I am slow to change from processes that seem to me to already be working fine. You know, ‘Bah! Keep your new-fangles improvements!’ Particular case: I pay most bills by mailed checks. Yes, utilities, credit cards, doctor’s bills, whatever. It comes out to one or two checks per week, which I stick into my mailbox for our mail woman to take away. (The only real exception is my verizon/cable bill, because they basically forced me into autopay to get the plan/rate I wanted.)
But I wonder, how rare a bird am I with this? Does one house in five ever put any mail out? Only one or two people on an entire delivery route? Are you (carrier person) somewhat surprised to find letters waiting in the mailbox? I don’t suppose it upsets you at all, I mean, you’ve already walked/driven to the mailbox, and will need to walk back to the truck/drive on down the street no matter what, and letters don’t weigh much – or is having to stick my letters into an outgoing bin somehow more onerous than I assume?
But when I ran a condo where we had communal mailboxes in groups of 50 I often interacted with our mail carrier as she put up the mail. For 50 condos Debbie would usually collect 3-5 outgoing items per day. More at holidays. Now the crowd here skewed old, say age 75 average. And not all units were occupied year round. So maybe 35-40 occupied condos most of the year.
I now live in an all-ages apartment building with some 400 units and all the mailboxes are together in one room. There are several outgoing slots each leading to flat storage areas just behind the slot. One of those slots is most convenient for someone just walking by. I mail something of my own maybe 2x/mo & always use that most convenient slot. I expect many (most?) other people do the same. I can always (or almost always) feel my mail piece jostling stuff already in there if I’m depositing in the afternoon. So the evidence suggests at least a few pieces per day per 400 residences when everyone is not a retiree.
OTOH, most of what I stick in the outgoing slot is stuff I’ve just received addressed to a prior tenant that I’ve endorsed “return to sender; not at this address”. I don’t know how many other residents bother, but that could easily be the vast majority of the outgoing mail. I probably do that 10-15x/mo.
I’ll probably see Rockelle this afternoon. If so I’ll ask her and report back.
Carriers are definitely supposed to pick up outgoing mail. Sometimes, they will try to save a few steps by pretending they didn’t see the letters hanging from the mailbox, if that delivery doesn’t have any mail.
It’s common to see house-dwellers stick outgoing mail in their mailbox. Some people leave it exposed a little bit, other people have clips or clothespins to affix it to the outside of their box so that it’s more visible. This is of course in addition to curbside mailboxes with flags that can be extended or simply inner compartments to separate outgoing from incoming mail.
While picking up outgoing mail from people’s houses happens only a small percentage of any day’s route stops, I am practically guaranteed I’ll encounter one or a few houses that have outgoing on any given day. Probably a lot more once people start sending out their Christmas cards.
Thanks for marking it as such! Too many apartment dwellers just stick stuff they don’t want in the outgoing slot without any notes, including those annoying flimsy flyers addressed to occupant. It can be super time-consuming to separate actual outgoing mail from this stuff.
Public service announcement: the outgoing mail slot is not a recycling bin. And if something was misdelivered to your unit, please write what’s wrong before dropping it in outgoing. Otherwise it’s going right back in your box. Tell your friends!
I’m also not a mail carrier or USPS employee, but my WAG is that it really depends on the neighborhood and even what style of mailboxes are prevalent.
Like you, OP, I pay several bills by paper check. Part of it is because I pinch pennies and paying an “convenience fee” to pay a bill online annoys me enough that I avoid it wherever possible (a stamp and the cost of the check & envelope combined is cheaper), part of it is because paying with a credit card isn’t feasible for some bills like my dentist who does take CC payments but it must be done in person at their office which is far across town, and part of it is out of necessity: at least two of my monthly utility bills – water and trash pickup – don’t have an option to pay by credit card. So, checks it is.
However, I have had mail stolen out of mailbox. My neighbors and I have agreed to rebuild the little stand that our mailboxes are on and I, for one, will get a locking mailbox. Until that day, however, I will never put any outgoing mail in my box for pickup. There’s a blue USPS dropbox a mile from my house and conveniently on my way to work, so I simply drop off my outgoing mail there when I need to send something by post.
So in neighborhoods where the boxes are on the street and mail theft is a thing, I suspect most people will do as I do and drop outgoing mail in a secure box or get a locking mailbox, which do have their drawbacks: they don’t hold packages any larger than a standard trade paperback, if you do have outgoing mail they usually only have room for two or three envelopes at most, and of course forgetting or losing keys is a thing.
I also imagine the mean age of the neighborhood population would have significance. A population that skews toward the elderly might have more outgoing mail than, say, an apartment complex full of college students, many of which likely do not even know how to address an envelope (sad truth, there).
So I imagine it’s quite location (neighborhood) dependent.
I pay all of my bills online, so I only have to send things through the mail maybe a few times per year. But it just so happened to need to mail something last weekend (apparently the photo I sent with my passport renewal application arrived damaged, so they needed me to send them another).
Although to my knowledge I’ve never had anything stolen from my mailbox, I am paranoid about putting things containing sensitive information like my passport number in my unsecured mailbox. So I started to drive to the post office to mail it, then I decided to swing by the grocery store on the way there, then I remembered there’s a blue USPS drop box in front of the grocery store, so I just dropped it in there to save myself from having to drive the rest of the way to the post office.
And that made me wonder just how many people use that drop box. Or drop boxes away from the post office in general.
Are you a rare bird? Perhaps, but then again I have no statistics. Years ago I mailed most of my bill checks but for many years now I issue either online checks from my bank or set up auto-pay on every regular monthly bill I have to include credit cards and utilities. The only time I actually hand write checks is to pay a service provider who just completed work at my home such as termite inspection , tree service, etc. I cannot remember the last time I actually mailed a check by placing it in my mail box for pickup.
I also receive an email from my bank and credit card companies for any credit/debit/charge over $1.00 keeping me apprised of day to day transactions. This eliminates the need to balance my checking account and as a failsafe I scan my online checking account activity daily. It works for me.
The only time I’ve had to pay a fee to pay a bill online is when
It’s a government agency -they often aren’t permitted to absorb credit/debit card fee or raise the rates for everyone enough to cover them.
I’m paying/arranging autopay on their website , not the bank or credit card’s website.
I’m paying by credit or debit card - “electronic checks” are no fee
That’s going to depend a lot on specifics - for my entire life, the only mail have ever left for the carrier to pick up from my mailbox/mailslot has been misdelivered mail. If I’m sending checks or cards out, I drop it in the collection box on the street.
Same. It’s so much easier. Takes about 30 seconds and there’s no postage to pay, nothing to get lost, etc. I urge everyone who hasn’t tried it to give it a try.
The other common form of online payment “convenience fee” is that your, e.g. electric utility or car loan company will happily allow you to set matters up via their website so they can vacuum money out of your checking account every month at no additional charge, but if you want instead to have them charge your credit card, they’ll tack on an extra $5 or whatever.
Under US banking and consumer protection laws, there are lots of advantages for the consumer to interpose a credit card between themselves and a vendor. Conversely allowing a vendor direct access to remove money from your checking or savings account leaves you quite naked in the event of fraud, admin mistake, or IT malfunction on their part. They’re happy to charge you $5 to tilt your choices towards the one(s) that most benefit them, not you.
I used to pay most bills by check, but mail carriers wouldn’t take any outgoing mail from my building. We have those metal locking mailboxes in each stairwell/lobby, and the only place to put outgoing mail is on top of them. However, incoming packages and other bulky items would also be put up there, so the mail carrier wouldn’t take anything. Thus, I would bring my outgoing mail to work and have it picked up there. Situations like that would skew the numbers a bit.
Once COVID hit and we went to work-from-home, I started doing more online payments. Either the processing fees were rescinded during the pandemic, or I set up a bank account transfer for the ones that didn’t, because those don’t incur a fee like credit/debit cards. Now I generally only mail out birthday and Mother’s/Father’s Day cards, and I still take those to the office to send out.
Yeah, I’d love to use my bank’s bill pay check for the property tax, but the county says a check MUST be submitted with the payment coupon that’s with the bill. I’m not willing to chance it, even though it seems trivial for them to match the property lot number in the check memo field.