Patrick Rothfuss’ fantasy world has a rather interesting system of getting post delivered across large distances. The letter writer gives it to someone (sailor, merchant etc, say X) headed in the general direction of the recipient, and suggests to them an amount the recipient would be willing to pay for the letter. That first X may end up delivering the letter if their destination is close enough, and collecting from the recipient, or may sell the letter at some other point to someone else who is going even closer. Bargaining, etc all apply to the links and the final delivery.
It struck me as a fairly workable system if there is no postal system, and led me to wonder if he was(as is likely) drawing inspiration from how letter delivery used to work at some point in history. Anyone know?
It doesn’t seem workable to me. I don’t understand why anyone would take on the responsibility - letters were important goods in such a society - for no sure reward.
Letters were certainly delivered by volunteers traveling to a destination, but for friends, acquaintances, or business partners. Known payment on delivery was also used in some systems. Bargaining for pay in a haphazard fashion would seem to be a much worse alternative for everyone involved. If it did happen, it would soon be supplanted by a safer system.
I recently read Eric Jaffe’s The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America. The Boston Post Road runs from Boston to New York and was the route used for getting mail and newspapers to and from and to all the towns in between starting in the mid-1600s. He follows its history all the way through to today, and that includes the office post system set up after the Revolution. That’s the best part of the book, which meanders when the post is no longer its main purpose but does provide a fascinating history of the many attempts to systematize mail delivery.
I don’t understand your objection. The letter functions like any trade good. You invest some money into transporting it with the eye to earning a profit. The only difference being your market is very specific, i.e one person. That may increase or decrease your risk compared to other trade goods, but I can certainly see that it may have been workable.
What if you don’t have known volunteers travelling to a destination? No known volunteer travelling direct to the destination? Money on delivery and self interest of the links in between would seem to be good ways of getting your letter to its destination. Whether such a system gets supplanted by a different one or not isn’t my question. I’m asking if any such existed.
I would assume before public postal systems the standard would be for both the sender and recipient to pay something. If you had means you could send someone in your employ, but otherwise you would have to offer something to the delivery man to take it in the first place, and whether or not there was prior agreement he would probably expect or demand payment at the other end. I’m sure this was all done pro bono in many cases where there was some other relationship among the parties, but I’d see it difficult to expect that a letter would get delivered without at least an expectation of payment at the end.
OK, I tell you that my aunt Martha will be willing to pay ten shillings for my letter. Do you believe me? What if she won’t pay that much? Trade goods like gold or spices are reliable: Lots of people want them, there’s a fairly stable standard price, and the value can be determined easily by weighing. You probably know how much your intended customer will pay for your goods, and if they won’t, you can probably find someone else who will pay nearly as much instead. But for a letter which is only of value to one recipient, and whose value depends on all sorts of intangibles that a trader has no hope of knowing, it’s a lot riskier.
For the first person in the chain, it matters not at all. They have zero cost of entry and zero marginal cost. After that, it’s up to them to get someone to buy it off them. That person will also likely have zero marginal cost. If they have no reason to trust the person selling them the letter, it’s likely that the entry cost would be low too. At low amounts, it’s been shown that people change their perception of risk and are far more likely to make wagers that they would not otherwise. They view the risk as small even if it is the same(or larger) in percentage terms for a larger amount. It’s workable.
This entire conversation(while interesting) is a bit of hijack that may be more suited to GD. The question I’m really interested in is whether anything of the sort has been an established system for mail delivery at any point.
History is big and so is the world. Multiple systems have been used in various times in various places. I can’t guarantee that this system has never been used. I’ve read a bit about postal history, though and I don’t believe it’s ever been the norm anywhere, because as I said, I don’t believe it’s workable.
Seems like a good system - as long as you’re not moving very much mail, don’t care how long it takes, or care if it’s secure or, ultimately never arrives!
Think about how much mail your town would make in a day! As soon as you neared any sort of volume someone would step in to organize it, and bingo, you’d get a postal system, I think!
Seriously, the problem is the reliability of whether the recipient buys the letter. The inventor of the modern postal service in England, IIRC, observed someone using the old “mark on the envelope indicates whether to pay for delivery” scam. (And accidentally, as a good samaritan, paid for the delivery). If the envelope was coded one way, it indicated all is well, don’t bother. The other way, important news, take delivery. Same as the old collect call scam where you call and ask for yourself to indicate that you ahd arrived at yor destination OK.
If the recipient is not obliged to take delivery, and so eventually does not, then buying letters on spec is a waste of money. Even if recipient honestly intends to take delivery or obliged to, what stops an enterprising Nigerian Prince from becoming the correspondent from hell, sending mesages to everyone. The payment to the sender drives the wrong behaviour. The same applies to the middlemen, if the sender is pohibited from getting payment - what stops someone from becoming the fake middleman?
I suspect most merchant ships and convoys across country and such understood they were the best choice or only choice for sending mail, and as long as it did not add to their burden too much, they were glad to help out - plus payment up from to the carrier drove the right behaviour.
I assume if the letter had to go from the destination port by coach to the inland city, the captain was paid enough to pay the coach too. I assume that certain well-known inns around town were the best place to find travellers bound to a particular city.
The captain could conceivably take the money and fail to deliver, but the pool of captains was likely much smaller and better known by reputation than the much larger pool of potential mail senders.
In a time where travel would have been much more difficult than it is now, I can’t see it working out to well.
Say I have a random letter to a random person I made up, and tell you that the fake recipient was willing to pay $10 for it, but I’ll sell it to you for $3 to bring to them… what are the chances you’ll ever see me again after you realize it’s all a ruse? It’s not like you can call them to ask if they’re expecting a letter or willing to pay for one.
You’re all assuming that it costs nothing to write and send a letter. When was the last time paper was expensive enough that a thick(ish) envelope could cost more than whatever tiny amount of money would make it senseless to scam, but just slightly profitable to buy a letter?
These drawbacks absolutely hold, but in the absence of alternatives, could still make such a delivery system viable. I’m not positing that it’s better than other systems, only that it could function, and I’m asking if it has functioned at any point in history.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find data on the historical cost of paper, but this cite suggests that it wouldn’t have lent itself to a mass scam quite as easily as some of you are suggesting.
As long as the cost of writing a letter is non trivial, the person buying it at below that cost to make the delivery is not risking being scammed. He is risking not being paid on delivery, but as I said, for small amounts, and since he’s making the trip anyway for some other purpose, that risk is not large. I still think the system is workable. You’re also neglecting the fact that there could easily be a large upside.
But I’m fully aware that you might be scamming me, so I’ll make a counter-offer of $0.01, or even zero. Only if we can reach some mutual agreement does anything happen. If you’re a friend or regular “customer” we each know more about what the risks are, so we’re more likely to reach an agreement for a higher amount.
People buy stuff and do business online all the time. They manage the risk of scams by making small purchases first as a test, using recommendations to establish partial trust and so on. It works surprisingly well.