Sunday, June 26, 2011

Postal Service crisis deepening

By DONALD BRADLEY The Kansas City Star

Postal workers will buzz across a frozen river in a hovercraft to get to a remote cabin north of the Arctic Circle.

If they pick up a letter there addressed to someone on the Havasupai Indian reservation, that’s where it will go. To the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

By pack mule.

And if the recipient has moved to Guam, the letter would then be forwarded to the middle of the Pacific.

All for the cost of a 44-cent stamp.

As business models go, this one seems suspect. A Las Vegas cab ride costs $3.30 for the first 1/13 of a mile.

But stamp by stamp, daily mail is an American ritual, in effect the country’s most popular entitlement.

It’s also in such a deep financial crisis — some say on the verge of collapse — that last week saw the U.S. Postal Service suspend payments to a retirement fund and make emphatic pleas to Congress for permission to end Saturday delivery.


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9 comments:

  1. They could cut the UPS budget by 50% with one simple solution: change to every other day delivery. This would allow them to get rid of 1/2 their employees which is their largest expense. Typical postal customers don't care if they get the letter today or tomorrow. But more to the point the UPS has to do something dramatic to save itself from bankruptcy.

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  2. I think its ridiculous to compare a taxi ride to mail delivery. First of all, do you really think it costs someone 44 vents to mail a package to the north pole? Second of all that is a pretty rare case. Most items are delivered in BULK, on trucks, planes, or ships. Perhaps people take it for granted, but there will always be some kind of message delivery, whether it is one person running to the next village over to deliver it.

    Halving the workforce of UPS is a simple solution, but probably overly simple. It is a mistake to think you can just cut down on one cost - labor - to solve all your problems and continue on merrily with the same business model. UPS is already one of the slower delivery companies. How do you think it would go for business if they more than doubled delivery times? I can imagine the amount of clogged and backed up delivery flows going on in the warehouses if suddenly half the people were there to get things sorted. Yet this MAY be required at some point. They would also no doubt be hiking delivery prices while trying to reduce their expenditures in gasoline. So, really, the problem isn't in the business model or in "entitlements", but rather an entire society too reliant on specialization, interconnectedness, and instantaneous results.

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  3. Hey stop calling it ups, ups is a good fast service. The Inept USPS is the Incompent Money losing company that should be shut down

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  4. That poor mailwomen will soon have to take a pay cut, so sad....

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  5. Simply cut pay and/or benefits until money coming in equals money going out; problem solved.

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  6. 5:18 maybe your pay ought to be cut until you can afford a lobotomy.

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  7. The postal service was set up mainly to service local and national business ,everthing from bill delivery to mail order catalogs.

    It was not necessary that a profit was made on every letter as the "socialist" government run service provided local jobs ,while adding to and facilitated the profitability of the american economy as a whole.

    when I visited japan about 10 years ago i noticed that suburbian mail deliveries in some areas were often still twice daily!

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  8. The postal service has always been about
    affirmative action. It's loaded with lazy,
    uneducated, worthless minorities who couldn't
    run a lemonade stand if they had to be out on
    their own. And customer service? BWAAAAHaaahaa
    aaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

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  9. “The postal service has always been about
    affirmative action”.

    That used to be good white guys with the cushy jobs right ?

    But now
    just like the American army

    It's loaded with lazy,
    uneducated, worthless minorities

    Disgusting !

    Stirring up a bit of class division and racial tension with a pro- privatisation and need for worker lay offs "austerity" aim ,so banksters baillouts by government can continue to be afforded ?

    Troll?

    BWAAAAHaaahaa
    aaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

    ReplyDelete

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