USPS Redesign

I like it, but I ask myself if this design will resist the change of times.

in my humble opinion, the "look" of the usps isn't their problem on the retail side. it's the fact that it's a complete and total PITA to ship with them, coupled with the wrong incentive structure for their employees.

1. streamline the process - one form to ship something, a letter, a package, whatever. one sticker goes on the package to indicate the shipping class (certified, etc). none of this a sticker here, a red stamp there, etc.

2. incentivise employees to be PRODUCTIVE. i don't know much about their existing compensation plan, but every time i go to a PO, no one seems to give a shit. i ship a lot of packages on my lunch break. the PO is PACKED at noontime... and there's one person at the desk. REALLY?

anyway, i could go on, but they have a long, long, long, way to go.

#2 is the #1 reason why I don't like dealing with the USPS for packages. It's easier for me to run to the post office and have them walk me through the process of the more complicated shipping (non-domestic primarily), but the people there are ass holes. Between the post office where I live and the office where I work (in two different states), I've never had a good experience. There's always some pissed off, rude middle aged woman who acts like I'm an idiot for not being familiar with all of their complicated protocols and rules for shipping.

So yeah, branding isn't their problem. It's the service itself that blows.

2 isn't an employee problem, its a system problem.

They feel the big brother need to authenticate the heck out of you and your money and manually handle packages all at the same time, so a transaction takes 5 minutes and you get a fabulous line that takes an entire lunch hour to navigate.

The way it should work is vaguely like the automated checkouts at my public library, one human being who does virtually nothing other than reboot machines and create new / renew cards.

So a human being does the Big Brother tracking thing to authenticate your D/L and CC once. Then for all eternity you step up to a machine, slide your DL and CC thru the reader, you slap a sticker on the package, you throw your package on a conveyor belt, all good.

I think a system redesign could get transaction times down to a fraction of a minute and reassign humans to do stuff humans are really good at, like debugging a system they're experts at, exception handling/customer complaints, all that big brother authoritarian BS that they enjoy so much, and teaching other humans, while getting humans out of the work that humans are awful at, like following brainless repetitive procedures, manual labor, and data entry.

Where do you put all this conveyor belt and vending machine junk in existing post offices? Well, if you're not going to have people standing in lines anymore, how bout putting the gear where people used to stand in line for 30 minutes at lunch hour.

Another fix would be sh!t or get off the pot WRT big brother / evil empire stuff. Either get rid of all of it which would save a lot of time, or go all in (more likely, because its more profitable for 3rd parties) which means automatic scanning of drivers licenses and CCs and fingerprints for all transactions, which sounds bad, but if automated would be a heck of a lot faster. (Edited to make it clear I think they're achieved a local maxima of wasted time WRT big brother BS, so any change would almost by definition of a local maxima, speed things up)

There is also a bigger systemic issue WRT scrapping entire parts of the system. If big business can ship whatever they want to Canada without it being inspected or (properly) taxed, or dudes in China can ship me literally anything without the customs system doing much of anything, why not just scrap them? Get rid of the whole process, customs forms and everything. Its not like anything will change other than the elimination of a huge waste of time.

#2 x 1000, after my last experience with surly disinterested employees at USPS I took my business to UPS this weekend. Cost slightly more but 0 paperwork and much better service.. Handed a list of addresses to the guy behind the counter, he filled the paperwork , printed the labels etc.. It boggles the mind this isn't standard at USPS which just seems to be a puzzle (#1)