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There must be a telekinetic signal on CD that tells people to start "post office sucks" threads. A new one is also in the Politics section.
thanks for the update. I agree with you. Yes, we all know, like any other business they have their problems and yes, we also know they will, eventually be replaced as mailing anything is almost a thing of the past, but for now, I would have to say, they do a pretty good job.
You do know that the post office budget is set by Congress, and Congress routinely underfunds the service? Now think of how Congress is (and always has been) in the pockets of big business, and how ANYTHING that even remotely smacks of socialism is smacked down. UPS and FEDEX look good in comparison to the USPS? Gee, I wonder why??? <Not.>
The goal is to have people pay $$$ for a service that used to be available for pennies, and have that money go into corporations in a trickle-up effect.
well with inflation being an issue I really don't think the charges have escalated that much, but I know what you are saying. As for the part about congress, totally do not agree with you. Why would anyone want to see the postal service lean toward socialism? Don't people realize, you pay for services one way or the other. I guess you would say more taxes would solve the problem? Much of the problem has been caused by less use of the US Post office as we find better ways to communicate plus the large retirement package postal employees enjoy. The money has to come from somewhere. When more people are receiving benefits than employees paying into the package it costs all of us.
They do seem to have delivery issues in some neighborhoods at some times.
Previously I lived in a neighborhood that had a dedicated ("regular") carrier. When the adjacent carrier route lost its regular carrier, the adjacent route was assigned to my carrier, who now had a double work load. My carrier transferred out to a different location, leaving MY route/neighborhood without a regular carrier. For the next year or so, I did not have a regular carrier, and delivery was VERY late (after 4 pm) because my neighborhood was being served by a carrier-du-jour who delivered my neighborhood after their own route. On one occasion, a tracked package I was expecting was "out for delivery" but not actually delivered until the next day.
Where I live now, we have had ZERO problems in the two years I have been here, with a regular carrier and early delivery by 10 am.
What a mismanaged, horrible service. Friday a week ago, a company sent me a replacement part for one that was packaged wrong. They sent it via Parcel Post Priority Mail. I got a tracking number and tracked it, said I should have it on Friday the 28th. On Friday morning, their website said it was on the truck going to my destination.
I waited all day, never showed up. I tried calling every post office in the area, NONE answers their phones. I even called the 1-800 number, and all you get are recordings, no human being. Finally, on Saturday morning, I drove to my local post office location because I thought I could pick it up there. WRONG !! The clerk said they had thousands of packages to go through, and no idea where mine was.
Finally, late Saturday, it did show up. But it was a really frustrating process all the way through, especially since you can not even get a human being on the phone.......why do they even HAVE phones ?
I predict that the Post Office will not even be around in another 5-10 years........worst run business ever.
Yes, actually. In truth, the quality of delivery varies widely depending on the city. In my metro area of 1.2 million people, the post office is pretty efficient. If I pop something in the morning mail, it's almost certain that it will be delivered the next day within my city.
But then there are newspapers, the aging, creaking dinosaurs of the information age. Not only were these people completely caught flat-footed by CNN in 1982 when total daily circulation began to decline, but the denial continued when the internet came along and accelerated the decline. As someone who consulted for two separate newspaper groups, I remember the discussions: This is a fad. This is a lesser medium. People prefer getting their news in a rolled-up wad of newsprint which, by the time you retrieve it from the bushes where the carrier flung it, is twelve hours old.
Seriously. The industry simply couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that they weren't in the business of delivering a physical newspaper, rather they were in the business of delivering the news. For fifteen years, I tried my level best to tell my clients to a) focus on high-quality online content and b) focus on local news. Instead, all they could do is obsess over their $13.99/thirteen weeks subscription offers.
I remember two separate discussions with two major dailies. The first one, I pointed out that the paper didn't have a clear-cut brand. The owner of the paper looked me in the eye and said, "We don't think a brand is important for success." I diplomatically made the point that if he drove to Atlanta, he would find an entire museum dedicated to how Coca-Cola built a global empire on a brand that glorified bittersweet soda pop. "Nope. We just need to push our offers harder. And have more FSIs [Free Standing Inserts]. If we do that, we'll be fine." Never mind that we weren't answering the basic question, "Why do I even need a newspaper anymore?"
Second client? While their circulation numbers continued to plunge, this other major daily spent six months arguing on whether to move the television guide from Friday to Sunday. Mind you, with a cable/satellite penetration rate of more than 90%, a viewer could see what's on by pressing a button on his remote. But whenever I spoke about the circulation numbers, they literally said, "Don't mention that to the publisher. It just makes him upset."
In other words, newspapers have watched their circulation shrivel over the past thirty-five years for no other reason than the fact that they refuse to keep up, looking backward to the glory days when they basically acted as a public utility. Over this span, they watched their classified ad revenue evaporate into mid-air because of EBay, Craigs List and a host of other online services that performed the job better and for less. Yet they refused to do create any alternative. They doggedly kept trying to deliver the news in the same format for years before getting serious about online delivery. Even then, most of them don't do it particularly well.
We live in the age of content, yet news organizations continue to lay off more reporters, destroying the one reason people read them in the first place. And lastly, newspapers, haven't found new and inventive ways to get people to pay for content. They are still shackled to the old subscription model.
And don't even get me started on the customer service model of newspapers, which is pretty much non-existent. To me, the classic example was the time I decided to let my newspaper subscription lapse, even though I had a credit on my account of $7. But somehow, they decided I owed them money and sicced a collection agency on me. I had my statement showing they owed me money, but I was getting daily phone calls from Guido to pony up. It took literally three months of phone calls to the mouthbreathers in the customer service department to straighten it out.
So while the USPS will continue delivering in a more or less efficient way (With exceptions such as yours duly noted), newspapers will die a horrible death, leaving only the national papers such as the WSJ, the NYT, the WaPo, and a handful of others.
And that's a shame. For if the past few years have told us anything, we are in desperate need of quality reportage that's more in-depth than the two-minute news story that sandwiched in between the weather, the sports, and that cute little human interest story about the squirrel that learned to water ski or some fundraising publicity stunt. For roughly 80% of television news is soft news, spoon fed to the news organizations by PR firms.
Meanwhile, the atrophying newspaper is leaving an enormous hole in our society, one for which we'll pay the price in a big, big way. All because publishers were too lazy and too unimaginative to see the changes coming.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 06-08-2017 at 09:10 AM..
The fact that you can put a stamp worth less than 50 cents on an envelope and it will go from one coast to the other is pretty cool.
They are not even close to the worst business.
The fact that you can put a stamp worth less than 50 cents on an envelope and it will go from one coast to the other is pretty cool.
They are not even close to the worst business.
Agree that they are cheap --- but you get what you pay for.
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