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Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

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Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#171

Post by mindslight »

missedthecue wrote: post #100
zanny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a legitimate law on the books that Fedex et al cannot legally deliver letters, or is it just that subsidized postage stamps are so cheap no private company can profit off paper mail delivery? Because letters are paper but so are magazines, newspapers, etc that I know are delivered by non-USPS mail carriers. It isn't a very persuasive argument to destroy cheap post for the masses to... let investors make mone…

The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title 39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a “letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The second is over the use of your mailbox. That is correct: there are criminal violations if anyone puts anything in your mail box that is not US government approved “mail.”

Someone should tell my Fedex driver, who has started doing everything possible to not deliver packages to my door. For the latest round the package ended up within my mailbox (which I didn't even think to check before calling in a missing package case). I'm pretty sure my mail carrier saw this when they delivered, and I don't think anything came of it.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#172

Post by pwg »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #55
alextheparrot wrote: post #26

This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access to a subset of the population. This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elect…

Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in. Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in lin…

> I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning.

You've been very lucky then.

For Obama's first term election, the lines at my polling place were across the room, out the door, down the hallway, out the building door, and a good distance down the block (i.e., easily a few hundred or more waiting in line to get their chance to cast their vote). And it was like this starting from before the polls opened until they closed.

Many would have loved to see lines "never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning" for that election at that polling place.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#173

Post by johnchristopher »

agustamir wrote: post #167
lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits). If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pens…

Trying to ELI5 this to myself - USPS has to fund their pensions and is forced to keep money aside for it. They are unable to make price increases to account for all this extra money that they have to keep aside since they are a public service. Their competitors UPS, FedEx are not being held to the same standard, and so USPS is losing out? And this makes a convenient excuse to show USPS as a failed org?

The same tactics (let's call a spade a spade) is used in my home country to legitimize the end of our political regime.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#174

Post by [deleted] »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #6

Would have appreciated some transparency on this before a shipped a $1K ecommerce package by Priority Mail last week. I read the official notice on the website and it just said PM was gonna be extended by one day. Then after it arrived in the destination ZIP they bumped it out another day, and now it is showing Alert status with no scans. Really unprofessional.

[deleted]

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#175

Post by qserasera »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #112
qserasera wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too. > Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future tax…

> That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too. I don’t know what this means. >Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies. FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS. It’s only government entities that aren’t regulated (because politicians like to be able to pay current…

> I don’t know what this means.

That means expanding these requirements to other departments will need sigificant political backing and will be very unpopular. I do view benefit funding requirements as necessary.

> politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected

looks like you agree with me on that.

> Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.

That is an entirely different discussion that would garner my interest.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#176

Post by athms »

conception wrote: post #97
qserasera wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too. > Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future tax…

Banking from the post office is a pretty common thing and makes a lot of sense as it gives people a public, non-profit banking avenue for the poor and under served.

I would agree if there were more post offices, but the USPS has been closing them over the last twenty years to cut costs. They serve wide geographic areas and it is easier to find a local credit union than a post office these days. The poor would be better served with Internet banking.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#177

Post by ethanbond »

_-david-_ wrote: post #169
ethanbond wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photo ID laws is a big one. Closing polling stations in minority communities.

Can you name a first world county that doesn't have voter id laws?

How about this: if Republicans were pushing voter ID laws plus a comprehensive plan to get IDs to every American who wishes to vote, I suspect no one would have any problem with such a proposal.

As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.

Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#178

Post by sixstringtheory »

missedthecue wrote: post #164
sixstringtheory wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest counterpoint to this is that government allows accountability. You will have those same people you don’t like running private enterprise, but CEOs have much longer terms than postmasters general.

Accountability to whom? The NSA is still illegally snooping on you and I, killer-cops go unpunished, and the social justice system is biased against black men, but supposedly there is accountability? The difference here is that it's not profitable for UPS to piss off its customer base. A CEO of a privatised postal company acting in his own rational self interest would produce far different results than Donald Trump a…

Every delivery service has horror stories. I’ve experienced bad deliveries with all of them. Turns out, there are still humans working at all of them.

Voting is accountability. You’ll have to find another time to discuss every other thing that’s wrong with our government, because right now we’re talking about a service being purposefully degraded in efforts to reduce the one of the only means we have for holding government accountable: voting.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#179

Post by Someone1234 »

missedthecue wrote: post #107
riffic wrote: post #80

Buy stamps, as if they were toilet paper or war bonds. If the American public buys stamps they can have a collective action of helping to save one of its finest institutions.

Asking people to perform charity in order to save socialised letter delivery is going to be a hard sell.

Why? The post office is a fantastic organization, and it being a non-profit actually helps society operate effectively (e.g. many government services rely on USPS as a backstop). The post office is a utility, just like water and electricity (and internet should be).

A lot of the reasons the post office is in the red are purely political (e.g. limiting what services they can offer, price caps, and financial mandates).

I already purchased two years worth of stamps to support it. I also spent all my coins because the US Treasury has a shortage. We can all do more, particularly the bare minimal.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#180

Post by vondur »

agustamir wrote: post #167
lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits). If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pens…

Trying to ELI5 this to myself - USPS has to fund their pensions and is forced to keep money aside for it. They are unable to make price increases to account for all this extra money that they have to keep aside since they are a public service. Their competitors UPS, FedEx are not being held to the same standard, and so USPS is losing out? And this makes a convenient excuse to show USPS as a failed org?

Not only that, but UPS and FedEx probably don’t offer pensions at all. USPS will never be able to compete, even if they raised their prices.
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