especially FedEx, laugh at this); they have to have outposts in bumblefuck nowhere; they have to offer six days of service even though volumes don't support it; fixed rate pricing for First Class letters even from/to the most remote destinations; and so on, all under their universal service obligation.

Furthermore, the postal service is mandated by the United States Constitution (Article I, section 8, Clause 7).

Look, it's like criticizing Amtrak. It's under congressional (although not Constitutional) mandate to run all those dumbass routes with stops in the middle of fucking nowhere on tracks where the freight companies are blatantly ignoring the law that requires passenger trains to have right of way. No wonder Amtrak's losing money and are late all the time; they're not allowed to do their jobs.

"The USPS operates under an insane number of constraints that private competitors don't"

And private companies are restricted by laws that grant, among other things, a First Class letter monopoly to the USPS. Let Fedex, UPS, and other delivery companies legally offer this service, and we can talk about how the USPS does a great job delivering bulk junk mail to every mailbox in America.

The postal service is permitted, not mandated, by the constitution.

"The Congress shall have power to...[long list] To establish post offices and post roads..."

The Congress shall also have the power to set up the court system (aside from SCOTUS). It is well established that this construct in the Constitution obligates Congress to do these things.

In my original comment, I was not arguing about the reasons why USPS doesn't make money. The author suggested that USPS is cheap and that is incorrect because USPS 'feels' cheap only because government takes care of the losses. BTW, correction for my previous post, USPS lost 7 billion dollars in 2008. Link: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/gao-postal-service-in-fi...

Coming back to your argument about the constraints USPS has to deal with. If you really think that USPS is losing money because they have to serve every single residential address in America, you are not being honest. By law, USPS has the monopoly to deliver first class mail, UPS/FedEx are not allowed to deliver them. If you really open up the market and let UPS/FedEx compete in the market, I am sure they will deliver better service for even cheaper prices. Link: http://www.jhhuebert.addr.com/articles/stamp.html

Yes, you may not be able to send a mail from NYC to SFO for 45 cents but it was wrong for cross country mail to be so cheap in the first place. I hardly use USPS but I have to pay my taxes every year and in turn I am subsidizing folks who are trying to send cross country mail for 45 cents. A private competitor will make sure that you pay the appropriate amount for your mail. It will be super cheap (may be even less than 45 cents) if the sender and receiver are in the same state! (And yes, UPS/FedEx will deliver to any address in America but you better pony up the cash if you are sending mail to middle of nowhere in Alabama.) Bottom line: price should reflect the cost, not pass it over to the taxpayers.

Also, did you know that USPS pays no taxes? No fuel taxes, no sales taxes, no property taxes, no corporate taxes, etc. Imagine what FEDEX and UPS could offer consumers in pricing & service if they were tax exempt like the USPS. Did you know that USPS makes most of its money from all the junk mail it delivers? There was a legislation on 'Do not Mail' registry (very similar to 'Do not Call' registry) and USPS is opposing it as without direct mail USPS will be in even bigger hole. So all those junk mails are essentially subsidizing your postal cost.

The other day I was in post office and there was a guy who was 2 years short of the retirement and he was making 50,000$/year. Guess what he did? He sold stamps behind the counter. You can hire people to do his job for 7 to 8 dollars per hour but because of Union/labor laws, he makes 50,000$. How is that for efficiency?

I could go on and on but you get my drift. For more food for thought, read this: http://perfectsubstitute.blogspot.com/2009/08/is-post-office...

Were you aware of how long this particular employee had been working for the USPS? Yeah, it's a little old-fashioned, but there is something to rewarding long-time and hard-working employees. (Japan companies get the retirement concept oodles better than the US). Maybe he'd long ago paid his dues as a carrier, and was simply happy to be working the last couple of years before his actual retirement.

Yeah, but only recently. Up until about the mid 00s, they've been running a healthy profit of about a billion a year. But, since it's supposed to be run revenue neutral (i.e., no profit) it gets absorbed back into the general fed budget.

Now that it's losing money, they have to cut back. No federal bailouts for a semi-federated body. Funny how that works.

Thanks, was gonna say... they were profitable for a long time. I always find the USPS to be great, better than UPS many times... but not so much Fedex.

In Italy, you can't sent a package without tying a &&(* string around it.

Your comment triggered previously unsuspected knowledge of cartoon swearing, making me suspicious that your censoring is both too short and containing two ampersands next to each other, which just isn't on (apparently - who am I to argue with my subconscious?).

On a closer look, one of your ampersands appears to be italicised, suggesting your original typing was two characters longer and more even, which would make it look more typical.

HN's markup doesn't seem to have been designed with cryptoswearing in mind.

The great thing about "crypto swearing" is that it's a variable where the reader can insert a phrase he or she feels is appropriate for the phrase, without getting offended, or snickering at something not strong enough. For instance, in the above phrase, you could use anything from "dad burned", to "gosh darned" to "god damn motherfucking".

What's been your experience of living down there otherwise?

Also, is Fedex or something similar an option?

"Helium balloon. The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped."

I burst out laughing when I read that in the article.

This is good too: "Never-opened small bottle of spring water. We observed the street corner box surreptitiously the following day upon mail collection. After puzzling briefly over this item, the postal carrier removed the mailing label and drank the contents of the bottle over the course of a few blocks as he worked his route. "

interesting: "Wrapped brick. Wrapped in brown paper; posted in street corner box with same amount of postage as was strapped to unwrapped brick. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt. "

The obvious moral is that if you're going to send anything heavy through the mail, send it in a larger than necessary box. Machine tool parts and so forth of steel are actually significantly denser than bricks.

It may have something to do with where the mailpiece originated. I get machine tools through the mail without any problem -- just got a 25lb vise two weeks ago, but it was sent from a clearly commercial address with the words "machine shop" in the title.

No chocolate for him.

I like the way they went an extra mile to treated the employees with decency. Kudos.

"We sought out as many of the USPS employees who had (involuntarily) been involved in the experiment as we could identify, and gave them each a small box of chocolate"

Reed Hastings tried this experiment in 1997 with DVDs. It worked, and he founded Netflix.

Of course, this was all back in 2000. I imagine the tolerance of unusual objects in the mail has changed somewhat in the interim.

There's always http://mailabrick.com

It has been fashionable to trash the post office (USPS) but growing up in a rural route area, I occasionally did a test by sending a letter to the grandparents with just the last name, the city name and the zip. Always got there. I probably could have just put the name, county and zip.

There's a picture in my local paper this week of an envelope. It's addressed simply to:

The editor of the local paper

Congleton

Apparently, it arrived at the offices of the Congleton Chronicle without an issue.

I've heard that someone once addressed a letter to:

HILL

JOHN

MASS

And it got there. See if you can figure out the intended recipient - it took me a good half hour. Spoilers at http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/bb_title/disp...

I once mailed a postcard from Honolulu addressed only to

  Michaelangelo McKasty
  Albany, New York

and it never arrived. I find it highly unlikely there is more than one Michaelangelo McKasty in Albany. I assume the USPS clerks in Albany are somewhat more disenchanted with their jobs than the ones in Andover, and just threw the postcard away.

Well, Andover has 31,000 and Albany has 94,000. The first is as a puzzle, the second one not so much.

In my case, the town is much smaller, and pretty much everyone knew everyone.

Or, they didn't appreciate you screwing with them when they're already agreeing to deliver your letter for just 44 cents and 3 lines of address.

You can put just the zip and the P.O. box number and it'll get there.

The zip+4 uniquely identifies every address in the US. We're probably nearing a billion addresses, though, I wonder what happens after that?

According to wikipedia, zip+4 does not uniquely identify single individuals unless they are high volume recipients.

sometimes they do, depends on population density.

Well, this was before the +4, and the official address was Rural Route #.

For an exercise in school we had to draw a postcard. Some of them looked pretty good so we decided to see what would happen if we used them.

100% success, all of them arrived stamped and on time.

So, if you're ever out of stamps but you have an urgent envelope to mail... bring out those crayons, success guaranteed.

Actually, just mail it with either no postage or one cent postage. It has a high probability of getting through, even if it's international mail. I did some experiments a few years ago, and of the 4-5 I sent every one of them got through.

Crayons wouldn't help anyway, except for maybe fooling people. The postal service machine's actually only look at the envelopes for flourescence which is applied to the stamps. In reality, the stamp's design could be totally blank. However, if the package or letter is an odd size, humans must handle it because it would otherwise jam the machinery - the reason there are now charges for oddly shaped mail. So, if you're scamming the USPS, make it an envelope that will have to be processed by people. Maybe a 1/2 too wide or something like that.

I'm not 100% about this, but I think the machinery spits out the envelope for a human to look at if there doesn't appear to be a flourescent stamp; else stamps from 50+ years ago would be invalid.

One more interesting item: the USPS uses some pretty cool OCR to read the addresses on mail. As I recall it has a 98% accuracy, although I wouldn't be able to find the source.

I know how much the Japanese Post Office will put up with, because the US Social Security Administration can't handle a mail merge:

"Patrick McKenzie $CITY, Japan"

is deliverable.

Page seems to be a 404 now. Any chance of a new link?

Hm, working again. :-)

I did a similar experiment with good results in college--mailed an individually wrapped slice of American cheese to a buddy.

I mailed a can of soda that was only available in the town where my college was to a friend across the country. It arrived intact, only slightly dented.

In college, Unilever mailed a bar of soap (in the normal bar-of-soap box) to every student on campus. The whole post office reeked of scented soap. Dozens wound up in fountains around campus. I can't smell that soap without being grossed out.

Virgin mobile phones mailed one of those Love Heart candies to business as apart of a "we love our customers" campaign. Unfortunately they got crushed by the post - resulting in white powder filled envelopes being mailed to lots of US business in the middle of the anthrax scare.

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No, but people are able to upgrade their content management systems. The internet wasn't around in 1900, but you can read news articles from that period just fine on NYTimes.com.

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