There is a marked difference between the walking speed of my usual mailman and the woman who sometimes does this route. Like literally one is twice as fast as the other, at least.
My question is whether anyone back at the post office tracks how long is takes these people to complete their routes, or is it just “do your route and go home”?
I met a person who drives a post office route in her own car in a really rural area of NC. She is a contractor and gets paid the same amount every day no matter how long it takes . The whole county has 7k people. The area is 95% farms or forests. The roads are in bad shape but so few people live there they are not going to be fixed any time soon or ever. I assume there are very few non farm jobs there so I guess she won’t be getting another job unless she’s really lucky.
Many, many, many…many years ago I had a friend who was a postman (in a city). He explained that the Post Office mapped out the official routes for each postman and provided an expected maximum time for the route to be completed. When starting out, it was sometimes difficult to walk the route in less than the maximum time, but with time, shortcuts and familiarity would reduce the time to well below the max.
Since the postman wasn’t required back at the post office until after the max time had elapsed, this allowed for long lunches and naps for the experienced workers. You may be seeing the difference between an experienced and inexperienced worker, with very little having to do with actual walking speed.
I think I’m seeing the difference between a very overweight person, whose walking seems to be coming at great effort, and another person who seems to be in pretty good shape. (And FWIW, the replacement person is the slower one.)
My question was about how much the post office monitors this, regardless of the reason.
If they haven’t changed their procedures (and they may have, it was along time ago, before things like GPS), then if both make their rounds within the expected time, the post office doesn’t care. One just gets a longer break.
I never delivered mail, but did work as a door to door meter reader for a couple years, so same idea. And no, as others have stated your organization gives you a specified amount of time to complete a route, which sometimes includes between what hours you need to work (people don’t like you sneaking into their back yards during supper time or on weekends). They don’t really track your walking speed, just your productivity. And they only really pay attention to that if you are getting behind.
As mentioned completing a route quickly is mostly about planning where to go when, short cuts, and leaving yourself with excess time or options. Walking speed, at least for someone who chooses to do a job where they walk a lot, doesn’t usually vary a huge amount.
Now with newer technology such as scanning parcels or in my old field remote-meter reading, you could probably figure out the route and driving / walking speed based on when the individual meters send their readings to the portable receiver the person carries with them. I don’t know to what degree that info is used though.
When I did shipping & receiving, you could tell when the drivers had a lighter or heavier day based on how long they stayed to chat.
Hello, Jerry.
Hellooo …Newman.
I’m a retired letter carrier. I delivered on foot and for most of my career I walked twelve miles a day.
Routes are supposedly set up to be delivered in as near eight hours as possible, including the time to put the mail up in the morning. Automation has obviously changed that time.
Every few years carriers are subject to a route inspection, where every piece of mail is counted and you’re timed on how long it takes you to put it up. There used to be something called ‘throwing standard’ which meant putting up 18 letters or 8 ‘flats’ (magazines and such) per minute. This is harder than it seems at first glance.
The inspector then walks the route with the carrier, usually two or three times in a week. They make sure the carrier isn’t wasting any time and is proceeding at a good pace.
Any time-wasting is noted, and territory may be added on to the route if it’s believed the carrier can do more. It’s pretty common to add territory anyway because management assumes carriers are lazy and crafty and have figured out a way to waste time without being caught.
Like any job, there are hard workers and slackers. Some people are very creative at slacking.
Our last carrier (Rocky), who retired a few years ago, was short, wiry and fast. The guy had been on this route for a very long time, knew everybody and their pets, and was very conscientious. We threw him a farewell party. After a couple of clunkers for replacements, we now have Matt, who kind of floats along, but is equally accurate and pleasant to deal with. Neighborhoods in Portland are largely door delivery rather than curbside boxes, so you tend to get to know your mail delivery person.
I guess I was pretty much like your Rocky. The people on my route became my family. I got to see kids grow up and I had to see friends grow old and die. If management had been better I would have done it ten more years.
Kind of nice having that relationship. It harkens back to the days when everybody knew their milkman, etc., and considered them not only friends, but someone who could help keep an eye out for any evildoers. Since his retirement, we’ve hired Rocky’s son to house sit for us on several occasions.
A guy I knew in university (I wouldn’t call him a friend, rather a distant acquaintance, as nowadays my contact with him is very loose) joined the German mail service for a first job after his degree. The main part of his work was the optimisation of mail carriers’ routes. He was in charge of a defined area and had to keep track of the average volume of mail each carrier had to deliver on his or her respective route. This data would then be used to redistrict the routes periodically in some manner that was considered optimal, which I suppose includes a balanced distribution of volume among carriers. I know that’s a lot of second-hand information there, but I suppose it supports what others have said before: That mail carriers are not paid by the hours they spend on their routes but rather for the completion of their assigned route, and that the employer doesn’t care how long that takes unless some defined absolute maximum is exceeded.
I was a summer sub carrier back in 1970, and did a lot of the routes in my office. Their lengths could sometimes be very different. It wasn’t just the mileage, routes where you had to climb stairs to get to the mailbox took a lot longer. The amount of mail mattered also. When you had to deliver fliers you had to stop at every house.
I was much faster than most of the carriers, who were all men. And the guy who went out with me the first day taught me that the last stop on your route was the bar. (Drinking age was 18 in NY back then.) Didn’t do it for me. When I had a car I hung out there, but I came back too early lots of days.
The postal inspector definitely watched me, but none ever walked the route with me.
My father was a letter carrier for about 30 years, most of that time spent carrying the same route. I concur with what you wrote. My father would be audited periodically to determine any adjustments to his route. He was very precise and methodical in everything he did, so he knew exactly where he needed to be at any given moment while carrying his route. He knew exactly how many steps he needed to take between houses and how long those steps should be. While our neighborhood wasn’t on his route, it was adjacent to it. And our house basically fell right in line with the midpoint of his route, so he was able to take his lunchbreak at our house each day.