USPS "agreement with Amazon is interfering with timely deliveries," senator says.
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Amazon packages reportedly overwhelm small post offices, delaying other mail
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Wouldn’t want those credit card offers and political flyers to be delayed.
I kid- but if I get one legitimate piece of mail a week I’m doing good. And it’s typically a medical bill.
I miss looking forward to getting the mail! Maybe I oughta start a service where you can send yourself random fun letters.
I kid- but if I get one legitimate piece of mail a week I’m doing good. And it’s typically a medical bill.
I miss looking forward to getting the mail! Maybe I oughta start a service where you can send yourself random fun letters.
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I dunno how I feel about this. Most of of my other mail is junk. Really, I don't think I mind that Amazon packages are prioritized.
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I'm sure Amazon's packaging hijinks like packing a microSD card in a box the same size as a case of beer doesn't help matters for these rural POs.
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Omega_Prime
Ars Scholae Palatinae
As the USPS is 'self funding' I'd expect that they would focus on those aspects which best funds their operations; if that's packages so be it.
https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/#:~:text=We%20are%20self%2Dfunding.,services%20to%20fund%20its%20operations.
https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/#:~:text=We%20are%20self%2Dfunding.,services%20to%20fund%20its%20operations.
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No it's more Dejoy probably has more companies lining his pockets that do business with Amazon on the more profitable high volume low labor intensive Amazon sub contracts.
The only real USPS deliveries i get from Amazon these days are stupidly heavy products that no customer in their right mind would ship via USPS because Fedex/UPS Ground are much cheaper at that weight. But Amazon has a special volume rate that keeps that down.
The only real USPS deliveries i get from Amazon these days are stupidly heavy products that no customer in their right mind would ship via USPS because Fedex/UPS Ground are much cheaper at that weight. But Amazon has a special volume rate that keeps that down.
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How have we not gotten rid of DeJoy yet? Also how have we not fixed the horrific accounting requirement saddled on USPS to ensure it became unprofitable? That always needs to be included as an * with any mention of the USPS financial situation. Treat it like any other entity and suddenly its no longer losing money.
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USPS is self-funding. The costs of mail pay for the mail.
So either the issue is that the changing landscape of how people shop have resulted in a seasonal bump that USPS has not staffed to accommodate; or there's a simple mismatch between demand and capacity.
These packages aren't displacing mail. If USPS is being paid to deliver them then they are mail.
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Sounds like there's some weird info traveling through the bureaucracy. Somewhere up above, someone told some people to prioritize Amazon. But not at a high enough level where everyone got the same message. Some places seem to have everything backed up evenly (Amazon or otherwise), while only some have prioritized Amazon, resulting in mostly non-Amazon stuff being backed-up. I'll bet if one carefully traced which areas are having problems, one could find the upper person who's been spreading the bad info. Perhaps someone with a personal interest in the Amazon relationship?
Given the evidence, it doesn't seem to me that this was a policy from the very top, with the PR office just lying about it. If that were the case, there would be a lot more evidence of what the actual "orders" from the top were, and there wouldn't be so much diversity among different areas prioritizing/not-prioritizing Amazon packages. But clearly there is some trope being spread within the bureaucracy, otherwise it would only be happening in a small number of places (if at all). And tropes spreading in bureaucracies tend to spread down, not up -- although sometimes laterally.
Given the evidence, it doesn't seem to me that this was a policy from the very top, with the PR office just lying about it. If that were the case, there would be a lot more evidence of what the actual "orders" from the top were, and there wouldn't be so much diversity among different areas prioritizing/not-prioritizing Amazon packages. But clearly there is some trope being spread within the bureaucracy, otherwise it would only be happening in a small number of places (if at all). And tropes spreading in bureaucracies tend to spread down, not up -- although sometimes laterally.
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Wow my brain completely failed on that one, thanks for correcting me. Nevermind and point rescinded
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Doesn't matter the absolute total. Only matters the amount per carrier.
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USPS is not just another private company competing for package delivery with UPS, FedEx, etc. It has a constitutional mandate to deliver mail.
ArtI.S8.C7.1 Historical Background on Postal Power
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Can confirm. Our rural part of a moderately sized city gets overwhelmed by packages to the extent that at this time of year,
Lockers fill up and there’s no room or money to place more of them. People go on vacation and mindlessly order things to home, where they sit in lockers, forcing everyone else to travel 30 miles round trip to the post office, where they wait in line to pick up a package they ordered. DeJoy’s plan to move the USPS to a private delivery model didn’t anticipate the infrastructure problems it would create - problems that can be solved, oddly enough, with more privatization. Which is exactly what DeJoy and his friends want.
if you lived in a rural area served only by a fixed set of package lockers and no to-the-door service I suspect you’d feel very differently.
Lockers fill up and there’s no room or money to place more of them. People go on vacation and mindlessly order things to home, where they sit in lockers, forcing everyone else to travel 30 miles round trip to the post office, where they wait in line to pick up a package they ordered. DeJoy’s plan to move the USPS to a private delivery model didn’t anticipate the infrastructure problems it would create - problems that can be solved, oddly enough, with more privatization. Which is exactly what DeJoy and his friends want.
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Exactly. This whole article was written without covering the long history of DeJoy deliberately sabotaging the Postal Service?! Have we forgotten the dismantled multi-million dollar sorting machines sitting in pieces, the piles of forgotten ballots? He has been a complete disaster since Trump indirectly “appointed” him by appointing the corrupt people who picked him, one of Trump‘s many last minute poison pills. He’s obviously concerned about his competing delivery service, and just like every Republican in Congress is trying his best to make people angry at the government so they’ll be happy to dismantle it.
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It’s not that simple. Rural deliveries aren’t to the door anymore. A fixed installation of parcel lockers and mailboxes is all most rural customers have, and when those lockers are full, there’s usually no space or money to build more.
This is all operating as planned.
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When you’re having a surgery or procedure that requires you to not be at work.
Sheesh.
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Perhaps one has a doctor‘s appointment, or the children have doctors appointments. Maybe a scheduled surgery. Cancer treatments. Driving all the way to the nearest VA. Eldercare. Could be a number of valid reasons, especially is one is being forced to work seven days a week.
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Mungus the Unhyphenated
Ars Tribunus Militum
Part of the issue in Minnesota may stem from it being rural territory, which tends to be served by a mix of regular (full and part-time) postal employees in official USPS delivery trucks, and rural contract carriers who must supply their own vehicles and work according to a separate contract carrier schedule. The logistics of the operation are different when compared to an urban, 100% USPS-employee-served region.
Where the rural contract carriers aren't involved, the Amazon delivery contract was negotiated so that the Post Office could hire sufficient (or close to sufficient) numbers of part-time drivers to deliver Amazon packages. Including on Sunday. It gets more troublesome in areas where the number of USPS employee carriers is relatively low compared to the number of rural contract carriers. They're going to be sending out a relatively small number of USPS employees again and again to cover the gap, and probably don't have enough budget allocated to hire part-time employees for the Amazon runs.
It was messy enough in Concord NH, which is a small "urban" zone, with plenty of rural territory still served by USPS letter carriers, when Amazon dropped their contract with FedEx and dramatically increased the load on USPS. It sounds a lot like the same scenario is playing out again.
Where the rural contract carriers aren't involved, the Amazon delivery contract was negotiated so that the Post Office could hire sufficient (or close to sufficient) numbers of part-time drivers to deliver Amazon packages. Including on Sunday. It gets more troublesome in areas where the number of USPS employee carriers is relatively low compared to the number of rural contract carriers. They're going to be sending out a relatively small number of USPS employees again and again to cover the gap, and probably don't have enough budget allocated to hire part-time employees for the Amazon runs.
It was messy enough in Concord NH, which is a small "urban" zone, with plenty of rural territory still served by USPS letter carriers, when Amazon dropped their contract with FedEx and dramatically increased the load on USPS. It sounds a lot like the same scenario is playing out again.
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The USPS is self-funded but it is also hamstrung by a law that forces it to prefund the health benefits of retirees since 2006. Part of the drowning it in the toilet thing, as no other agency or private company is forced to do that.
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The postal service can’t just hire a bunch of contractors to hire subcontractors to work for pennies the way Amazon can. They have to follow federal rules. Apparently DeJoy made a very unfavorable contract with Amazon that allows them to dump this volume of work on the USPS with no notice.
DeJoy is a real piece of work though. Every single year since his “appointment” there have been major scandals and serious problems. He is not ever going to be competent at doing that job, the best we can hope for is for the free press and Congress to make a stink.
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And there are a lot of rural areas where even if the boxes are on individual posts, all the boxes for a dead-end road or a private drive are often at the entrance. That makes for efficient delivery of mail since there might be 10 or 20 mailboxes all grouped together, but amazon is likely demanding doorstep delivery, so even a single amazon package on street could blow out their allotted time.
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Have we forgotten [...]
Yes. DeJoy is a random "bureaucrat", in a sea of bureaucratic institutions, and entirely removed from the Average American. Which is exactly why it's so easy to loot, plunder, and ruin our public institutions over the span of years and decades.
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Or splitting an order up into multiple packages and doing that with one part, instead of shipping them together in a single box. Had that happen with a CPU and motherboard I ordered on Black Friday.
For those that aren't aware of the accounting requirement, a Republican controlled congress passed a law requiring the US Postal Service to pre-fund all retiree health benefits. This means they have to pay today for things that won't actually happen until years or even decades in the future. No other company in the entire world does this, because it's utter madness.
It was done solely so the Republicans could point to the USPS losing money every year (due to the insane requirement they foisted on them) and call for privatization that would supposedly be "more efficient." (Which it would be, of course, because it would no longer be saddled with the pre-funding requirement.) H2O's absolutely correct that it should be pointed out every time it's mentioned the USPS is losing money, because it's caused artificially.
As for why we haven't gotten rid of DeJoy, that's entirely up to the USPS board of governors. There should be a Democratic majority on there now, but they aren't voting to remove him. There's absolutely nothing Biden can do about this, unfortunately.
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You've never scheduled time off for a doctor's visit or surgical procedure? (Or one to take your kids to the same?) That's a scheduled sick day: a sick day scheduled in advance for planned medical purposes.
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I'm having a hard time understanding why the multitude of junk mail that makes up the bulk of the USPS delivery to me is "actual" mail, but the back brace from Amazon is not.
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Thats just vacation time at the 2 companies I've worked for (SPX and Mentor Graphics, big corporations).
Kind of oddly to me, the SPX division I work with has actually moved to a "use as much vacation as you like, as long as you're making deadlines - no problem" scheme for salaried employees. For sick days, they've always (the 14 yrs ive been here) prefer you not come to work sick and infect all their other healthy employees to the detriment of the business. I think I'm kind of lucky as most companies just dont give a F
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Anecdotally, carriers (workers who make deliveries) rank the importance of items by the type of postage used. They typically treat anything below first-class mail as junk.
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This is interesting considering anything I order from Amazon with it's "Prime shipping" label no longer shows up within two days. I've watched items be shipped through my local city then go off across the country before coming back then getting delivered three to four days late. Amazon needs to pay the USPS more, but they won't. Amazon claims once they ship it then the location of the item is no longer their responsibility. I disagree... I paid Amazon for the item(s), not the USPS.
Get rid of DeJoy or he'll kill the USPS and keep the profits.
Get rid of DeJoy or he'll kill the USPS and keep the profits.
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This has been a continuing problem here in Sonora, CA. Last winter, Amazon packages completely overwhelmed our local post office. There was a huge pile of Az packages out back of the building, with trucks adding more much faster than they could be delivered. The pile was (somewhat) protected from snowfall by an ever-growing set of tarps.
The PO staff said they had no authority to pause or even slow Amazon truck deliveries. This eventually led to ~2 week delivery delays for all packages. Staff sorted packages into critical stuff (medications) and made them available for pickup. It was a mess for everyone. Not looking forward to this Christmas.
The PO staff said they had no authority to pause or even slow Amazon truck deliveries. This eventually led to ~2 week delivery delays for all packages. Staff sorted packages into critical stuff (medications) and made them available for pickup. It was a mess for everyone. Not looking forward to this Christmas.
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