Posted on 05/09/2009 1:16:49 PM PDT by Patriot777
"As the price to mail a letter is set to increase on Monday, mail volume at the U.S. Postal Service continues to drop. To counter the tough times, the government-run service operating 579 post offices across the state will continue to reconfigure its work force and its ability to compete for customers. Brian Watson, 37, of Lowell, said he's getting ready to make the jump from putting his bills in a mailbox to completing the transaction online because of the cost to use the postal system."
(Excerpt) Read more at nwanews.com ...
“Why, then, is the mail volume declining—other than the versatility and expediency not to mention cost-freedom of the internet?”
I think that’s enough right there.
If you ever get a chance go to a big USPS BMC (mail center). The employees are ACORN refugees or recent immigrants who cannot speak English due to preferences. I recall being at a bulk mail center when 3rd class (junk mail) had much bigger volumes. And yes “junk mail” helped the post office cover fixed expenses.
Well when the were busy you could stanbd there for an hour while one employee was calling in his horse bets. It is is a unionized work force in most cases.
Wonder why the financial system of America is sinking? Same people are running Fannie and Freddie and the govt thugs tell banks to make loans to anyone or go to JAIL.
Another real problem is we are in a Pelosi (2006 Congress) and Obama Depression if you have not noticed. People with money/brains and businesses do not spend moeny when a marxist is in the White Hut.
They just built a new one down the road in a small town (pop. about 200) Only mail service they have ... will be closing ... in operation maybe a year ...
Isn’t time to resurrect the urban legend about adding five cents to every email????
Mail volume rose for years, costs must go up to meet the increase in demand. Volume now goes down, cost must continue to rise for ?????? What?
What does it take for cost to go down? Competition?
Oh to finish the story. I went back a few years later in maybe 2007. The place was a ghost town and the service was better because they had no customers. Junk mail kept rates lower. It is like early bird dinner discounts. Helps cover the fixed costs and downtime and lowers the USPS deleivery cost per unit.
I think that’s enough right there.
Except we haven't yet reached the point of being able to "virtually ship" physical goods. =o)
However, recessions and depressions usually don't create drops this big. For that you have to look at DROUGHT.
What happens in a drought is quite simple. Throughout the area where there's drought folks tied into the agrarian lifestyle and economy (farmers for example) quit paying their bills. That phenomenon is usually detected by their creditors early in the game so they stop sending out new bills (which is called "cutting your losses").
Sometimes bankruptcies will increase, and sometimes not. Usually the creditors know payments on debt will resume once it rains ~ outsiders might not, but they have computer routines that "detect drought conditions" so much of this takes place rather automatically these days.
So, no bills being sent to customers; no payments being paid to creditors, and that's a chunk of main volume that just disappeared. Add to that Standard Rate Mail (advertising) which is no longer sent to people who are not paying their bills (at roughly a 10 to 1 ratio to First Class Mail, e.g. bills) and you have your explanation.
So, we have an Obama Depression, serious drought conditions in the Southeast, Texas, the Southwest, and CALIFORNIA, and that's enough mail to just toss USPS like a chopped cabbage!
In fact, I think it's a 15% drop, but it could be more.
Regarding costs, USPS usually gets caught unawares by the drought cycles because the first impact is in rural areas where postal costs are generally fixed. Costs pretty much the same to handle a billion pieces as it does two billion pieces in rural America since the infrastructure for doing that is high relative to the volume being handled. Costs of handling vary in urban areas. It's like there are two different sorts of mail handling business in America with totally different cost factors. Probably explains why you don't see UPS and FED EX running routes all over the countryside!
The only "preference" anyone gets for a USPS job is "veterans' preference" and there are several categories. 10 pointers can pretty well cruise right in provided they meet minimum requirements, and 5 pointers (like me) are right behind them.
I once hired over 100,000 returning Viet Nam War vetrans ~ many of them straight out of the boonies ~ gave 'em the test right in the field dodging bullets and mortars.
Well, enough on that. USPS has a pretty open hiring system. You take the test. You wait. The test is no big thing ~ just to demonstrate you can read and aren't going to walk out there in a modern industrial environment and lose limbs on the first day.
At present the United States supposedly has 19 million surplus EMPTY houses and condos. At the same time as recently as 10 years ago there were a mere 60 million houses and condos.
That 19 million is nearly a 1/3 increase in the number of stops with essentially no change in population, and certainly without a concomitant increase in the expected mail volume.
Overbuilding of houses and condos with below cost illegal alien labor has given us a collapse in home prices, millions of unemployed people, the destruction of the Postal Service, and a near meltdown of our banking and credit systems.
ML/NJ
but when you mail a check from florida to the left coast on tues, payday is friday, it gets there on thursday.
The post offices here in Irving TX are doing away with their single stamp overnuight vending machines, so you either have to buy a bopok or wait in line during the day. That irritates me greatly. I wonder how widespread it is.
And yet (I bet) USPS upper management will still collect some kind of bonus this year, and next.
That means that the only jobs available are those where people have moved on to a better job, or where they've retired.
Men and women have different expectations regarding how long they should futz around with a potential employer before they're hired. There are books written about the phenomenon, and I know it's always going to be a surprise to some, but men and women are different.
So, who are the women who wait around for a postal opening? Well, for starters, they are ladies who can work nights. About half the workforce shows up after 5 PM, and works to the wee hours of the morning. The other half show up about 4 AM to case mail (they're called letter carriers) and then hit the streets.
A woman with young children will probably not find a postal job compatible with her schedule, but a woman with teenagers will! Besides, with college tuition coming up, and the need for better medical insurance, USPS fits the bill ~ provided there are no young children at home.
Men all too often think postal schedules are a POS. I agree. Still, maintenance has to be done in off-hours (2AM to 10 AM for example).
My own area (Mail Classifiation) had a normal work cycle that fit in perfectly with musicians. At least 1/3 of the people I worked with were, or had been, professional or semi-professional musicians at some time in their working lives, and many continued to leave the Mail Acceptance Units at 9PM and go to the clubs to perform until 1 or 2 AM.
Alas, that wasn't all that large an employment category (350 people in supervisory and specialist positions, and maybe 3400 in clerical levels).
There were other matches like that where people could balance two jobs for a long period of time. Good way to be a high earner too.
There's also a division within the USPS between large facilities and small facilities. About half the workforce work at large facilities and half don't. With the movement of mail processing and the use of heavy machinery to Mail Processing Centers with thousands of employees, there's a tendency for men to show up in MPCs and women to show up in smaller retail, finance and delivery units.
About 20 years ago folks holding greencards as authorized immigrants were allowed to take US government jobs. That's why you see the Asian and Latino ladies at the post office. With the background check performed by Postal Inspectors on every aspiring employee, I doubt there are any illegals in the bunch.
Now, another factor in USPS employment, if you've been convicted of a felony the odds on you getting a job are between ZERO and NONE. Right there is a difference between men and women with women holding an edge in the employment race. Still, I think the ratio by sex is pretty much what it's been for the last 75 years ~ that is, 50/50 with some variation in different place.
What I think you are having a problem with are the thickness standards for letter mail. They are of somewhat recent vintage ~ I wrote the first ones.
What you need to do is quit stuffing all that extra stuff in the envelopes, particularly if it's advertising. Send that at Standard Rate rather than at a marked up First Class Mail rate.
It can’t help either that Ebay no longer wants Money Orders and requires Paypal. Also with the drop of ebayers due to this restriction this will also effect their mail volume, LOL!
The post office fails to realize that their problems began when the made the size limits for priority mail 1cf. All other services have a size limit of 3 cubic feet before oversize charges begin. The post office in their wisdom decided 1cf was big enough.
They tried to force everyone to use parcel post, if you have ever used parcel post you know it is not dependable. When they made the change they almost put our company out of business. We had packages that took 38 days to arrive which is completely unacceptable.
So what did we do? We switched the vast majority of all our shipping to UPS. We ship 300-500 packages a week. That business that used to go to USPS is now going with UPS. Multiply that out by thousands of businesses and you will find the very reason the post office is losing money.
They want to blame in on the economy, however the real reason is mismanagement. They posted a 5.1 billion loss the very next year, and this was before the “worse” economy since the great depression.
I think you need to move over to DU and not go telling FReepers what they "need" to do. As it happens I frequently mail disks in a 5x8 envelope with a piece of paperboard in there as a stiffener. The cost of this tripled with one of the recent penny increases. I really do not care whether my stuff doesn't go through the automated machinery. Maybe we could just through away all the automated machinery, cut the forced two minute conversations about whether I want to send my non-standard envelope by registered mail, whether I want delivery confirmation, whether I want to purchase any stamps, etc., and fire half of the postal workers starting with the ones who cannot speak English. (Or at my Post Office, the Box Mail attendant who is deaf and cannot hear the buzzer mounted next to the box mail window.)
ML/NJ
Hmmm....
The post office in my town has a deaf old man, an oriental who doesn’t speak English well and a Lesbian with an attitude behind the counter. There are usually only two windows open most of the time and the line is out the door and down the block most of the times. And it seems like every time i turn around, the post office is doing a ‘price restructure’.
I get mail for other ppl at least twice a week. People in my town have hand delivered mail to me that went in their box. I have had credit card bills arrive either the day before or the day after they were due on more occasions that I care to count.
Yep... I use online bill paying.
Tell you what, buy disk mailers that have the proper aspect ratio. You'll find that the costs go way down.
The lesson is that if you don't care if the mailpiece goes through the automation machinery then you'll have to pay the manual distribution rates ~ and let me tell you, it costs a whale of a lot more to sort mail by hand than with those machines.
Our town of just under 6000 got rid of the stamp dispensing machines around 2002 or so. The advantage, and it took some adjusting to- is we can and do buy postage stamps at the grocery stores while shopping. Of course we can still get out of the car, walk up the mandatory steps (beautiful old building built back in the 1930s or so-)and stand in line. The plus side is our postal people are for the most part outstanding.
Unlike when my son was in Guatamala. You mailed nothing beyond letters because the postmster kept any and all packages. You could have it if you were willing to pay enough and if the postmaster did not want it worse than you did.
No, you see that's the way it works in the Communist countries. The government tells you how to do things and you do them that way, or else.
You beloved Postal "Service," would be out of business if they allowed competition. We always hear that we cannot allow competition because no business would deliver the mail to the Aleutian Islands because of the cost involved. Well, it costs them a lot less to deliver my disk to NYC than it does to deliver anything to the Aleutian Islands. They had been doing it for years at the the regular (inflated) first class rate.
As for your special mailers, I have them. They are "non-standard" and stiff too; and they cost about a buck a piece. My envelopes cost me about a nickel each. Only a government drone would make the suggestions that you have made to me.
ML/NJ
I wonder if the democrats have thought of this one yet: the USPS takes over control of all email within the US and charges x cents per email sent. Attachments would cost more. Of course we would need to rent our email inboxes from the government for some annual fee (although they would probably be “free” and paid from our taxes). After a few years of this they would realize their 100,000’s of postal workers aren’t actually doing anything and would start delivering the emails daily (not on Sundays though) to our physical mailboxes on CDs.
You sound like a good liberal artist I heard lecture. As she was forced away from the fine arts school that had nurtured and supported her for 8 years, she learned she had to make a living working.
She had a masters degree in fine arts and was a very accomplished wood worker. Unfortunately she didn’t like to make things that didn’t comply with her artistic ideals. He thing was” a dialogue with lines and dots” Everything she made from wood was decorated with lead pencil lines and dots. There was a dot and then a line connecting it to another dot and so on.
She decided she would make framed mirrors. The wood frames were painted with flat paint and then covered with the lines and dots, thus expressing the unique dialogue. She learned to her dismay that she had to do the shipping and packing. She also learned that boxes for the purpose were not available in the random sizes of her completed work. To buy the available packaging, she must standardize her frame sizes and thus surrender the freedom of artistic line and dot dialogue.
At the time of the lecture, she was but weeks away from being kicked out of the academic nest and still had no idea about where she was going or what she was going to do. She could not get over the fact she had to either use available standard packing materials or spend the time and money to develop and fabricate her own. She was an artist and packing was mundane activity for riff raff. She had a masters degree!!!
And you sound like someone who has difficulty with the English language, or logic, or both. I'm not making those envelopes that cost me a nickel, or wishing they were a different size. I buy a hundred at a time at one of those office supply stores that dot the landscape because they suit my purpose.
ML/NJ
First you demand lower cost, then refuse the advice of an expert who tells you how to get it. What’s wrong with the GOP these days again?
I'm sorry I cannot join you in a rejection of modernism ~ so, back into your cave.
Oh Great Postal "Service" Apologist, pray tell us: When did this standardization ever result in lower costs? The price of mailing the most garden variety first class mail has only gone up during my lifetime. I guess your boys just forgot to pass all the great savings along to us poor schlubs forced to use this "service" that constantly reduces service. (Hello? Anyone else remember when there were two daily deliveries of mail?)
ML/NJ
The only thing I ever mail are formal invitations or thank you notes. I couldn’t tell you what the price of a stamp is.
Standardization of radio wave technology has made it possible to place phone calls around the world.
Standardization of mail has enabled everyone to be able to afford to use it, and presently USPS is the world's largest AND most efficient postal operation.
You either buy into the concept of standardization and its benefits to productivity and utility or you retire to a cave.
Go to usps.com and order stamps online. USPS will deliver your stamps to your door, with delivery confirmation
I see you continue to avoid answering the questions I pose and raising completely unrelated topics. Flim-flam Florio used to do this here in NJ. I still want to know where my cost savings are.
ML/NJ
Time to consider the practices of John H. Reagan, the Confederate Postmaster General. Reagan promoted efficiency in the office and reduced costs. He ran the only post office in history to turn a profit.
$0.94 to mail a postcard to anywhere outside the US, what will be come Monday?
It was only $0.37 to mail postcards to the US from the Caribbean.
Remember the penny postcard?
Back in the ‘80s, I took the exam for mail carrier. Before we even started the test, minorities were credited with free exam points because they weren’t white. Right off the bat, they had an advantage over whitey. After that, I understood why our mailman couldn’t speak English, and apparently couldn’t read it, either, as there was always some kind of mix-up with our deliveries.
Of course he could run things at a profit!~
Take that problem up with the Nancy Woman, Hairy Reed, or Obama bin Laden, OK!
ML/NJ
You don't give up, do you? I am perfectly aware that there has been inflation. But in other areas where there have been cost savings (air travel, electronics) things haven't increased at the same rate as general inflation. I bought my first RT air ticket in 1969 from Hartford to Miami. It cost me $150. This weekend I am in the middle of a similar RT flight from Newark to Palm Beach. It cost $230 dollars. Your first class stamp in that same time has gone from five cents (I think it had already gone from four to five) for virtually any one ounce envelope to 41 cents for only a subset of one ounce envelopes. (and more next week) You would think some of those lower air costs might be reflected in postage rates too. But no, the government NEVER lowers the cost for anything.
ML/NJ
In 1969 the old Post Office Department had had to CANCEL all maintenance related items for the indefinite future because Congress had failed to authorize those funds.
Earlier other Democrat Congresses had refused to allow postal modernization of parcel service so a large number of Postal Service Headquarters economists and operations folks puchased a moving firm in Seattle and named it United Parcel Service. They immediately unionized the place and set up an employee ownership system.
The price of a single First-Class stamp has little bearing on anything until you get to the creation of USPS.
Uh huh, sure.
Still, at the MPC they're mostly male (and work nights, and I bet you've never been to an MPC at night).
For many years the worst demographic problem was the incredible dominance of females in postmaster jobs. Those ol'gals just wouldn't retire and wouldn't retire and guys couldn't move up. I think it was something like 75% female, maybe more.
No doubt that's a good reason to close down useless small town post offices.
ML/NJ
Witht he creation of USPS the subsidization ceased, rates went up with inflation, and the employees went off welfare and foodstamps.
That was a win, win all around.
To argue against it is to argue for putting more people on foodstamps and welfare.
I'm confused. Is the Post Office there to deliver the mail, or is it a social welfare organization? With all the great automation you refer to one would think the Post Office should have fewer employees and lower skills (if that were possible) required of the average remaining employee.
Why doesn't the government just close the Post Office down and let private enterprise do the job? I would bet standard first class mail between and within major cities would be down to a dime a piece in no time.
Let me guess, I have to pay for your retirement and health care too, beyond Social Security and Medicare?
ML/NJ
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