The USPS SUCKS

[Dan Gould]

On 7/14/2020 at 3:46 PM, Dan Gould said:

Well we've found a new locale where items can go in the wrong direction - Memphis. 8 days after leaving Memphis (when it seemed on target for on-time delivery) it was scanned in Phoenix.  Frankly I'm relieved that it got someplace to be scanned even if its 2000 miles in the wrong direction. Now I am wondering - when an item is misdirected and ridiculously late, is anything done to expedite delivery, as in treating it like a first class package? Or I bet it is a media mail piece in Phoenix, hopefully sent in the general direction of Florida, and probably 9 days away. 

Well this is truly turning into a likely disaster. Apparently they do "upgrade" a mail piece when it goes so far afield. Took only two days from scanning in Phoenix to scanning to in Ybor City which is just east of Tampa. So first thing this morning I had hopes of receiving this today. 

Now I don't know if I should have any hope of receiving it at all, as it was dropped off at the Brandon PO. Brandon is two towns west of Plant City.

If it gets on a truck and says "Out for Delivery" I will bet that someone puts it in a random mailbox and scans it as "delivered".  Fucking pathetic.

[Big Beat Steve]

16 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

If it gets on a truck and says "Out for Delivery" I will bet that someone puts it in a random mailbox and scans it as "delivered".  Fucking pathetic.

And next thing you know - the discussion will take another turn, to the tune of "oh those poor parcel delivery drivers are so poorly paid that they just can't cope and just have to unload their stuff somehow to get it done within their time frame. It's not their fault - it's the system and the working conditions and ...")

(Happened over here - pathetic too ...)

A political post? Maybe ... but no matter what the working conditions may be (I understand there are other jobs that are a treadmill too, BTW), this is no friggin' excuse for just dumping the stuff just anywhere or not bothering to deliver it at all but just stick a "nobody home, collect it ourself at the center" notice in the mailbox (and then you're lucky if the do at least this!) even though clearly someone was home and sitting on edge waiting for the doorbell to ring ... etc. etc.

 

[JSngry]

 

[Dan Gould]

28 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

And next thing you know - the discussion will take another turn, to the tune of "oh those poor parcel delivery drivers are so poorly paid that they just can't cope and just have to unload their stuff somehow to get it done within their time frame. It's not their fault - it's the system and the working conditions and ...")

(Happened over here - pathetic too ...)

A political post? Maybe ... but no matter what the working conditions may be (I understand there are other jobs that are a treadmill too, BTW), this is no friggin' excuse for just dumping the stuff just anywhere or not bothering to deliver it at all but just stick a "nobody home, collect it ourself at the center" notice in the mailbox (and then you're lucky if the do at least this!) even though clearly someone was home and sitting on edge waiting for the doorbell to ring ... etc. etc.

 

(Partial) credit where it is due: my pessimistic nature led me to anticipate that a Brandon route driver would stick it in any old mailbox. In fact they must have a dedicated truck for messed up local PO deliveries from the regional center, as the next scan was instead "Arrived at Plant City PO" and the one ten minutes after that was "Out for Delivery" from Plant City. So hope springs eternal!!

[Big Beat Steve]

Crossing my fingers ...

[Brad]

The currently hardest hit areas are probably going to suffer disruption. 

[medjuck]

Is a news report in the Washington Post considered political?:

"The new head of the U.S. Postal Service established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made “difficult” changes to cut costs. But critics say such a philosophical sea change would sacrifice operational efficiency and cede its competitive edge to UPS, FedEx and other private-sector rivals.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.

Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service

The memo cited U.S. Steel, a onetime industry titan that was slow to adapt to market changes, to illustrate what is at stake. “In 1975 they were the largest company in the world,” the memo states. “They are gone.” (U.S. Steel is a $1.7 billion company with 27,500 employees.)

Analysts say the documents present a stark reimagining of the USPS that could chase away customers — especially if the White House gets the steep package rate increases it wants — and put the already beleaguered agency in deeper financial peril as private-sector competitors embark on hiring sprees to build out their own delivery networks.

Congress authorized the USPS to borrow an additional $10 billion from the Treasury Department for emergency operations in an early coronavirus relief bill. But postal leaders have yet to access the money over disagreements with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who attached terms on the loan that would turn over operations of much of the Postal Service to his department.

The Postal Service’s governing board appointed DeJoy, a major Trump donor and seasoned logistics executive, in the middle of that back-and-forth.

Read the documents: Internal USPS document tells employees to leave mail at distribution centers

Steep drop-offs in first-class and marketing mail, the Postal Service’s most profitable items, have exacerbated the USPS’s cash crisis; postal leaders predicted at the start of the pandemic that their agency would be insolvent by October without congressional intervention. Single-piece, first-class mail volume fell 15 to 20 percent week to week in April and May, agency leaders told lawmakers last month. Marketing mail, the hardest-hit segment, tumbled 30 to 50 percent week to week during the same period.

Skyrocketing package volume, up 60 to 80 percent in May as the coronavirus pandemic made consumers more reliant on delivery services, has propped up the Postal Service’s finances and staved off immediate financial calamity. But the packages also have intensified the USPS’s competition with Amazon, FedEx and UPS, industry leaders looking to capitalize on enduring changes in consumer habits brought on by shelter-in-place orders. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.

Trump says he will block coronavirus aid for U.S. Postal Service if it doesn’t hike prices immediately

The Postal Service’s future needs to be as a low-cost package carrier, industry analysts contend, as parcels make up a growing portion of the agency’s volume and profits, and paper mail volumes continue to decline as coupons and bills increasingly move online. Postal leaders project the agency could run out of money between March and October 2021.

“If this is true, it would be a real concern to customers if service were slowed, especially in light of the fact that the Postal Service may get more rate authority, meaning higher rates, later this year or early next year,” said Art Sackler, manager of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, an industry group whose members include Amazon, eBay, Hallmark and other commercial mailers.

“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”

The changes also worry vote-by-mail advocates, who insist that any policy that slows delivery could imperil access to mailed and absentee ballots. It reinforces the need, they say, for Congress to provide the agency emergency coronavirus funding.

 

“Attacks on USPS not only threaten our economy and the jobs of 600,000 workers. With our states now reliant on mail voting to continue elections during the pandemic, the destabilizing of the post office is a direct attack on American democracy itself,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.). “It has been 59 days since the House passed $25 billion to keep USPS alive. The Senate must pass it now. Democracy hangs in the balance.”

The Postal Service said in a statement that it was “developing a business plan to ensure that we will be financially stable and able to continue to provide reliable, affordable, safe and secure delivery of mail, packages and other communications to all Americans as a vital part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.”

Postal Service to review package delivery fees as Trump influence grows

It said the plan was not finalized, but would include “new and creative ways for us to fulfill our mission, and we will focus immediately on efficiency and items that we can control, including adherence to the effective operating plans that we have developed.”

But the documents circulated Monday on shop floors around the country called for specific changes in the way postal workers will do their jobs.

“Every single employee will receive this information, no matter what job they perform, so remember that YOU are an integral part of the success we will have — again, by working together,” the second document states.

“The shifts are simple, but they will be challenging, as we seek to change our culture and move away from past practices previously used,” it adds.

The first memo says the agency will prohibit overtime and strictly curtail the use of other measures local postmasters use to ameliorate staffing shortages.

Even a common method for mail delivery — “park points,” in which letter carriers park their mail trucks at the end of a street, deliver mail items by foot for several blocks, then return to the trucks and drive on — is under scrutiny. The document bans carriers from taking more than four “park points” on their routes and claims “park points are abused, not cost effective and taken advantage of.”

Under siege from Trump, U.S. Postal Service finds surprising financial upside in pandemic

“It’s like a riot act,” Rubio said.

“Overtime is being used because people need their packages in this pandemic,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents 200,000 USPS employees. “They need their mail in this pandemic. They need their medicines in this pandemic. They need their census forms. They need ballot information.”

The second memo says the Postal Service will first look to cut its transportation costs, and estimates that late and extra trips cost the agency $200 million annually in “added expenses,” or about the same amount the agency lost in May. The memo warns postal workers that it may be “difficult” to “see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor,” but that the agency “will address root causes of these delays and adjust the very next day.”

Postal union leaders condemned the measures and said customer service is being sacrificed for only meager cost savings.

“I would tell our members that this is not something that as postal workers we should accept,” Dimondstein said. “It’s not something that the union you belong to is going to accept.” "

 

Edited July 17, 2020 by medjuck

[Kevin Bresnahan]

8 hours ago, medjuck said:

Is a news report in the Washington Post considered political?:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-service-trump-dejoy-delay-mail/

This one is not behind a paywall: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/15/disturbing-memo-reveals-trumps-usps-chief-has-slowed-delivery-amid-calls-to-expand-voting-by-mail/?fbclid=IwAR1oP4KkSBnDQPR4Fcsg_vzazW3Sf7msEweIeKLYW-DSEKIFzWDnkCQhm8c

[Dan Gould]

39 minutes ago, bresna said:

This one is not behind a paywall: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/15/disturbing-memo-reveals-trumps-usps-chief-has-slowed-delivery-amid-calls-to-expand-voting-by-mail/?fbclid=IwAR1oP4KkSBnDQPR4Fcsg_vzazW3Sf7msEweIeKLYW-DSEKIFzWDnkCQhm8c

And is entirely political. 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

44 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

And is entirely political. 

The article is not "entirely" political. For instance, if you take the first line and remove the politician's name, it is directly related to this topic. "... newly confirmed US postmaster general ordered the endangered public service Monday to make major cost-cutting changes, which could slow mail delivery."

Why it was done is likely entirely political.

This article also states that this new postmaster general took his post in May, which seems to be right around when our postal problems really started to rise.

[medjuck]

1 hour ago, bresna said:

This one is not behind a paywall: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/15/disturbing-memo-reveals-trumps-usps-chief-has-slowed-delivery-amid-calls-to-expand-voting-by-mail/?fbclid=IwAR1oP4KkSBnDQPR4Fcsg_vzazW3Sf7msEweIeKLYW-DSEKIFzWDnkCQhm8c

I pasted it to get around the paywall. 

[JSngry]

Is the information presented as fact in that article in fact factually correct?

A quick scan suggest that it is.

Determining motive, though, that would veer into the political, or at least the speculative. Nobody would deny that getting the USPS to run more efficiently is not something that can and should be done. And that may be all that's going on here, the establishment of a newer, harder "new normal" for the USPS and its customers, one that we are not going to like

OTOH...how many times does the sun have to rise in the eastern sky before you can safely tell what it is by the way it looks and where it is?

If Larry wants to delete all of this, fine, no objections here. But I'm inclined to let it stand, and caution against further explicitly and entirely political commentary about the article, and strongly urge that any other articles posted be carefully and objective screened for a highly favorable fact/inference ratio. Facts after all, are facts. conclusions drawn, however, are not facts. A conclusion will either prove to be accurate or not, but until that happens, a conclusion is not in and of itself a fact.

We'll know when we get there.

 

[Brad]

I read the articles and felt that any discussion would turn political.  The issue of fixing the Post Office has become political but it shouldn’t be a political issue. It’s like everything else i this country: what shouldn’t be political has become so.

If only I could move back overseas. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by Brad

[ghost of miles]

58 minutes ago, Brad said:

I read the articles and felt that any discussion would turn political.  The issue of fixing the Post Office has become political but it shouldn’t be a political issue. It’s like everything else i this country: what shouldn’t be political has become so.

If only I could move back overseas. 

Yes, the USPS has become political, much like the pandemic.  I'll refrain from expressing who bears the overwhelming burden of responsibility for that, and say this instead--it's hard to keep politics out of certain topics when certain entities, governmental and otherwise, insist on making them political.  

[JSngry]

Excuse me if I don't shed the tears here, but I don't see how reforming the USPS can't help but be "political" or even "partisan". That's just how government works.

My concern is one of good faith and transparency, always at a premium in this system, but....perhaps we are creating a "new normal" in that regard also. If so, I'm not a fan.

I mean, there's infinite varieties of chocolate for every taste and inclination, but bullshit, or just common shit, is not one of them.

[Dub Modal]

This is a good reference for what put the USPS in a troublesome spot and some steps that could be taken to improve the situation.

[Brad]

The principal reason the USPS is in financial straits is that under a law adopted in 2006 it must pre-fund its pension obligations for 75 years.  Pre-funding is required for most pension plans under the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).  However, requiring a company to fully fund pension benefits 75 years in advance is not the norm. In addition, the USPS must pre-pay retiree medical benefits, not just pension obligations. This requirement doesn’t apply to other companies. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by Brad

[kh1958]

Received a CD shipped from the U.K. today. It was a seven week journey to Texas.

[JSngry]

35 days a parcel!

[Dan Gould]

Apparently the lameness of the Netherlands parcel service effects the USPS too. Not that I expected super fast perfect service after they received it at custom at Miami airport, I did not expect it to take three days to go from Miami Airport (Miami-Dade county) to Opa Locka (also Miami-Dade county).  

[Pim]

On 21-7-2020 at 0:29 PM, Dan Gould said:

Apparently the lameness of the Netherlands parcel service effects the USPS too. Not that I expected super fast perfect service after they received it at custom at Miami airport, I did not expect it to take three days to go from Miami Airport (Miami-Dade county) to Opa Locka (also Miami-Dade county).  

Hey don’t blame us for everything Dan  praise yourself lucky. Custom clearance here takes around 2 weeks now

[Brad]

I purchased a cd in May from a seller in Belgium.  Took about a month. 

Edited July 23, 2020 by Brad

[Dan Gould]

1 hour ago, Pim said:

Hey don’t blame us for everything Dan  praise yourself lucky. Custom clearance here takes around 2 weeks now

Well to be clear those three days to go from Miami Airport to Opa Locka was after clearing customs. So its all the USPS ... a little credit -  since then it showed up at the local PO yesterday and it was worth the wait, if not the actual price paid.

[ghost of miles]

On 7/17/2020 at 4:02 PM, Brad said:

The principal reason the USPS is in financial straits is that under a law adopted in 2006 it must pre-fund its pension obligations for 75 years.  Pre-funding is required for most pension plans under the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).  However, requiring a company to fully fund pension benefits 75 years in advance is not the norm. In addition, the USPS must pre-pay retiree medical benefits, not just pension obligations. This requirement doesn’t apply to other companies. 

Yep. And what’s “political” here is the deliberate attack on the USPS as outlined in the article that Medjuck posted and this one from Fortune Magazine. So if one wants to complain about how much “the USPS sucks” (which has never been my experience btw, despite the challenges they’ve faced), one might wish to call one’s representatives and the seat of national leadership regarding the issues mentioned in these articles. 
 

Package delivery has been slower since the pandemic began, but everything’s eventually arrived. Given all that USPS has had to deal with, I’m not upset.  Hopefully they can somehow ride out the next few months.

[JSngry]

Everything's bigger in Texas, including

my satisfaction with the USPS!!!!!!!