Open Letter to Employees of the U.S. Post Office

The BBQ Pit
1

Friends, on this holiday that only you and other government employees work hard enough to have granted you, apparently, I wish to bring two simple facts to your attention.

(1) There is no reason in heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo why it should take more than six business days for a small package to complete a journey from State A to Neighboring State B. (2) If you offered this level of job performance to any entity other than the United States Government, you would rarely, if ever, escape (a) the unemployment line, or for that matter, (b) your own puddles of drool.

2

uh-oh.

DUCK!

3

Okay, I have always regarded my mail service as something akin to the weather (Arkansas weather, at that).
Mail, like weather, is outside everyday. The mail is in the box, though. Somedays the service is really fantastic. Somedays it’s okay. Somedays is’s not so good.

I have taken a small package and shipped it to NY from AR. I chose standard parcel post because it wasn’t all that important that it arrive quickly. It was there in 2 days.

I have taken a document and mailed it via Priority mail. It was important, so I felt justified in paying extra to ensure delivery in 3 days or less. It arrived at it’s destination 5 days later, to a place I could have driven in 12 hours.

This does, indeed, boggle the mind, but so does 80 degree weather in November. shrug I find my blood pressure and temprement is much nicer if I don’t stress over things like the weather or the mail.
YMMV

and btw, this may be a thread more suited to the Pit.

FaerieBeth

4

I have dealings with a branch of the government, doing fairly important work.

When it’s really important and time critical, said branch uses FedEx.

Take from that what you will.

5

I work for the Federal Government…and we use FedEx for the quick stuff.

Then again, the USPS is not an agency of the US Government. It is an independent establishment that loosely falls under the executive branch. But the key word is independent. If they were regular civil servants, their benefits wouldn’t be half as good.

But I, too, have today off. Which explains why I’m not spending as much time reading the SDMB today.

6

Disclaimer: My husband is a letter carrier for the USPS. He works his butt off, and will freely admit that there are many slackers working there, most of which have the union going to bat for them to protect their worthless selves.

It’s worth noting here that Priority Mail does not ensure that mail will arrive in 3 days or less. If you want guaranteed on-time delivery, you need Express Mail. Priority Mail gets handled as a priority, and should be arriving faster than regular first-class mail.

Considering the sheer volume of mail that is handled daily by the USPS, I think they’re doing a pretty decent job.

However, I will say I have nearly ceased ordering via Amazon’s free delivery service as a result of the USPS, at least indirectly if not directly. Each time I’ve ordered through them using this method, I’ve tracked the package and seen it get shipped to the same wrong mail processing center for my area. Then it goes AWOL for a week, unscanned, until mysteriously being scanned as received and then sent out by my local post office. Contacting Amazon results in me being told to call the USPS. Calling their customer service line results in me being told to call my local post office. This is after I emphasize that the hold up is most certainly at the processing center and not at the local post office, and that I’ve already talked to my route’s letter carrier because he’s my husband, and he knows that the packages that come into that office do not sit around for days before being delivered. I suspect that Amazon is possibly getting good rates from the USPS because perhaps their contract involves only shipping out their “free shipping” rate packages from the distribution centers once a week or so. My husband is not involved in that part of the post office, but can at least see that as a possibility. I can understand this from a business viewpoint, but am too impatient to see my package sitting somewhere for a week in one of the Chicago suburbs, so I pay for faster shipping.

7

This is probably not fair to a large percentage of the “hard working” mail folks out there, so I apologize in advance if I piss you off.

I have noticed that most postal employees I have ever had to deal with seem to lack any talents, skills, personality or personal grooming habits. I really wonder how in hell they got the job to start with. Its like the USPS goes out of its way to hire the absolute bottom of the employment barrel. If these people ever came to an interview I was conducting, the application would go straight into the “round file”.

There was a goofy-looking dude that used to drop our mail at a place I used to work. He would “plod” in and practicly throw the mail on the counter and “plod” back out. Someone would always say, “Hi, how are you?” and damned if he never replied, except for once just kind of grunted. One day we saw him sitting in his truck, with his finger knuckle-deep in his nose, blank stare into the air, mouth hanging open as usual. That guy wasn’t right.

I have only met one guy at the local PO with anything that resembles a personality or sense of humor. The rest of his slow moving compatriots stagger around like the zombies from the classic “Night of the Living Dead”.

Whats up with that? Where do they find these people?

Again: Sorry to all the hard-working, normal folks at the PO. I know you have to be out there in vast numbers. I don’t mean to slag you, but why the hell haven’t I ever seen you?

8

Bingo…

9

Wild-Ass Guess: I’m assuming the reason the shipping is “free” is because they cut some deal with the USPS allowing the latter to treat these packages as super-ground rate or something, even once they get to a processing center. The USPS gets to only deal with those boxes once a week or something, Amazon gets a good deal and encourages people to buy books, and most consumers don’t watch the tracking that closely, or if they do either figure “hey, it’s free” or “stupid post office, they suck.”

Shocking, isn’t it. My husband mostly sees coworkers that are slackers more than… disturbed. He’s pretty well-regarded among his customers because he’s friendly and has a sense of humor (plus he gets along with most dogs). However, catch him at the wrong time and he’ll seem strange - a lot of the time, it’s such a mindless job that he tends to let his thoughts wander, and it can take some time for his brain to “shift gears” and figure out what’s being requested.

10

Moving this rant to the BBQ Pit.

11

Couple things (Australia Post employee - but the USPS is the same):

  1. Yes, the high volume mailers (big companies usually) get bargain basement rates in return for low priority (and for pre-sorting the mail themselves).

  2. Don’t think in terms of “five days to a place I could have driven in twelve hours”. Mail, like email, has to be handled and rerouted at various points. The more of these points, the slower. There aren’t enough letters going from a tiny village to another tiny village just across the state line to be worth the cost of a vehicle and driver, so that letter will probably go at least via the capital cities of the two states (might be hundreds of miles in the opposite direction in both cases). On the other hand, I just received a parcel here in Sydney, which had been posted in only California four days earlier. It’s the other side of the world, but the only difference is a few extra hours in an aircraft - the actual number of handling points is lower than for many domestic US mail items.

12

My girlfriend similar problems. If her mother sends her a letter from the local Post Office, it takes two weeks (New York to Atlanta). If her grandmother–also New York–sends her one, from her mailbox, it takes about 4 days. Riddle me that.

13

I don’t think they find them. From what I understand about working conditions at the USPS, these people are created.

And I rush to defend myself, not everyone that works for the Post Office is like that. There just seems to be an extraordinarily high percentage of them. Low resistance to personality molding, or something? I dunno.

14

The postal employees here are friendly and awake for the most part. But that does not mean that the mail gets anywhere quickly. I received a post card in the mail yesterday. It was mailed first class, and it was urging me to vote for a particular candidate for the city law director. I have of course already voted for her opponent on the 4th. The card had 2 postmarks, one October 29th, the other October 30th.

15

Tell me about it, I work at a CPO and I’m always kinda amused when I get to sorting bundles of magazines and the like requesting in home delivery a week or longer ago.

As for Amazon’s free shipping deal, it gets there eventually, tis a good deal for buying gifts far in advance of when you’re actually going to hand them over. If you are buying something that you can’t wait to get your hands on, just remember, you get what you pay for.

16

Count me on the side of the USPS.

Where “they get these people” is through competitive testing. It’s a difficult test, and the people who pass it are not numbskulls. Unfortunately, because of affirmative action (a topic for another thread…someday) they don’t necessarily take the best candidates first. Anyone who is a minority, female, or a veteran of any ethnicity or sex has an automatic ten-point advantage. (I’m going by the policy of about 30 years ago, which may have changed in the intervening years…anybody know?) That said, I really don’t think that there are proportionately any more slackers or stupid people in the USPS than in any other industry. My guess is that a lot fewer of them are wasting their employer’s time posting to message boards during working hours than employees of most other industries.

Comparing the USPS to Fed-Ex is not fair because the USPS handles a far greater volume than Fed-Ex. Also, you cannot get any other service to deliver a letter from a post office in Honolulu to a rural box in Maine for the same 37 cents it costs to mail across town. If the private services had to handle the same volume without the benefit of pre-sorted “junk” mail, they wouldn’t be nearly as fast as they are and their rates would be prohibitively high.

The USPS is far from perfect, but I still think their service is pretty good and the cost is a bargain. YMMV.

(I am not, and never have been an amployee of the USPS, just in case you’re wondering.)

17

Oh GRRRRRRRrrrr!! The Post Office!

I remember one phone call I had with them (and this was after several years of really bad service).

I’d lived at this apartment for about two years, and was continually getting mail from 3 or 4 different people whom I’d never heard of, (my daughter and her boyfriend had lived there for about a year prior to me taking over the lease and this mail wasn’t addressed to them either). And I was continually “returning it to sender” and “not correct address’ing” them too.

I got on the phone and told the floor supervisor in charge of “my” area of town that I wanted the mail to NOT go into my box.

She said, "bundle all the mail together (about 30 pieces I’d been saving up), and write “not the correct address, return to sender” on the top piece of mail.

About three days later, the 29 bottom pieces arrived back in my mailbox.

I called and asked for whoever is in charge of the people that send out mail, or deliver it, or whatever.

After I got her on the phone, I told her that I wanted them to ONLY put my mail in the box, no one else’s. That I was the only person at that address.

Her answer? “I’m sorry ma’am, we can’t do that, that would be violating the privacy act for the other people recieving mail at that box number”.

Oh. My. GOD. I just saw red. “WHAT??? You mean to tell me, that even though it’s my box, I can’t keep strangers’ mail from getting put into it?”

“Yes ma’am, it’s against the privacy act”. Well, I took a deep breath, and asked for HER supervisor, and explained to him, what this other person had told me.

He said that she didn’t know what she was talking about, and that all I had to do was request that ONLY mail bearing my name was to be put into the box, and then to make sure that my full name was on the outside.

Another battle ensued. I’m a single female, I am NOT advertising that fact by putting my full name on the outside of a mailbox that is out in public view.

After some argument, he agreed that “Jones, Apartment XYZ” was sufficient.

Did it work? Oh hell no. The same mail addressed to the same 3 or 4 strangers (and they got a LOT of mail) kept coming to my teensy little post office box.

This has occurred at every place I’ve lived.

Why on EARTH do they have us fill out those annoying change of address forms, if they’re NOT going to use them?

Oh, I know, I know, that’s not what those are really for (and why ever NOT, I’d like to know).

At any rate, IME? Most of them, at least up here, ARE drooling idiots, the smart ones leave.

18

Thank you all for your thoughts on the matter. Long story short, I get cranky when I have to wait too long for a CD.

Interesting to note, though, that not even USPS defenders here tried to offer an explanation regarding the gripe in my OP, i.e., why it should take over six days for a package to make it from, oh I don’t know, Ohio to Pennsylvania. Mainly 'cuz there ain’t none.

(I’m still relatively new to the board and was under the impression that the Pit was reserved for rants about the SDMB. Mea culpa.)

19

I know for a fact that if you plan to mail a package from New Jersey to London, England on September 12, 2001 and unforeseen circumstances force you to mail it on September 19, 2001, it reaches London on January 23, 2002.

I could have personally taken it across the pond faster by swimming.

20

Forgive me. TheLoadedDog did attempt an explanation.

Your California example seems to confirm something I’ve faintly susepected, friend-- are you telling me that I should actually try ordering from places that are farther away from me geographically to get them faster?