Carriers who previously had delivered dozens of small parcels a day plus paper mail suddenly had to deliver between 300 and 500 boxes that they said had previously been handled by UPS. One mail carrier said his mail truck was so full of packages he could barely see out the left window. Some boxes were so big they couldn’t fit into mail vehicles. Those were stored on-site for customer pickup in an area that soon was overflowing.
For all the extra work, mail carriers weren’t making much more money. Rural mail carriers are paid only for the amount of time the post office estimates it will take them to finish their jobs. And in Bemidji, the routes had been reevaluated in October, just before Amazon changed everything.
As a result, “we’re giving away tons of free labor,” said Nelson, the carrier who staged the symbolic strike on Nov. 13. Though mail carriers aren’t legally allowed to strike — their union signed away that right more than 100 years ago — others joined him in the pre-dawn chill, carrying signs with slogans such as “USPS belongs to the people, not Amazon.”
The United States Postal Service is one of the few explicitly “enumerated powers” to provide a critical non-military/law enforcement domestic service to the population (along with coinage, standardized “weights and measures”, and the Patent Office), and does not exist just to support a for-profit business in cutting its marginal costs below what the ‘open market’ can offer. Postmaster General DeJoy (a Trump-appointee, no surprise there) needs to get his house in order and stop using the essentially free labor of unpaid overtime, and preventing the expeditious delivery of normal “paper mail”.
I think it’s outrageous for Amazon/UPS to expect the ‘last mile delivery’ by the USPS.
I haven’t had mail delivery for 30 years. I have a USPS box in town. AND a UPS box as well for packages.
The rural nature of where I live does sort of dictate that, but the one other guy that lives on this road has UPS come to his house. Sometimes a couple of times a week.
The locals understand this. Go get your mail and whatever else if you have a UPS box once a week or so. UPS sends me an email without fail when a package arrives at their in town store. So I’ll make a grocery run and pick up the package. It’s no big deal. At all.
They only expect it because the USPS agreed to it. They have had signed contracts in place back at least until 2013, maybe longer.
I don’t know what the numbers are now, but according to Mr. Google, the USPS made $1.6 Billion in profit off of Amazon in 2019.
I don’t see where Amazon has done anything wrong here. They asked if the USPS was interested in doing last mile deliveries, since that is what the USPS was MUCH better set up to do than Amazon. The USPS agreed to it, and is happy to have the profits from it. The fact that the USPS has screwed over quite a few of its rural employees in the process is a USPS problem, not Amazon’s.
The USPS could have put restrictions on rural deliveries like yours and demand that you have Amazon deliveries at the post office or whatever. But the USPS didn’t. They accepted the job of delivering to your door, no matter how rural.
Yeah, well the USPS does not deliver to 75% of the people in the county that I work, or the county that I live. I’m in GIS. I work for the county, one of our jobs is to assign physical (not mailing) addresses.
I’m fine with this arrangement. Get it close, I’ll go get it.
A 2 wheel drive car in summer can get to our house no problem. In summer. After a snow in the winter it’s a completely different situation.
With effectively unpaid overtime by postal delivery employees and contractors because the rates were estimated based on routes and mail volume before the massive increase in Amazon deliveries. The Postal Service is a a crucial service for the nation, and despite the recent expectation that it should make a profit (despite legal restrictions on increases in postal rates) it has rarely been profitable nor was that historically an expectation; postal fees are intended to offset costs, not generate a cash surplus. It certainly shouldn’t be used to give a massive online retailer a competitive advantage or undercut market competition for package delivery.
Now delve into international postal agreements - I can order say, a charging cable from Shenzhen for 5 bucks, shipping included, and it will get delivered to Long Beach or wherever, and USPS will pick it up and deliver the rest of the way. I can hardly mail an empty box across town for 5 bucks.
Amazon is using this singular agreement with a government monopoly operating at a loss to undercut its online retail competitors, and incidentally interfering with the prompt delivery of “paper” mail. It is not blameless; it is hogging a resource that was intended to be a service to the American public to reduce its marginal costs in an exercise of excess corporate capitalism only slightly less egregious than farm subsidies to multinational ag companies.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 7.
I guess you could interpret this as “not required” that the government actually exercise this power, but then the federal government isn’t actually required to do much of anything besides take a census, certify federal elections, and pass a budget (and often struggles to accomplish one or more of these these) but even if you are a die-hard libertarian you have to acknowledge that having a reliable system of mail distribution (among other things that the US Postal Service does) is a significant public good, and why every developed nation has some kind of government-operated post office system.
The increased packages happened back when the pandemic started and yes this made the Rural Contract Carriers unhappy because it started about half way through their yearly contract.
I know this because we are rural and I heard about it from our carrier all. the. time. The next year, the same contractor won the low bid KNOWING that the packages weren’t going to stop. This tells me that the contractor thought she could make money despite the packages. The very same contractor has won the low bid every year since and still bitches and cries and complains all the time about all of the packages.
The USPS signed a contract with Amazon once and then kept renewing the contract. The carriers continue to bid on the contracts, indicating that they agree that the money they will receive for delivering the packages is sufficient.
While I agree that this could be harming the American public, I can’t blame Amazon for this. If the USPS thought they were losing money, they could just turn down the contract. If the carriers thought they were losing money, there are many other delivery jobs around (the problem with those is the employer deducts taxes and SSI from their pay). Amazon isn’t twisting anyone’s arms…they are just waving money around and people are falling all over themselves to get it.
In the beginning General Dreedle devoured all his meals in Milo’s mess hall. Then the other three squadrons in Colonel Cathcart’s group turned their mess halls over to Milo and gave him an airplane and a pilot each so that he could buy fresh eggs and fresh butter for them too. Milo’s planes shuttled back and forth seven days a week as every officer in the four squadrons began devouring fresh eggs in an insatiable orgy of fresh-egg eating. General Dreedle devoured fresh eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner— between meals he devoured more fresh eggs—until Milo located abundant sources of fresh veal, beef, duck, baby lamb chops, mushroom caps, broccoli, South African rock lobster tails, shrimp, hams, puddings, grapes, ice cream, strawberries and artichokes. There were three other bomb groups in General Dreedle’s combat wing, and they each jealously dispatched their own planes to Malta for fresh eggs, but discovered that fresh eggs were selling there for seven cents apiece. Since they could buy them from Milo for five cents apiece, it made more sense to turn over their mess halls to his syndicate, too, and give him the planes and pilots needed to ferry in all the other good food he promised to supply as well.
Nor is it singular- the UPS has the same deal-- Does UPS use last mile delivery?
We have the infrastructure, systems and reach to transport mail and parcels through the entire mailing cycle. Whether you’re mailing across the country or the world, we integrate with postal systems for final mile delivery.
It is paying for a service. UPS does the same.
The USPS is making like 1.6 Billion a year from Amazon. That is a Good Thing.
Exactly.
Meaningless in this context.
That is a work of fiction.
This is just Amazon hate posting, and really is a anti-Amazon rant.
I can see their logic…but that is because it is so much easier to hate on Amazon then to remember Dejoy. I personally would rather hate on Dejoy and trump for what has happened to the mail service, others think differently.
Not “In one Rural PO”; the overwork of postal delivery service is all over the country.
Not when they can only make a profit by overworking postal delivery workers and prioritizing package delivery over paper mai; containing checks, bills, and other critical mail deliveries.
Yes, it is. Amazon has devastated brick and mortar retail by undercutting prices and exploiting warehouse workers, and now they are doing the same by virtually monopolizing commodity online retail through this ‘special relationship’ with the USPS to get cheaper and higher priority shipping, again at the expense of the ostensible main duty of the Postal Service to deliver actual mail.