# An example of the efficiency of government (US Postal Service) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [October 9, 2013, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783 "2013-10-09T16:31:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Alley\_Dweller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alley_dweller/32/430_2.png) [@Alley\_Dweller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alley_Dweller)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/61 "2013-10-10T05:31:50Z")
> [@Sattua](#): > > Some post offices are far worse than others, though it sounds like the clerk you talked to was following procedure, not being obnoxious or incompetent. > > I’ve had clerks reject flat rate boxes because they were too heavy. Really. There is a 70 lb limit on all Priority Mail, whether flat rate or not. Were you mailing lead bars? (The limit varies for international shipments.) And a lot of people think the new Regional Rate boxes are Flat Rate boxes, they are not. It’s different service and not Flat Rate. But they should still accept Regional Rate boxes above the limit for the category of box (up to 70 lbs) and charge you the standard weight-and-distance rate. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/62 "2013-10-10T05:59:03Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > When conservatives bitch about government efficiency and not wanting more tasks to fall to the government, this is a reason why. When writing about American “conservatives,” it’s important to distinguish the gullible from the gullers. The gullible are delighted to see government employees following rules, so they can prattle about government inefficiency and stupidity. (Though if the same employee bent the rules, they’d prattle about incompetence, discrimination and fraud.) The gullers, OTOH, delight in complicated regulations which hamstring government agencies, all the while cutting budgets so regulators can do nothing but respond to the time-wasting delays GOP-inspired laws allow. [Here is a pdf paper written by a rare creature – a “conservative” who is both intelligent and sincere](http://www.ccdemuth.com/uploads/9/7/6/2/9762112/contemporary_conservatism_and_government_regulation_lower_quality_pdf.pdf) – admitting that the most expensive and most poorly designed regulations were those of the GWB Administration. Passing onerous regulations to hamstring regulators is a long-standing GOP tactic. Here are just a few of the latest instances: Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act Regulatory Accountability Act and the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act As OP implies, the GOP also wants to sabotage the (“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”) Post Office, which now operates under unprecedented pension rules, designed to crush it financially. Had the Post Office violated Congressional orders to save OP a few bucks you can bet he or someone would have delighted in a time-wasting Congressional hearing to explore such malfeasance. HTH. ---
**Author:** ![Labrador\_Deceiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7c8e57/32.png) [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/63 "2013-10-10T11:01:11Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Then you happen to live in a very atypical situation. There are about 31,000 post offices in the United States and only sixty-four Amazon fulfillment centers. And even for those people like yourself who happen to share a post office with a fulfillment center have to deal with Amazon’s inventory system - when you order a book that happens to be in one of the other sixty-three centers, you lose your local advantage. > > So let’s do the numbers. Let’s round the population off to 310,000,000 to make the math easy. That means each post office has an average of a thousand customers. So 64,000 people live in a town that has an Amazon fulfillment center. The average American reads 15 books a year - let’s be generous and assume that person buys eight of those books from Amazon. That means that even those people who live in a town with a fulfillment center will only be buying a book from their town’s fulfillment center once every eight years. > > So the situation you described would only be available to one out of every 4800 customers and even those customers would only use it once every eight years. So, yes, I’m calling that a rare situation that the post office shouldn’t develop a special rate for. > > Now perhaps you’re going to argue that you only gave Amazon as an example. If so, I’ll point out that Amazon is the largest online retailer in the country and is therefore the best-case example. If we used any other business, we’d come up with much smaller numbers. Who cares? Neither you nor I have any idea how many packages are shipped locally, but I’d guess its tens of thousands per week for any given major city. Maybe you can come up with some hard numbers, since you brought it up and initially made the claim that it wasn’t very many. ---
**Author:** ![Fubaya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@Fubaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fubaya)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/64 "2013-10-10T11:18:41Z")
So they should hire extra people and purchase extra machines to sort everything locally? ---
**Author:** ![Labrador\_Deceiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7c8e57/32.png) [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/65 "2013-10-10T11:27:47Z")
They may not have to. I’m sure they do a local sort of letters already. ---
**Author:** ![Space\_Vegetable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6de8d8/32.png) [@Space\_Vegetable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Space_Vegetable)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/66 "2013-10-10T18:38:14Z")
Suppose I bring in a package with postage I bought online. I hand it to the clerk and point out that it goes in the PO box right over there. The clerk tries to be helpful and puts it directly in the box. Then I can go online and get a refund for my unused postage, since the package was never scanned. OK, the clerk may well have a scanner, and perhaps knew to scan the package first. Does that scanner tie into the postage web site, and tell it the package was accepted for delivery? Maybe only the scanners at the sorting station do that. Sure, you could teach all the postal clerks new rules. It’s now OK to put a package directly in a PO box if it has stamps, but not if if has online postage, or it’s registered, or certified, or has insurance, or it’s an Express service with a guaranteed delivery and a refund if the USPS can’t show it was scanned on delivery, but those rules don’t apply if you scan the package, as long as you use this scanner, not that scanner, and you push the Accept Package button, not the Check Postage button… But every new rule has a cost in training, and makes the clerk’s job harder and more likely to be done wrong sometimes. One of the cost-saving measures the USPS proposed recently was to eliminate more of its local sorting, and centralize it more. This would mean local letters would take 2 days to arrive in some cities, not 1, but the savings would be so large that they considered it worthwhile. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2013, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783/67 "2013-10-10T20:45:56Z")
So basically, this thread is someone bitching about how they don’t get special treatment [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-example-of-the-efficiency-of-government-us-postal-service/670783.md?page=3)