The US Postal Service

[Star Wolf]

I'm not taking shots at USPS, I've always been pleased and happy.

But my understanding is that a lot of their losses (aside from the dwindling business) are in the pensions and retirements of the employees.

Kinda like how Social Security can't keep pace with the payouts, USPS retirement and pension monies are sucking a lot of money out of what little they're generating.

Not to mention, that, as government employees, they're getting paid way more than they're worth while they are still working.

It depends we are but are not government employees. Unlike all other feds we do not get an area based pay adjustment so a small town letter carrier out earns police supervisors and teachers while big city carriers live near the poverty line, assuming they live anywhere near their assignment, if they have three kids.

The UPS Driver is the best paid in the industry while a FedEx Courier makes slightly more then a letter carrier and he reaches his top pay grade about 8 years earlier then we do.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It's an efficiently run business whether we like them or not.

Exactly, and that is something the USPS can't say.

Works for Subway, Walmart probably saved Subway.

But again, it's the US government, even if the USPS is run as a separate "entity".

And the government is trying all the time just to reduce it's dept under a trillion dollars or somesuch.

 

[Star Wolf]

My local post offices are terrible. You're guaranteed a 10-30 minute wait every single time. And they look like they're straight out of the 1930s.

Whenever possible I go to my local grocery store which has an express post office in it. It's just one person in a booth but there's never a wait there!

They are supposed to be tested to ensure no more then a 5 minute line. However the staffing level stations is based on the average work load of people walking into that lobby per day. As we sell more postage online and through super markets etc less people come in so the stations lose window clerks. So it is normal to have only one or two work stations open in an office which has room for many more clerks.

Normally a District Manager will want to close and consolidate but the local congressman normally says no you can't, so the Postmaster cuts further the number of clerks assigned.

The extra people you see around are normally carriers on light duty. union rules prevent them from working the window so they help out by acting as a lobby director, pulling parcels and hold mail from the back so the clerk doesn't leave the window. Working passport applications and if the clerk's union is weak in that district they might even be the clerk for the PO Box section.

 

[Star Wolf]

It seems that every U.S. post office now has one of those touch-screen kiosks for weighing packages, figuring postage, and dispensing stamps and postage labels. Even if I just need a book of stamps, there are always at least four or five people ahead of me in line. What happened to old-style stamp vending machines — the kind that do nothing but dispense stamps?

Those machines are not made anymore. The USPS was the only market and as we moved over to the kiosk it became impossible to keep the maintenance up on them. The last stamp machines were retired last year.

 

[Star Wolf]

My Dad has worked as a letter carrier for the USPS for 20 odd years, and over those years I've been exposed to a lot of the inner workings of the service. And every so often I'll skim through his union literature just for kicks.

And that insanely powerful postal employees union is a big part of why the USPS is running at a loss now. Cutting back from six-day delivery to five-day delivery has been pushed as a cost cutting measure for at least a decade, but the union has staunchly resisted it. As it does with almost any changes suggested by management.

No argument here. I can see the day before I retire when the USPS moves to an odd/even deliver scheme thus dropping almost half of the deliver force, I think some business will be able to continue with 5 day should that happen. Along with 5 day deliver, door to door delivery because that deliver location as been grandfathered into place is also big money trap. But the biggest problem is that our rate is based on 1st Class postage paying its own way with extra revenue coming from advertising mail and parcels. As the percentage of 1st Class pieces drop the remaining advertising mail becomes more of an anchor rather then a supplement with each additional piece

 

[Star Wolf]

I order stuff online all the time, and nobody has ever used the USPS.

If your deliver point is in the wrong, meaning not a cost effective area, then UPS sub contracts it out and the USPS does the last mile delivery.

 

[Star Wolf]

And I hear from many people FedEx fucks things up, and they don't want to deal with it, either.

They do along with UPS I see them daily, they just don't handle the volume of individual pieces that I do or visit the number of delivery points a day. And every piece that leaves my hand is another possible error

 

[RoJoHen]

The biggest difference I've noticed with UPS and FedEx is that FedEx always needs me to be home to sign for packages, whereas UPS will just leave packages outside my door. I definitely prefer the UPS method.

 

[Star Wolf]

It's run by the same dumbasses that are running the country into the ground.

The problem is they need to cut services and won't. There is no need for some cities to have three dozen post offices!

Also my plan for saving the post office... make a deal with Walmart. Have post offices in Walmarts just like Subway does.

They can't close stations. My District lost one to arson in the Rodney King riots which hasn't been replaced though. Even with the large processing plants there is always a fight with the local congressman in a not taking it from my backyard kind of thing.

There are contract postal stations in places like shopping malls and Hallmark Stores, normally a retired postal worker acts like a franchisee. They have no delivery unit attached.

 

[Star Wolf]

The US Post office SUCKS! I worked there a year and hated ever minute of it. It paid extremely well, but they worked us like slaves.

Here is their caste system:

Temps - You get less money, work long hours and no benefits.

PTFs-Part Time Flexible employees who are eligible for benefits, start off with good pay but have to work 6 days a week, work every Federal holiday, work the worst hours, have to work overtime if it is called and they can move you and cut your hours without you having a say so in the matter. Most postal employees start off as this and it can literally take DECADES to advance to the next higher level which is:

Regular Employees: These employees work 40 hours a week, can volunteer to work overtime if they want, but don't have to, get all the benefits, get two days off a week, get all Federal holidays off and can transfer to another post office if they want.

Once you start working as a PTF you go on a list and they only make so many regulars every year. There is a guy who has worked at the post office on Ft Knox who has been a PTF for 17 years and FINALLY made regular. When I worked there, my partner on the machines we worked on to process the mail had been a PTF for 5 years and made it. Her number was #39 on the list and my number was #117 so I really didn't expect to make regular in this lifetime.



I have also found priority mail packages that had fell under the conveyor belts that were mailed over a month ago.

My year at the post office taught me that it is a truly evil place and I'll be a homeless bum on the street before I work in that hellhole again.

Close, you missed Transitional Employees (TE) sort of between the Casuals (temps) and the PTFs. They are hired to fill jobs of the retired while we wait for new technology to replace those jobs rather then promote a PTF who would then face a lay off.

I'm not sure of the clerk or mail handler PTF percentage rules but I know its not a set number of years rather then as needed to replace retirement. Only now the pace of technology has exploded and those jobs held by the retired no longer exist. In my 16 years the service has gone from over 800,000 employees to somewhere around 600,000. While City Carriers, depending upon their district make regular in around 4 years most window clerks I know are PTFs.

On the Carrier side there are many instances of mandatory overtime

You think writing "handle with care" on your packages means something? You are living in la la land if you think so. All packages are dumped in huge metal bins, wheeled out onto the floor of the main postal processing centers and then the workers literally grab it and throws it into a series of boxes labeled with the appropriate zip code on it. If you were mailing a glass vase to grandma, well that glass vase might be crushed under box of books as they land on top of it in the box.

Well you got that right even if you have a "slow" clerk pissing off his boss by being careful many more then that one person is throwing packages and the next guy throws the 70lb sledge hammer on top of the "Fragile" parcel. On the other hand UPS is also known as United Package Smashers, its just the nature of shipping if it absolutely positively has to be safe hire movers, not shippers.

 

[Star Wolf]

In a few years, my kid will hear about the joke abut the boy predicting the deaths of relatives where it turns out the Mail carrier is the father. The kid will ask "What's a mail carrier? People used to carry emails from house to house?"

I remember about 10 years ago a girl was surprised saying something like "grandma why is the mailman coming to the house". She was from a newer suburb without a door delivery point grandfathered in.

 

[RoJoHen]

I think someone needs to introduce you to the Multi-Quote function.

 

[MetalPants]

The US Post office SUCKS! I worked there a year and hated ever minute of it. It paid extremely well, but they worked us like slaves.

<SNIP>

My year at the post office taught me that it is a truly evil place and I'll be a homeless bum on the street before I work in that hellhole again.

My but you have a strange world view. You complain about the work but like the wages. So what, you expected to get paid for doing nothing? You say you would be a homeless bum on the street before working there again. Have you ever had to buy ramen noodles with the last few pennies that you managed to steal out of a fountain? Have you ever sold plasma for money so you would be able to eat? Have you asked yourself, "Gee, I wonder if I will eat today?" If you haven't, you don't have any idea of how lucky you are compared to a "homeless bum on the street".

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Normally a District Manager will want to close and consolidate but the local congressman normally says no you can't, so the Postmaster cuts further the number of clerks assigned.

For what it's worth, this debate has been going on since the first congress (there was a debate about whether or not it was constitutional to let the Postmaster choose mail routes, which essentially boiled down to congressmen wanting to make sure the offices were in their districts).

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I think someone needs to introduce you to the Multi-Quote function.

Damn, beat me to it

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I didn't want to start a new thread for this little gem.

Package going from Illinois to California....by way of every state in the union apparently.

On the plus side, at least they're scanning it at every stop.
I've received packages (in my hand) that still showed "electronically notified of shipment" on the website.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Ship something via UPS or FedEx and you'll see much the same thing. There are a few hubs everything goes through.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I understand the hub idea, sending a letter from Chicago to Chicago usually involves it going to the hub out in Palatine.

But I've shipped & received a lot of packages with tracking and never seen this level of ridiculous before. I mean, from Iowa back east to Michigan & Pennsylvania?

 

[RoJoHen]

I mean, from Iowa back east to Michigan & Pennsylvania?

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Maybe it accidentally got put on the wrong truck. Or maybe they can't figure out where California is.

 

[Star Wolf]

Or with counterfeit computer postage something else has the same I'D number.