Man, times are tough.
Even the normally indefatigable post office, giver of the many and extended holidays to their workers, seems to be cutting back. This weekend, they announced they’ll be chopping 3,000 jobs. Well, they ARE offering up a little bit of a parachute that’s more in line with their cushy-job ways. A quarter of the current workers will be given an opportunity to take an early retirement.
Hooray, no more postalnivore dogs nipping at their heels.
(I was going to make another joke about their jobs being cancelled like stamps, but my philatelist vocabulary is not really up to snuff right this minute.)
They hope to save over a hundred million smackers a year through the cuts. As a frequent USPS customer, I gotta say that I’m a little concerned. Our “service” has declined considerably over the years. From mis-delivered items (we get some of our neighbor’s mail every few weeks) to waiting in long lines at the post office (I used to send about 3 packages a week due to Ebay and other obligations), the quality of service is already shaky as it is. Oh, we have a few excellent mailpeople - but the bad eggs in the bunch like to deliver my Victoria’s Secret catalog with the good parts ripped out. And so on.
Additionally, I always had aspirations of becoming a mailman. Great benefits, exercise included in the job, and frequent mid-morning trysts with the Real Housewives of Orange County. They already had a huge waiting list for mailpeople - you can forget about getting a job there now.
All my dreams have shattered like so many jars of kalamata olives in an uncushioned Priority Mail Box…
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter in your bag for me, I’ve been waiting a long long time, so don’t get armpit sweat on that letter of mine]
Add to del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble Upon
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:37 am
You know, it wasn’t really till you pointed it out that I gave it more thought and realized that yeah, the quality in service has gone way down. We get misdelivered mail frequently. When we first moved into our house, we got a message in our mailbox telling us to fix it because it was “leaning too much”. And if we didn’t they would suspend mail delivery until we did. What the hell?! I had some chat with folks over that.
Thankfully that was not our regular mail lady but a sub while she was on vacation. I like our current mail lady alot but one good apple doesn’t make up for all the bad.
And aren’t prices of stamps supposed to go up again in May or something? Jeesh.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:32 am
@andrea - oh man, don’t get me started on the price of postage! We used to have a regular mailman who was super nice, knew us by name and delivered everything perfectly. For some reason they switched it so that now our mail is delivered by at least 3 different people, ugh.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
The main problem with the postal service and prices is that they really can’t profit due to obligations to deliver in non-profitable areas. That is, doing service in rural areas costs more than they can ever make from processing and delivering mail to those areas. To make up for this, they have to charge more and more, but it’s a losing battle. Unlike FedEx or UPS, which can simply refuse to offer service to unprofitable areas, the postal service is required by law to deliver mail to anyone anywhere. It’d be nice if they could privatize (they’re semi-privatized now) and become profitable, but that simply would not work due to the laws surrounding how they must do business.
The main reason it’s hard for regular folks to get jobs with them is that they prioritize military veterans and the disabled. The work is awful though. My uncle used to be a postal worker and it’s tedious and soul draining, and retirement isn’t all that cushy. He works as a supermarket bag boy to supplement his retirement income after more than 20 years with the postal service. Probably your mail is delivered by three different people to rotate jobs so people aren’t going crazy with the repetitive work in one area, or they’ve hired more part-timers so they don’t have to give benefits to full-timers.
It’s all rather unfortunate, and I don’t think there is a solution to the issues as long as they are required to serve every individual in the United States in the same manner, and I don’t see how they can really do otherwise. It’s really more of a socialized delivery service provided by the government than an actual business.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:17 am
I hate USPS. I swear it’s like they break every other package they send us. I think they should drop the semi-privitization idea and go back to being a government institutuion. The only reason to use them is that it’s cheaper, and they’d lose that if the were no longer subsidized. They can’t drop service for unprofitable rural areas, then those people wouldn’t be able to pay thier bills, including thier taxes. Then the government would have to pay for revenue collectors to visit everyone in those areas any way, using whatever money they saved by not having to pay for the post office.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:48 am
@orchid, @holly - yeah, I think it’s sort of a stereotype that all postal workers have cushy jobs and take the maximum number of holidays a year. A lot of times I’m writing in jest. I should probably have added that the service from the private guys, FedEx and UPS, can be just as bad. It has actually been WORSE as a percentage of the times the service has been used. FedEx and UPS has had about 2 out of 5 packages delivered to us broken (we sometimes buy collectibles that are breakable). The good thing is that insurance is included in many of those packages shipped, whereas USPS in most cases you have to buy something extra. But anyhow, about 90% of the time it’s the fault of the sellers for not packing it well - so maybe I shouldn’t be killing the messenger =)
March 26th, 2009 at 7:04 am
As much as I don’t like the post office, FedEx is worse. My husband gets insulin through the VA, and they will only give it to him by mail, through FedEx. They wouldn’t leave it without a signature, and wouldn’t let us pick it up without a door tag, which they didn’t leave. I doubt it’s any good now, because it wasn’t refrigerated the whole 2 weeks they had it.