The USPS has shrinked wrapped a mailbox for outgoing mail next to my apartments.
Has anyone else seen this?
Now, the closest place to drop off mail is at the post office 5 miles away.
The guy running the USPS needs to be fired.
Just my opinion.
Andy
I do not know about your situation, but we can have the mailman pick up mail by simply placing it in the mailbox and raising the flag. If you need more service than just a pickup, you then need to visit a post office. I have seen the closure of USPS locations due to lack of use. That is what they should do. It is true that sometimes that is more inconvenient than we wish. But any successful business must take into account their income versus expenses. Unfortunately the USPS has not done that enough for decades and has depended on bailouts. There have been many businesses that had to adjust their practices or close. UPS and FedEx have found a way to compete with the USPS and make money. It is time the USPS did the same.
Don't other people have a constitutional right to take what's yours?
Rural mailboxes work the same in Nebraska. Flip the flag up for outgoing mail. That would be things like letters, cards, and checks to pay bills. People would take packages into town to be mailed because they wouldn't know how much postage to put on them.
F'ing commie Bob?
Well, one can leave a letter (I think only first class) for the mail carrier to pick up. Since I get my mail through a slot in the door I can leave an outgoing letter in the same place, sticking out,
But I don't do t his with anything somewhat important, because I don't think many people do, so it would be easy for the mailman to forget to check his bag for such mail when he got back to the office, and it might be delayed a few days, or longer. (I only use it for misdelivered mail, which often goes to a house a block away.)
For sure. Did anyone at the committee hearing ask him if he was afraid of what his children or grandchildren would think of him?
The USPS is not as business. It's a government service.
The biggest problem as you must know is that they had to prepay all their pension commitments when no other federal agency has had to do that.
And if the post office has to be subsidized, that's the way it should be, so that everyone can have reliable mail delivey.
Fedex picked the low hanging fruit, parcels that senders were willing to pay a lot to send. They don't take letters and deliver them for
50cents. If you guys ever succeed in driving the USPS out of business, you'll regret it.
You should call the post office and complain before it's actually removed.
Also, the shrink wrap shodl be removed and it shoudl be back on the collection schedule until the election .
Call the radio stations and newspaper too.
When I was a kid, folks on the rural route would place their outgoing package inside their mailbox if it would fit, or lean it against the post if it was too big. No postage at all. We'd pick it up, take it to the PO where it was weighed and stamped, then a Postage Due card would go into their box the next day. A day or two after that, they'd place the envelope with the money in the box for us to collect.
I think that level of trust probably doesn't exist anymore.
Yep, and more recently we've seen collection boxes and sorting machines 'go missing' from areas that were still using them. That part is relatively new.
The USPS is not a business. It's a government service.
Every government service has to be funded. That isn't bailouts. The USPS was making billions per year before they were hamstrung by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), signed into law by GW Bush.
Again, the USPS is a government service, not a business.
UPS and FedEx don't do what the USPS does. Only the USPS visits every house and every business every day. UPS and FedEx don't do that.
Wait a second. If you're a kid, why are you collecting the money?
Well of course not, with the kids collecting all the money.
That's true, FedEx and similar don't have to stop at every mailbox across the whole country so that everyone has mail delivery. If they did, they would be having similar economic problems. And if USPS could just ditch
80% of their customers, not send out mailmen all over the place, they could be profitable too.
Are you saying that in your neighborhood only outgoing mail gets stolen from street-side boxes? Doesn't sound like very intelligent thievery. Don't your local thieves want financial, insurance, and utility, statements with account numbers, greeting cards with checks inside, social security checks, new/renewed credit/debit cards, etc.? I recently moved after 30 years living in a house with a street-side box. Our neighborhood had periodic vandalism involving box bashing and pole bending, but never stolen mail. If you normally get mail at least
3x/week, no need to put up the red flag to announce to the world that you've got outgoing mail inside. The post office delivery person will pick up whatever you put in there that has an address different than your own when new mail is delivered. If your outgoing mail is very time sensitive, it probably should be mailed directly into the slot at the nearest branch post office.
I live in a newer part of town where they use the same mailboxes. The mail carrier does pick up mail but ignores the flag.
Where I grew up, it was a family affair. My grandfather was our town's first postmaster. When he died suddenly, his son (my uncle) took over, eventually doing the paper work to make it legal. When our town started to offer rural mail delivery, another uncle stepped in to do that, eventually doing the paper work to make it legal. Both of those uncles needed time off now and then, so my dad would fill in for either of them, and when he filled in for the rural mail delivery, he took me along to handle the mail so he wouldn't have to slide across the seat at every stop. If both of my uncles needed to be away at the same time, my mom would fill in. Neither of my parents had taken the exam, but it was a very small town and everyone knew that our family took care of the mail. On some of the days when my mom was filling in as postmaster, if she needed to step away for a few hours she'd have me come down to take her place. I started helping out with the rural delivery and taking care of the office when I was 9 or 10, and continued until I moved away at 18.
Oh, I almost forgot. I also delivered mail to half a dozen seniors in our town, which was probably all of them. We didn't have formal mail delivery; everyone was expected to pick up their mail at the PO. I was given their box combinations, and every morning I'd go down and get their mail and take it to their houses. My reward from most of them was a simple 'thank you', but one lady used to give me a dime almost every day. That was a lot of money back then, especially for a kid.
The town was small, just 4 blocks by 4 blocks, with about 35-40 people in my earliest memory. On the day my buddy and I left for military service, the population dropped to 31. I was away for quite a few years, but on my next visit I learned that the population had dropped to 7, and now it's at
Long story, but you asked. :)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The USPS refers to these as "collection boxes" and has been removing them from residential areas for years. Shrink-wrapping is a bit odd. Usually, they are just detached from their bases and hauled away. The shrink-wrapping was probably done to prevent people from depositing mail to a box that was scheduled for removal and was no longer being emptied regularly.
If you go to the USPS web site and search for collection boxes in your area, you will see that most of them are now outside post office branches or in high-traffic business areas such as shopping centers, office buildings, and hospitals. The web site Mailbox Locate also lists the many, many remaining locations for dropping off outgoing mail.
It has been this way for years. When I saw what a fuss the media was making about collection boxes, I knew that this was fake news, an old story that had suddenly been discovered and hyped for political purposes. It has apparently escaped the attention of many in the press that first-class mail volume has declined drastically in the Internet era, especially for mail generated by households rather than businesses. Mail collection boxes are going the way of the hitching post and the pay phone. Perhaps the next panic will be about the disappearance of fax machines.
Yes, Trump lies. So do all politicians. And so does the press. It's not just bias or spin. They flat out lie. That's the world we are living in. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to give Bill Clinton a pass on perjury?
The Department of State and the Department of Defense have not made a profit for years and have depended on bailouts.
I can't think of a single depatment or office that's made a profit except the tariff office, especialy under the great Stumpie McMuffin.
All hail Dunghead Donnie.
IIRC, this policy started right after September 11, 2001 as an "anti-terrorist" measure. The same time that they banned mailing anything over a couple of ounces via a collection or drop box.
that weight restriction has an interetsing history. It started off at 16 ounces (one pound) as an emergency FAA rule after TWA-800 was blown out of the sky by a bomb.
(Yeah, we know it wasn't, but still...)
WHen the FAA rule came out, the USPS immediately put its own regulations into place.
Initially, if you slipped something over a pound into the collection box, the USPS would slap a "GROUND TRANSPORT ONLY" label on it and yes, truck it across.
Nowadays they pretty much just return it to sender.
Note that this restriction started at roughly the same time as the Unabomer's attacks were getting publicity, so many people mix and match the memories and believe these limitations were courtesy of him. Nope, TWA-800.
The USPS has periodically reduced the weight allowed, and it's now at (iirc) 12 ounces... I'm not sure if this was from the FAA or just the USPS being ornery.
Cut a bunch.
Cut more.
I've never looked what the Constitution says on the subject. From Cato
The Department of Defense does not charge the people it serves unless you see taxes as the charge. The post office does. Like Sleepy Joe likes to say: "Come on man."
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