That’s true. Different countries have different ways of achieving what is essentially a similar outcome. The US has strict laws on the use of your mailbox, so that amounts to a monopoly for the USPS. Here in Australia, any old company can stick stuff in there hand-delivered (mostly pizza places and Chinese restaurants), but for a courier company to deliver addressed mail, they have to charge at least ten times the standard domestic postal rate of A$0.50 (it might have gone down to five times now). IIRC, the Royal Mail in Britain had a similar system, but it’s been abolished (or close to it) opening up the system to wide competition. Companies like Deutsche Post are circling like vultures over countries whose governments are considering doing this.
The US method is unusual, I think. It will be harder to crack. American postal laws are much stricter than most other places, especially the whole Postal Inspector thing.
[postal worker]Actually, despite growth in mail volumes over the late 90s and early part of this decade, internationally the internet effect is finally starting to bite, and mail volumes are dropping. I can assure you that the postal workers are happy to process extra stuff (more overtime and conceivably more jobs).[/postal worker]
I can see your point on that. My partner is a postal worker and they all dread the full coverage that delivering the ads entails. But then again, the office in which she works is understaffed right now so there’s already enough overtime to go around.
I worked the graveyard shift at the post office to help pay for college (it didn’t last so very long, I never got any sleep) and I asked a few of these questions. I believe the post office/mail carrier is prohibited from actually “throwing away” anything. They have a special department for “dead letters” and other such undeliverable mail so people actually are getting paid to sit there and sort through random bits of paper that are not actually mail and try to get it to where it was intended. I would assume at some point when they have exhausted all efforts they throw some things away. I was also told by my father, a postal worker for many many years that undeliverable things such as letters to God and to the North Pole are auctioned off and actually bring in good money, and are worth more unopened…
I can give you the exact procedure for Australia Post, but as a fellow member of the Universal Postal Union (known by postal workers as the ‘Up U!’ ) the United States Postal Service will be doing something broadly similar.
Old fashioned manual sorting these days is largely comprised of sorting machine rejects that the OCR tech couldn’t handle, so we get all the weird letters. Of the 74-way ‘break’ (74 pigeon holes in the sorting frame), two (sometimes three - I’ll get to the third later) apertures are reserved for undeliverable mail. The first is UNDELIVERABLE - INSUFFICIENT ADDRESS and the second is UNDELIVERABLE - DEAD LETTER OFFICE. The first might have a letter addressed, say, to a town name which exists in several states but no postcode. These are processed by a clerk ‘in house’. He has a library of telephone books, street directories and postcode books. He is authorised to write on the letter in red ink to complete the address, but he is not authorised to open it. Mail going to the second aperture is for stuff like “God” or, increasingly common these days, company computer screw-ups like “John Sample, Sample Street, Sample Town”. This stuff is put in trays and trucked off to the DLO in another part of the city. the guys there are the only people in the network authorised to open mail for clues (after they have exhausted other sleuthing techniques). This stuff will then be forwarded or returned to sender if the contents provide a clue, placed in an official envelope with an explanation note. For stuff that is deemed truly ‘dead’, it is held for a set period (a few weeks or months), and then incinerated. Valuables are auctioned once or twice a year.
The third pigeon hole is kinda cute. It’s labeled SANTA MAIL, and kicks in in October or November. This also goes to the Dead Letter office, but there is a guy there who looks at the return address or opens them to find it, and sends the kid a (non-committal, non-religious) letter from ‘Santa Claus’. It’s a PR exercise.
It’s fairly easy to undercut the USPO, if you restrict your service to a ‘profitable’ part of the business.
One USPO 39¢ stamp will deliver your mail to a neighbor in the next block, or somebody way across the country and deep in the wilds of Montana.
It costs the USPO well under 39¢ to deliver mail in big cities, where the houses are close together and many can be covered by one mail carrier. It’s much more expensive to have a mail carrier driving a car up and down back roads to deliver mail into those rural mailboxes. And it costs much less to deliver mail locally in town, compared to mail being sent way across the country. The local, big city deliveries subsidise the cross-country & RFD mail, so it all works out. (And the complication if people had to figure out a different postage rate for each letter, depending on how far away it was going – that would be very annoying & expensive for the Post Office.)
So if you start your own mail delivery service, but only deliver local mail within a big city, refusing the expensive cross-country or rural mail, you can certainly undercut the USPO rates. (Especially if you use part-time delivery people, with lower pay scale and probably no benefits or pension plan.) Sounds like that’s what Brennan was doing.
There is some controversary now about package delivery companies, like UPS, etc.
Some of them are doing a similar kind of cream-skimming with their service. They offer delivery to any address (something that customers demand). But they only actually deliver if the address is within one of the cities where they have delivery routes. If it’s one of those expensive rural or small town addresses, they just
put stamps on it and toss it to the USPO to deliver.
So they get the deliveries to profitable routes, and shove the expensive deliveries off onto the Post Office. And the shipper who paid for UPS delivery is actually having their package delivered by USPO.
Some people in the USPO are asking if they should be participating in this. And some shippers have complained about it – the usual response from UPS is that this is allowed somewhere in the fine print in the shipping form they signed.
Thanks for that there fighting my ignorance. It had never occurred to me, probably because I’m dense, that some routes are cheap and others are silly expensive.
) the United States Postal Service will be doing something broadly similar.