I live in a small-ish town in northern New Mexico, with a decent sized US Post Office of about 1,000 PO Boxes. Sometimes, I gotta send in some paperwork to an organization with a PO Box in town . . . I fill out the paperwork, fold it up, fill out the ‘Return’ & ‘To’ addresses, stick a ‘Forever’ stamp on it, and lick/press the adhesive on the envelope to make it all final. (Yes, I still appreciate and work in “paperspace” communication.)
I’m sending my letter from ‘828 Maple Street, Smallish Town NM, 87501’ to ‘PO Box 923, Smallish Town NM, 87501’ . . . all within the same Zip code. Why does my letter go all the way down to Albuquerque to be processed, and sent back to Small-ish Town (only to be dropped into the PO Box which is 20 feet across the room from the original drop off slot)?
Do the local Post Offices not have the cancellation equipment or sorting machinery to handle the in-town traffic? seems a bit complicated so send a letter all the way down to ABQ just to cancel a stamp . . .
Tripler
We have a brew pub & another decent restaurant, which is what evolved us from ‘small’ to ‘small-ish’.
Similar situation here in central Mass. At the post office there are two slots, “In Town” and “Out of Town,” but evidently it all goes to Springfield, 80 miles west of here, to be “processed,” whatever that means.
This was addressed by a USPS person in a prior thread I can’t now find.
Doing it your way would involve the local PO having to handle each piece of mail they collect at the office or from out in public to determine which are local and which need to be sent out for delivery elsewhere. Given the size and expense of modern sorting equipment, it’s cheaper to send everything to the nearest sorting center for the machines to handle, than it is to employ workers to hand-dig through all the new mail every day.
Yes, a mail slot at the PO labeled “in town only” would theoretically allow short-circuiting some of the handling. If people used it accurately. And if anyone mailing something local brought it to the PO, not just dropped it in any public mail deposit box around town or left it at their business / residence for the mail carrier to pick up and carry to the PO.
Right now first class postage is 82 cents. There can’t be much handwork applied to any mailpiece before it’s a money loser.
Before the advent of any automation, it was handwork all the way. In that scenario, having the local office dig through all their fresh mail and segregate it into local and several various directions / distances of not-local was the most efficient way. Not any more.
Reminds me of how FedEx used to have one sorting facility, in Memphis. So even a letter from one side of Manhattan to the other would go through Memphis. The whole idea Fred Smith came up with was that it was most efficient for everything to go through one sorting center.
(Nowadays FedEx is so big that they have several sorting centers. But the one in Memphis is still the biggest, AFAIK.)
Not only that, but IIRC someone (it might have been the Wall Street Journal) convinced a couple of Manhattan corporate headquarters to drop an envelope in the interoffice mail bin at the same time they sent it out via FedEx (through the Memphis hub) to the same recipient in the same building. The FedEx package was delivered first thing the next morning, while the interoffice mail sometimes didn’t show up until the second day.
It’s a famous story that Smith first proposed the idea for FedEx in a term paper when he was at Yale. His professor gave him a C on the paper, saying that the idea was interesting but not feasible.