The Incredible Shrinking Postal Service

American Spectator ^ | March 15, 2012 | Peter Hannaford

[QT3.14]

Let's say you own a store with a good clientele, but sales have been slipping in recent years. A new store with new products has faster service at lower prices and is open 24/7. You're losing money. What do you do?

[ExGeeEye]

Raise prices and cut service, of course.

[Lysandru]

Punk-ass Liberals tell us that drilling for oil won't help lower gas prices-- but then they want to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help lower gas pricess.

Either they are morons or they think that we are.

[rodguy911]

Better than that, we will get executive unionized $40.00 per hours postal associates one at each post office who will only wok 32 hours per week,the four days we get mail.

The hell with snail mail. Use the computer instead. Its far more reliable and a hell of a lot quicker.

[varon]

A new store with new products has faster service at lower prices and is open 24/7. You're losing money. What do you do?

Arrange a riot and burn down the new store...........

[Brandonmark]

Internet allows you to communicate at lower cost and pay bills with more certainty. Private sector FedEx stores and UPS stores opening multiple locations (even acrooss street from each other)where you can pack, ship, print, and even purchase office supplies. Got to love free enterprise system.

[GraceG]

I think i am going to support them by buying a couple hundred dollars worth of the Ronal Reagan Forever stamps, gonna use them to send my liberal family members X-mas cards this year....

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks QT3.14.

Junk mail. which is close to the most annoying thing on Earth, turns out to have found a much cheaper way to live and more rewarding life aboard the world wide web, and robotic calls out of Bermuda.

[hinckley buzzard]

I ordered flower bulbs on line but when they tried to deliver them all they did was goop up my printer.

When the PO delivered the next batch they came in fine.

[Doe Eyes]

The model doesn't work. It was never reasonable, just popular.

It costs more to deliver to remote rural areas than it does to metropolitan centers. The costs per delivery are higher due to the low volume and remote location.

If free enterprise takes over, it would cost a lot more to deliver an envelope to Kodiak, Alaska that it does to New York City (which is the way it should be).

[Trailerpark Badass]

LOL, the postal service.

My local post office has started a new "service," I guess to decrease wait times in line. They never seem to man all of the counter spaces, even during peak business hours (around lunchtime), which can result in fairly long wait times. So, they've now begun taking one of the counter people out from behind the counter, slapping a red vest on him, and having him mingle with the people in line. He carrries a notepad where he checks off the various services each customer requires, and then hands it to the customer, who then takes it with him to the counter. At this point, the counter worker reads the note and peforms the desired services. It's so stupid and inefficient that it makes me feel like I'm in a Kafka novel.

Do they do this everywhere?

[raccoonradio]

I work for postal service—we can’t really raise prices all that much without permission from Postal Rate Commission. Admittedly a large part of the debt is having to pre-fund
75 years of retirement in the next 10 years...45 cents is
a good rate for postage (1 oz.) but if we made it 50 or
60 we could get rid of that debt. But wait. We can’t. By law. Has to follow rate of inflation...up by just a few
cents each time.

—Many are being offered early retirement
—Facilities being consolidated (big sorting centers). I myself may wind up in downtown Boston after spending 25 yrs
in the suburbs. Some of the suburban facilities are being
closed. Vermonters may have their mail sorted 75 miles
away instead of only 25 miles...and it gets there a day later. Smaller post offices being closed.

—Salary freeze (actually all fed. employees exc for
military is affected)
—We do have universal service. Want to privatize? Fine,
but if you live in the boonies you may have to drive
40 miles or so to get your mail.

—Price of gas. It ain’t cheap. It adds up in jeeps,
planes, trucks, etc.

Sure we could raise the price. They won’t let us.

We’re cutting but we can’t raise the price all that much.
We’re quasi-governmental; if we were privatized the price would go up and you’d still get the cuts in service.

Sat. service? Who needs it.

[wizr]

Do you remember that several years ago new architecturally designed post offices were springing up all over the country?
The management didn’t seem to care about the costs. They just raised that rates to cover whatever silly concept came up, even creating new stamps almost every week it seemed.

They dug their own hole.

[raccoonradio]

Even though I’m a postal worker I pay a lot of bills online. But I use USPS for other things like sending flash drives or cassettes to friends with radio stuff, music etc

[raccoonradio]

Also acc to a supervisor what’s the biggest part of post
office? Parcel sorting, not letter sorting.

[Alberta's Child]

This is where the U.S. Postal Service gets screwed by the U.S. government. If USPS rates can only increase with inflation, then the U.S. government policy of deliberately under-reporting the inflation rate isn't doing the USPS any favors.

It's not as if a 2% "reported" inflation rate is enough to offset the 20%+ increase in fuel costs and whatever pay raises are built into the USPS labor agreements.

[Southern Magnolia]

I’ve posted several times on this issue. The problem started when the PO discontinued cheaper classes of mail to make “more” profit.

This has affected my company’s international business in terms that it now costs an international customer three times as much to ship items to them via their only option, air mail vs what they used to pay just a few years ago for the “boat or land” mail option, which has been discontinued. We’ve lost fully a third of our company’s international orders because of it.

[captnorb]

Also the subway ride would be $27.49 each way and the rural areas would have less taxes. Same holds true for buses.

[MamaDearest]

I work for postal service—we can’t really raise prices all that much without permission from Postal Rate Commission.

The overabundance of USPS supervisors is a union sacred cow, never addressed:

APWU, USPS reach tentative agreement on new contract

Snip: The new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which will expire on May 20, 2015, retains protection against layoffs for all career employees who were on the rolls as of Nov. 20, 2010, when the current contract was scheduled to expire.

The salary of a post office supervisor

Snips:

. Expert only reports average salaries for 10 cities, but five of those featured average earnings between $50,388 and $54,531.

. With bonuses and other incentives, those yearly earnings may increase by $1,458 to $4,929.

. Union contracts let postal supervisors access health benefits at a rate cheaper than the rest of the federal employee labor pool.

. Upon reaching qualifying retirement age (55 to 57), workers receive a monthly pension check for life.