This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a long, long time. A business is in trouble and they are losing money. Do they propose to work harder and do a better job? Well, you’d think that would make sense. After all isn’t that how capitalism works? The best and most hardworking businesses thrive and the slackers go down? Sure seemed to work for my uncle who ran his own service station for 45 years.
Well, our wonderful Post Office wants to degrade their service significantly. Let’s get rid of equipment and people they say. Lets do away with overnight delivery. 1st Class letters will now take 4 to 5 days. This is a major step down in existing service. It seems like just the opposite of what they should be doing.
Does this business plan make the tiniest bit of sense to anyone? Do these numbnuts really think slashing their existing quality of service will do a thing to improve their business?
The POst Office is bowing to reality-e-mail is displacing 1st class mail.
But other firms are goinf down the same path-take Bank of America-they are charging more for inferior service.
No business plan is to degrade service, even the post office doesn’t have such a plan.
The plan is to cut costs, an unfortunate side effect of cutting costs is degrading service.
If you can show that they are not going to save any money yet there service is going to degrade I’ll buy your argument that ‘their goal is to degrade their service’
Slashing service is nothing new. Your uncle ran his own service station for 45 years. That means he was in business during the time when real human being would pump your gas, clean your windshield and check the air in your tires, right? Did he have the same business model at the end of his career, or was there one attendant sitting in a glass cage ringing up convenience store items from customers who pumped their own gas and paid 50 cents for three minutes of air?
What’s the alternative? Congress forced them to pre-fund their retirement plans to the tune of $5.5 billion annually (which funds so far ahead that it covers future employees who aren’t even born yet), refuses to return $6.9 billion in overpayments, and the USPS is legally limited in what services they can provide so that they don’t compete with FedEx/UPS in certain areas (the counterpart to those companies not doing non-urgent mail). They’ve already cut lots of employees by pushing early retirement, consolidating offices, consolidating mail routes.
My husband, a USPS letter carrier, has gone from 8 hour days to 10-12 due to route consolidations and many coworkers losing their jobs out of his office, also with a higher percentage of hours being spent on the street due to automation - which cuts down on the employees needed to sort mail - reducing how much sorting needs to be done in the office. This increases the number of hours on his feet, carrying a heavy bag of mail slung across his back. His coworkers have usually had their first joint replacement (hip or knee) by their early 50s. With this change, I’m betting late 40s for my husband’s first; he’s 41 now. I’ve already picked out his orthopedist office.
The USPS does not have control over certain things. They have to ask the government for permission for actual changes in how their spending happens, how their service is run. If they don’t get it, they have to slash their employees and services. That’s how it works. Meanwhile people still scream at a cent or two increase in stamp prices - and by the way, they aren’t legally allowed to raise the price of postage by over the rate of inflation, and even getting to do that isn’t decided by the USPS but by an independent council.
My mom just reminded that this isn’t the first time they’ve slashed services. She still remembers morning & afternoon mail delivery in the 40’s & 50’s.
They’re saying this will be the end of any weekly magazines. Can’t have a weekly mag when it takes the Post Office 9 days to get it to your house.
Frankly I wish they’d raise postage another 50 cents a letter and then finally STFU once and for all about being broke. That should shut them up for a few years anyway.
I agree that raising the price of postage some huge percent, maybe doubling the price of postage, would be a great move by the USPS. Most average day people only send a few letters or postcards per year, so it’s really only going to affect big businesses. Will they pass those expenses on down to you and me? Sure they will, but it’ll feel invisible and we can sleep soundly at night with speedy mail delivery.
They asked to raise the postage a higher amount a year ago. Their government regulators said no way, you’re limited to raises at the rate of inflation.
there is a price-quality trade-off and there is definition of quality itself. to you, quality may mean more varied or more specialized service but to a business, it may simply be you’re getting more service thatn you’re paying for. anything going the other way (lower quality, higher price) is a rip-off.
I’d think there’s room for some increase, since we have one of the cheapest rates of any industrialized country (although not the absolute cheapest, at least where Europe’s concerned).
I can see how raising the rate could be a blow to small businesses, but then the USPS is supposed to be a business too. If their service continues to degrade than it won’t be of any value to those other businesses.
For routine day-to-day communication I’d much rather do it electronically. On the other hand, an actual letter carries far more impact, IMHO, than an e-mail. Even junk mail, if it concerns a product in which I’m interested, is going to get my attention much more than an email will.
Well there are the businesses that sell you lifetime memberships and lifetime warranties on products that simply shuffle all the profits into a few people’s hands and then declare bankruptcy…
From the something that may interest only me department, I wonder how this will affect the legal system? At the moment, in my state, certain things are routinely served by mail. By the applicable rules of civil procedure, the responding party gets an extra three days added to the time limit for their response when served by mail. If the mail will now be considerably slower, those rules might need to be revised…
As Ferret Herder has explained, the USPS isn’t a business in the conventional sense. Their options with respect to setting prices, providing new services, etc. are quite limited.
Really what the USPS needs to be able to do is set a long-term plan for managing the inevitable decline of demand for their services. It’s a safe bet that, 30 years from now, the USPS will be just a shell of its present self. So how does it get from here to there with a minimum of disruption to services, and without losing a shitload of money? It’s not an easy question to answer.
The UK Royal Mail could soon be allowed to raise prices by as much as 50%, or, in theory, an unlimited increase for first-class mail.
For the amount of mail that most people send and receive, that will make very little difference. Most people use email, online banking etc, and goods bought online are usually sent by courier.
I was shocked to find that a first-class stamp in the US is only 44c. That seems insanely cheap, especially when you consider the size of the country. Does that also cover Hawaii and Alaska? Here in the UK, a first-class stamp is 46p (72c).
That’s the key. USPS has proposed other options (steeper increases in mail rates being the primary one), and those options keep getting rejected by their government oversight committee. So, they’re really caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place: they’re being told, “you must do this”, and “you may not do that”, and, by the way, you can’t run at an overall deficit while you’re at it.
It does. Also, as part of the agreements hammered out with FedEx and UPS (IIRC), the Post Office may do the last leg of a FedEx/UPS delivery to the middle of nowhere. It’s not cost-efficient for those businesses to send a lone truck to some obscure place for one package, but it’s the USPS’s government mandate to do it. So FedEx/UPS pays some money to the USPS for their “last mile” service.
Just yesterday I was reading a small local business’s Facebook page in which the owner posted a lament that people wanted free shipping and how that was too much. Someone from Alaska posted asking whether they’d at least consider going USPS for Alaska delivery, as FedEx/UPS were too pricey for them to consider paying for.
I know I sound like a USPS apologist; they do have faults that need to be rectified. It’s just that if you don’t understand how it really works, it’s easy to gripe about how it’d be so easy to do X, Y, and Z when those things aren’t even under their control.
At the recent committee hearing (watched on C-SPAN), one member said that the USPS plan to close thousands of rural post offices would save 7/10ths of 1% of their budget.
They’ll save some money, but the result will be that people will look for even more ways to bypass the post office.
Local mail is trucked 90 miles for sorting, rather than have the post office clerk put it in the boxes. Carriers drive 40-60 miles (round trip) to pick up mail at a sorting facility, then drive back to the town where they deliver. The weekly newspaper is delivered the day before the new edition comes out.
We’re losing our post office in January, even though the city has offered to pay all expenses for the post office building. We’ll pick up our mail at an outdoor clusterbox, because the USPS doesn’t want their carriers to have to open a door – their words.
I was thinking this morning about how little mail I send out. Back in the day I might have sent 10-12 pieces of mail a month. Now it’s about 1-2. The internet has eliminated many of my needs to send mail and receive mail.
Personal letters – now done with email/facebook or a phone call since most everyone has free long distance.
Bills – Most are setup with automatic debit or by logging into the website and paying online. Companies encourage paperless billing where just an email reminder is sent instead of a paper bill.
Periodicals – Many fewer subscriptions since most of the information can be viewed online.
I don’t really have any urgent need for my mail to be processed immediately. I could handle the mail being delivered as little as 2 days a week with almost no impact. Heck, I’m almost at the point where I could be fine without postal service at all.
I think the Post Office has seen something like 20% drop off in revenue two years in a row. I don’t see an end to that anytime soon. They have to cut costs to be in line with their revenue.
As a quasi-government entity, they’re in a bind. They have a federal mandate to perform certain services and are prohibited from offering many others. They cannot raise rates except by act of Congress (literally). They’ve been bleeding billions of dollars for a long time. First class mail volume is down 30% in the last ten years, mostly thanks to the internet. They don’t need all the infrastructure and staff they had a decade ago, so this is the most reasonable option.
What the Post Office should do is offer a premium service where consumers can pay to block junk mail. Think of it as a real life spam filter of sorts.
I get it: bulk mailers are probably most of the Post Office’s revenue, but I can’t help but wonder how many people would be willing to pay (and how much they’d be willing to pay) to block all that crap. Personally, I’d pay a princely sum to block junk mail— literally 98% of the mail I get is junk mail, which is killing trees and causing an inconvenience for me (either it sits on the floor of my car until I find a trash can or it goes in my house, immediately to be dumped in the trash).
Do these numbnuts really think slashing their existing quality of service will do a thing to improve their business?