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You realize that postage hasn’t gone up since May 2009, don’t you? Just sayin’.
Wrong, about once a year lately.
Exaggeration, unless you are so big it takes you 12 months to turn around.
Wrong, it has to be done by Congress.
This is incorrect. Rates are approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission. Although one could argue it was created by Congress by way of legislation, much like the post office the PRC is considered an executive branch agency. And the PRC only gets a say when the post office wants to raise rates beyond that of inflation.
heh, if we didn’t slip Mary a dozen eggs every week we would be up to our neck in fresh eggs pretty quickly [mrAru also takes them in to work. Unfortunately they repay him occasionally with huge bags of zucchini :smack:]
Most apartment buildings that I have known of, where they have a group of mailboxes together for all the tenants, have one outgoing box there also for everybody to use. Is this not the case in the above and several other up-thread remarks about multi-unit dwelling places?
That may be true in large apartment buildings, but it’s not true in small ones. I live in an garden-style apartment complex. That is, there are twelve apartments in each building, arranged in three stories of four apartments each. There are several mailboxes in the complex where I can deposit my mail. There are no outgoing mailboxes in the apartment buildings themselves. There is a mailbox for each apartment for incoming mail, but to send mail I have to walk to the nearest mailbox. The nearest ones are about a hundred yards away for me. As I said eleven years ago, some mail carriers will unofficially agree to pick up any mail left next to the mailboxes, but that’s their own decision, not U.S. Post Office policy. In any case, it’s a bad idea, since anybody can steal your mail before the carrier picks it up.
Don’t most mailboxes (for individual, detached houses) have a little red flaglike thing you’re supposed to put up to let the mail carrier know you want them to pick up outgoing mail? Do people still do this, or was that just a regional or temporal variation in L.A., while I was growing up in the 1960s and early 70s’?
those are on roadside (rural or unimproved (no sidewalks or curbs) urban/suburban) where the postal carrier road a vehicle to make deliveries to each address.
Wow. No mail collection for 11 years. That’s completely unacceptable!
There is the issue of a theft problem with outgoing mail left for the mailman to pickup.
A better solution is to deposit the mail inside the post office.
Heck, I take it one step further and wait in line to have the postal counter clerk hand cancel my outgoing mail.
Nowadays, mailing a letter is a crapshoot.
Doing everything that you possibly can helps to increase the chance that your piece of outgoing mail will arrive safely to its desired destination!
I don’t know of any evidence whatsoever that mail is more likely to get lost today than it ever was. And, in any case, it’s always been very rare for mail to get lost. I would say that less than one item in a thousand is lost in the mail.
I never realized this, but it does make sense. I don’t know if this is still common, but a lot of houses in cities had mail slots in the door rather than an outside mailbox, so there really wasn’t any place to leave outgoing mail.
I think people are talking past each other in this thread because many do not realize that postal delivery practices are not uniform. The OP stated that he lived on the north side of Chicago. Residences in the City of Chicago do not have the type of curbside mailboxes that people are imagining. There is no mounted delivery in Chicago. Carriers walk from house to house and climb stairs to porches or go inside apartment building lobbies. A “mailbox” is often a slot in a door or a slot in the side of a wall into which letters are deposited. Sometimes it is an external container screwed to the side of a wall. Apartment buildings may have banks of boxes like this or this mounted inside their lobbies or on the wall outside the front door.
In the city limits, it is not customary to leave mail for your mail carrier to pick up. Instead, on most large streets there are blue collection boxes every few blocks for people to deposit their outgoing mail. Each box has a scheduled pickup time posted on the box. Every box has at least one daily pickup, some more. This does cause confusion for people who have recently moved from suburban or rural areas who are accustomed to leaving their outgoing mail to be picked up when their incoming mail is delivered.
In the ten years since the OP posted, the USPS has waged an aggressive campaign to remove the street collection boxes. They have disappeared from most suburban areas. Fortunately, they still are readily available in major cities like Chicago, but suburban and rural postal customers have no choice but to leave their outgoing mail to be picked up by the delivery carrier (or to drive to the post office).
Why? What is the alternative? Email?
Nothing to add except that this Friday will be exactly eleven years and two months since this question was posted, and Wednesday will be exactly eight and a half years since the OP was active on this board.
Well, that and I drop my mail off in the slot at the post office. My Amex goes to Newark NJ from Long Island. The last two months I’ve dropped it off at the PO on a Friday afternoon and gotten an email from Amex the very next day (Saturday) telling me they received it.
Why? To save money.
In that sentence I was talking about the blue collection boxes like these. They are generally being removed from areas where mail is delivered to curbside boxes like this or neighborhood cluster units like this. These provide places where outgoing mail can be placed to be picked up when the incoming mail is collected. These types of mailboxes (as opposed to collection boxes) are generally not found in older cities.
People are sending dramatically fewer letters. The collection boxes are not being used and are not generating revenue. Where the amount of mail collected drops below a critical threshold, consideration is given to removing the collection boxes.
“Mounted delivery”? That sounds like it goes back to days of mail carriers on horseback.
L.A. must be different; here the larger apartment buildings do have a secure outgoing mail receptacle which the carrier has to unlock in order to collect the mail. Smaller complexes just have an open bin sort of thing below the tenants’ boxes; I wouldn’t have left anything there to be mailed if it was important.
Seems like a vicious cycle. If people can’t find boxes to drop mail in, they are less inclined to use the service, more boxes are removed…
REFERENCE: USPS Handbook SP-1 Highway Contract Routes - Contract Delivery Service - Contents http://about.usps.com/handbooks/sp1/
33 Route Performance
331 Line of Travel
Suppliers must follow the official line of travel described in the contract or they should proceed directly to the first box on the route where mail is to be delivered and/or collected and begin service. Even if there is no mail for a particular box, the supplier must stop to make collection when the signal flag is raised. The official starting and ending point of delivery is the designated loading and unloading area of the head-out office.
http://about.usps.com/handbooks/sp1/sp1_c3_013.htm#ep998399