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Comment by zomg | Hacker News Reader

in my humble opinion, the "look" of the usps isn't their problem on the retail side. it's the fact that it's a complete and total PITA to ship with them, coupled with the wrong incentive structure for their employees.

1. streamline the process - one form to ship something, a letter, a package, whatever. one sticker goes on the package to indicate the shipping class (certified, etc). none of this a sticker here, a red stamp there, etc.

2. incentivise employees to be PRODUCTIVE. i don't know much about their existing compensation plan, but every time i go to a PO, no one seems to give a shit. i ship a lot of packages on my lunch break. the PO is PACKED at noontime... and there's one person at the desk. REALLY?

anyway, i could go on, but they have a long, long, long, way to go.

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#2 is the #1 reason why I don't like dealing with the USPS for packages. It's easier for me to run to the post office and have them walk me through the process of the more complicated shipping (non-domestic primarily), but the people there are ass holes. Between the post office where I live and the office where I work (in two different states), I've never had a good experience. There's always some pissed off, rude middle aged woman who acts like I'm an idiot for not being familiar with all of their complicated protocols and rules for shipping.

So yeah, branding isn't their problem. It's the service itself that blows.

The most polite way to put it is people who willfully refuse to learn any market, are only given the alternatives of being frustrated or ripped off, often without understanding which is about to happen to them. So in this individual concrete example, basically you're saying that for a willfully uninformed customer, the USPS has made a policy decision at a high level to frustrate you instead of ripping you off, and you'd like to do business with someone who will rip you off instead of frustrating you. I donno if that's a huge win or if most people would really prefer that, especially if the alternative were explained to you.

I've shipped exotic electronics prototypes to Canada, all by myself, gettin it right the first time, about as exotic as you can get without involving ITAR, with only minimal and brief research. If you get ITAR involved, then I do feel your pain, but ITAR isn't the USPS's fault, even if they're the easiest people to lash out at.

There shouldn't need to be any learning of markets or navigating of postal office policies. This is a business like any other meant to serve their customers. Shipping a package should and needs to be as easy as checking out at Wal-Mart.

"Shipping a package should and needs to be as easy as checking out at Wal-Mart."

.gov politicians disagree emphatically. Those regulations weren't made for fun. They may result in a dysfunctional system. Monopolies do not serve their customers other than incidentally.

I wasn't really complaining that it's too difficult to ship stuff so much as I was that the employees I've interacted with have all been dicks. I guess not setting aside a weekend to memorize the poorly-designed info database on the USPS site is technically willful ignorance. But then again so is not taking a weekend to learn all of the inner workings of my car, or how plumbing works, or how to build a house, etc. and choosing to have a professional take care of it.

And I really don't think the only two options the USPS has are "be a dick" or "go figure it out yourself, you lazy shit"

Your experience is alien to me. I'm probably in the thousands of USPS packages shipped.

- Use electronic shipping whenever possible. With label sticker paper, it's less than 5 minutes for me to create, pay and print a label on usps.com and have it on the package. Then in most cases you can just drop it in the package slot at the post office or have your mail carrier pick it up, no interaction at the post office required.

- If you're making a little side money off of eBay, eBay or PayPal shipping couldn't be easier (and the price for First Class Package, if you're < 1 lb, is a third of Priority etc)

In the rare cases I have to interact with clerks - international, SCAN forms - they've been quite efficient everywhere I've been.

Basically, you can largely avoid having to ever stand in line. If you can't, I'd suggest not going in during peak times. Lines are slow because people who stand in lines largely don't know what they want and don't know how to work the post office.

You are correct that there are typically easier ways to ship. However, needing to know how to work the system is emblematic of the greater problem with USPS. Desk service is an important aspect of the mail system, and, while it may be alien to some, people need assistance with USPS' wide range of services.

Just use the Paypal shipping link, you just enter the recipient address choose your service and package size and you are done. Print the label on your printer drop the package in the mail. You also get the benefit of Commercial Base (COMBAS) pricing. Which is significantly cheaper than physically going to the post office for the same services.

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now

#2 x 1000, after my last experience with surly disinterested employees at USPS I took my business to UPS this weekend. Cost slightly more but 0 paperwork and much better service.. Handed a list of addresses to the guy behind the counter, he filled the paperwork , printed the labels etc.. It boggles the mind this isn't standard at USPS which just seems to be a puzzle (#1)

2 isn't an employee problem, its a system problem.

They feel the big brother need to authenticate the heck out of you and your money and manually handle packages all at the same time, so a transaction takes 5 minutes and you get a fabulous line that takes an entire lunch hour to navigate.

The way it should work is vaguely like the automated checkouts at my public library, one human being who does virtually nothing other than reboot machines and create new / renew cards.

So a human being does the Big Brother tracking thing to authenticate your D/L and CC once. Then for all eternity you step up to a machine, slide your DL and CC thru the reader, you slap a sticker on the package, you throw your package on a conveyor belt, all good.

I think a system redesign could get transaction times down to a fraction of a minute and reassign humans to do stuff humans are really good at, like debugging a system they're experts at, exception handling/customer complaints, all that big brother authoritarian BS that they enjoy so much, and teaching other humans, while getting humans out of the work that humans are awful at, like following brainless repetitive procedures, manual labor, and data entry.

Where do you put all this conveyor belt and vending machine junk in existing post offices? Well, if you're not going to have people standing in lines anymore, how bout putting the gear where people used to stand in line for 30 minutes at lunch hour.

Another fix would be sh!t or get off the pot WRT big brother / evil empire stuff. Either get rid of all of it which would save a lot of time, or go all in (more likely, because its more profitable for 3rd parties) which means automatic scanning of drivers licenses and CCs and fingerprints for all transactions, which sounds bad, but if automated would be a heck of a lot faster. (Edited to make it clear I think they're achieved a local maxima of wasted time WRT big brother BS, so any change would almost by definition of a local maxima, speed things up)

There is also a bigger systemic issue WRT scrapping entire parts of the system. If big business can ship whatever they want to Canada without it being inspected or (properly) taxed, or dudes in China can ship me literally anything without the customs system doing much of anything, why not just scrap them? Get rid of the whole process, customs forms and everything. Its not like anything will change other than the elimination of a huge waste of time.

Literally all of your problems could by solved by buying your postage online ahead of time. The post office encourages this, and sells it through their own website, as well as resellers like Stamps.com.

Once you've attached a prepaid shipping label to a package, you can simply drop it off at any office, and they'll ship it. No personal interaction necessary. You don't even have to wait in line.

This. Fix the service (and system). Not the branding.

Plus, it's really every US tax payer paying for the problems...

The USPS doesn't cost the taxpayer a dime.

This isn't really true. They cover their huge losses with loans from the government.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/postal_service_...

It's an artificial debt... their pension plan is way oversized. Congress has put them in the ridiculous position of literally pre-paying pension obligations of employees who haven't been born yet.

They haven't been putting money into that since 2011. And their own page shows they would have been at -$3B in 2010 even without the pre-funding mandate. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...

USPS has authority to run its own deficits quarter to quarter or year to year, and they have significantly improved their financial situation since the financial collapse and large drop in first class mail usage. Last year they would have run a surplus if it were not for the pre-funding liabilities: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/us/postal-service-trims-it... Congress needs to get out of the way and let the USPS succeed, but I fear the privatization interests are just setting them up for massive failure.

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