I cannot remember the last time we bought stamps. I think we have a sheet hanging on the fridge with a couple left - back in the day whenever we’d get that low one of us would be sure to buy more. Same with the checkbook.
If USPS stops putting stuff in our residential mailboxes, how’r we supposed to vote?
Your housing is much denser than mine. A hundred yards radius would cover about 6 houses.
We actually just bought a sheet the other day.
I’m not seeing how the distance to my community mailbox gives you any information about housing density.
You listed it as if it might be a typical distance. Otherwise, why do i care? If i lived next door to the post office, it would be convenient for me to get my mail there, too.
When i lived in a large apartment building, it was very convenient to have a community mailbox in the lobby. A mailbox cluster that served as many people in my current home would be a rather long walk on a cold or wet day, and might be half a mile or more away.
Then you don’t have the Allen Toussaint stamps!
Sure, let’s get rid of the post office. Then let’s knock down all the telephone polls, cause who uses a landline anymore?
I just bought a sheet last spring, when I finally used up the sheet of boring flag design stamps I bought from a USPS kiosk many, many years ago. I’m sure the postage rates went up several timed in the time it took me to use them all up.
I bought the new sheet online, partly because I didn’t want to go down to the Post Office, but mostly because you can get more interesting designs there. I went with some James Webb Space Telescope themed stamps. One thing that annoys me about buying stamps online is that the USPS doesn’t charge for shipping, they charge a few dollars for “handling”.
I just thought about that when I said I don’t send much snail mail anymore. My vote by mail ballot is one of the few things I do still semi regularly mail. And I actually use those return address labels charities send me on my return envelope.
That’s actually becoming an issue in California. AT&T wants to get rid of their old copper landlines, but in California they are legally the “carrier of last resort” which requires them to maintain their network. AT&T argues that most of their remaining landline customers have other options now, so they shouldn’t have to continue maintaining the old copper lines, but there are some very rural communities where the old landlines really are still the most reliable form of communication.
That’s actually one letter that i don’t entrust to the US mail. My town has a drop box near town hall, where you can deposit ballots and correspondence addressed to the town (like property tax payments). I drive the ballots there.
I checked the Canada Post Delivery Planning Standards Manual for Builders and Developers and while they have lots of standards for where community mailboxes may be located, I can’t find anything related to maximum distance from a residence that it serves.
But anecdotally, just from looking around this neighbourhood, there are a lot of them. So saying that 100 yards is typical doesn’t imply high-density housing, it can equally imply a lot of mailboxes. In fact I was guesstimating maybe 5 or 6 houses between me and the community mailbox, so a 50- or 60-foot average frontage, which is just typical suburbia. “Half a mile or more” to a community mailbox? No way! No one would stand for that!
The USPS also has community or cluster mailboxes - they aren’t installing them in rural areas and probably not a lot of suburban ones. They are putting them in new developments in areas that currently get door-to-door delivery , not in places where the box is at the road and the carrier doesn’t get out of the truck. There are some about three blocks from my house - on my block the carrier comes up my walkway and walks up the steps , puts my mail in the box walks down the walkway and then 20 feet to my neighbor’s steps, up and down and on to the next neighbor.
I can’t figure out how to add a photo to a post, so here’s a link to a photo
It’s not that 100 yards would be 5-6 houses away, a circle with a radius of 100 yards would contain about 6 houses. 100 yards is 2 houses down the street. My next door neighbor, whose door is close to my property line, is ~100 feet away.
Yes, I’ve seen them. When you live in a denser community with a well-defined entrance to your section of the community, they can be reasonably convenient. And in some communities where you can’t get anywhere without driving half an hour, they are too far to walk, but still pretty convenient, as you’ll be driving by them regularly. They would be wildly inconvenient where i live. Or there would be so many of them that the post office wouldn’t get much benefit.
Don’t you have areas where the houses are spaced relatively far apart? even in my well settled farming area, the closest place they might plausibly put one to me is about half a mile away; and I know roads even around here where individual houses are spaced further than that apart. Not convenient at all; and not efficient, if it involves multiple people in multiple cars driving back and forth to get or drop off mail, as opposed to one car going down that road doing both.
I expect they’re reasonably convenient as well as more efficient where there are a batch of houses all within three minutes’ walk from a central spot. That’s where I usually see them; or at the beginning of private roads that the mail carrier doesn’t go down, but those are mostly to lakefront properties, chosen for that reason.
It wouldn’t get me halfway to the next house.
Exactly. And there’s a whole lot even of relatively settled country, even in the USA, where that’s what it would have to be.
To me, that is high density housing; though I’m well aware that it comes higher yet. It’s a relative term, though.
People who work at home, or who are retired, may or may not drive anywhere regularly.
I have a friend who lives in a place like that. It’s literally a 25 minute drive to his nearest grocery store, despite his living in a community that’s probably large enough to support its own convenience store, at least. He’s retired, but he leaves the house a couple times a week, and every time he does so he drives by the cluster of mail boxes.
Well, it’s higher density than where i live. I have the shortest frontage in the neighborhood, at 100 feet. Most are closer to 150 feet. So yes, any area around here will have between ¼ and ⅑ if the number of dwellings near wolfpup. Making those mailbox clusters a lot less efficient/convenient, even if there somehow magically appeared space on which to build them. I guess the state could seize the land from homeowners under eminent domain, but i don’t see that being super popular. Especially if reducing the square footage of a lot made it non-conforming.
Yeah, this is still an issue. You’d think we’d be past snail mail and paper checks, but certain niches continue to insist on them and they are unavoidable for some.
I recently retired and while the retirement health plans are decent, the retirement dental plans are worthless garbage. Since my ex-employer is currently pursuing options for changing that, I COBRA’ed my perfectly fine full employment dental plan, which buys me 18 months while those options are being researched.
The subcontractor processing my COBRA payments cannot be reached and the bills cannot be paid electronically. They function by snail mail only. Once a month they send you a paper payment slip, and you have to provide your own envelope, physically address it, write out a paper check, add your self-provided stamp and send it to the processor. No exceptions.
It’s archaic and I hate it. My memory is already shitty enough - auto and instant electronic payments are a modern godsend. But it’s also currently unavoidable. As long as agencies are allowed to do business this way, snail mail can never truly die.
And there’s another little problem with the idea. If it ever happened, ~637,000 people would be out of work and not particularly skilled to do anything else.
Could be the way NYS agencies handle things - DMV will email me about my due dates for license, registration inspection , but the state departmetn of taxation sends me an email telling me to log in to hte secure message ccenter.
An important reason to keep snail mail is community newspapers, most of them weekly. I wonder how much of their revenue still depends on snail mail.
What about periodicals in Denmark? Are they considered letters or parcels? Do they have to pay the enormous (compared to the U.S.) letter rate?
I live in such a neighbourhood, where direct-to-home has been a thing since forever. But I’ve also lived in two places where we had community mailboxes. In neither case was the mailbox very far away. The farthest was maybe 75 yards away, and the other was maybe 30 yards. In neither case were they inconvenient—easy to walk to, or you could just pull up your car, if, for example, you were on your way home from work.
It’s important to note that, as I recall, no community mailboxes are on private property. They are on land owned by some sort of government. The two that I’ve dealt with were both on the city’s property (for example, one was at the edge of a park). So nobody loses part of their property to what they might not want on it.
My hardcopy community newspaper folded years ago. I am fortunate that a local couple has picked up the slack with an online paper. I get a weekly email with some headlines and a lot of links. I’d prefer there were more in the email, honestly, but i guess they make most of their revenue from online ads.
(They also solicit contributions, and i pay them, because i really want them to stay in business. But the economics are such that they need to be free to get ad traffic.)
That’s the problem where I live, old City of Toronto with no place for them. The closest park is 2 blocks either way and they would need space for a few hundred boxes.
As to stamps see here from ~6 months ago:
By amazing coincidence I mailed 2 snail mails today. Used 2 of my small batch of 2016 XMas stamps. Not that my mail is Xmas themed; just that those are the only first class stamps I own.
In another 5-10 years that small sheet will be used up.