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Post by jdd2 on Nov 28, 2023 14:45:03 GMT -5
wapo.st/3N4Fr3JNo need to comment, it's all been said in the comments there.
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Post by Marty on Nov 28, 2023 18:37:57 GMT -5
Amazon is paying SOMEBODY to be able to demand priority over the US Mail. Even if it is a legal business agreement between the USPS and Amazon people's mail should take priority over a new toaster.
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Post by theevan on Nov 28, 2023 21:00:53 GMT -5
Millring has been giving us a blow-by-blow of all this, but seeing it like this makes my blood boil. John has, if anything, understated the magnitude of the problem. It's testament to his fortitude he's kept ait this long.
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Post by Marty on Nov 28, 2023 23:49:15 GMT -5
It's the modern business management attitude of having employees do more for less. Why should Amazon hire their own drivers if they can get a deal with the USPS to deliver for them.
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Post by jdd2 on Nov 29, 2023 4:47:21 GMT -5
Millring has been giving us a blow-by-blow of all this, but seeing it like this makes my blood boil. John has, if anything, understated the magnitude of the problem. It's testament to his fortitude he's kept ait this long. Yeah, the early version of that story right here. The comments seem to (mis?)attribute some blame for the situation that's not in the article, certain people in congress, besides the appointment of dejoy. I'm with Marty on the US mail being something that should have priority. Instead, let the boxes (as junk mail) pile up and be delayed for days. |
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Post by millring on Nov 29, 2023 6:34:54 GMT -5
The $6 billion a year deficit? ....that's your "free shipping". Like everything else Americans feel we have a right to (health care, electric cars, electricity) we simply put it on the tab that at this point we actually already know can never be paid down, much less off.
For the love of God, it isn't DeJoy who got us into this. And the knee-jerk willingness to blame him (as if blaming will solve the problem) is as intellectually shallow as a one-quart-of-water, 20 acre pond. The contract was entered into before DeJoy. If it's politics and you MUST keep score, that's the Obama administration.
The contract was entered into to save the USPS. To the extent that it lowered the annual deficit from double digit billions to upper single digit billions may look like success to you, but that short term success happened because it has taken a while for the Amazon to take its toll on:
Infrastructure -- our vehicles weren't made for parcel delivery and neither were the postal workers. Our trucks, dollies, trays -- everything we work with -- is on its last legs. And the solution to the trucks? ...the new Metris? ...it's even HARDER to do the parcel work and mail with (but at least it has a heater that works in the winter). Like everything else we try to get by, it is simply stop-gap. It wasn't designed to carry mail OR parcels. It's simply the cheapest solution for the short term.
Personnel: For two days now we have had 3 subs (me and two other guys) covering 10 routes. The regulars are beaten to death with well over 200 parcels every day -- many of them the cat litter/dog food 50# boxes. The doctors and chiropractors can't keep up and can't keep them going. Even if they could, when do they make appointments in a 14 hour work day? Yesterday our supervisor (who, to his credit is putting in as many hours as us subs) collapsed on the job. As I was leaving the office with the parcels and mail that was going to keep me out until 9:45, I saw him sitting dazedly in his chair (he had been helped across the workroom floor and set there to wait). His sweaty face was a combination of confused and scared. The ambulance that was coming to pick him up met me in the parking lot as I was pulling away. Amazon is killing us.
And new subs come in, see the impossibility of the task, and quit. Another resigned yesterday after being assigned our biggest route....because that regular was home sick. Again.
And, yes, the mail is sitting while Amazon is going out. But here's the newest wrinkle. This time...this year....we are SO understaffed that even the Amazon is not getting delivered. At 9-9:30PM we have been bringing back hundreds of parcels we ran out of time delivering -- even though we've cut the mail.
Management thinks they just need to tell us to work harder and faster. What else can they do? ...the Amazon contract to which we are heavily over-committed is nevertheless the only thing paying some of our cost of doing business.
And, yes, the mail is sitting while Amazon is going out. But here's the newest wrinkle. This time...this year....we are SO understaffed that even the Amazon is not getting delivered. At 9-9:30 we are bringing back hundreds of parcels we ran out of time delivering. Even though we've cut the mail.
Management thinks the just need to tell us to work harder and faster. What else can they do? ...the Amazon contract to which we are heavily over-committed is nevertheless the only thing paying some of our cost of doing business.
oh. and we aren't even at "peak" season yet. We haven't even started delivering "cyber Monday" orders.
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Post by millring on Nov 29, 2023 6:58:17 GMT -5
let the boxes (as junk mail) pile up and be delayed for days. Where? |
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Post by jdd2 on Nov 29, 2023 7:30:23 GMT -5
While I'd've first said outside somewhere, just let all the boxes pile up, how about--since there's no place for it--just don't unload it/let it be unloaded?
'The contract' for the shipping of parcels apparently dates to 2013, and according to one comment "the Postal Service "considers the contract proprietary" and won't disclose it." So does this contract run indefinitely? This is now its 10th anniversary (if I've got the math right). So may it's time for some new contract terms.
And note that I'm not blaming or assigning responsibility to anyone here, least of all you.
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Post by dradtke on Nov 29, 2023 10:27:50 GMT -5
Am I the only one who remembers discussions - here and elsewhere in the news - that the Post Office was just another wasteful government boondoggle filled with fat and sassy union employees who were paid for eight hours when it only took them five to do their route? All the result of public service unions whose lazy members voted in Democrats who would then turn around and raise their salaries in exchange? We should get rid of the Post Office and the public unions and turn everything over to efficient privately-owned for-profits like FedEx who were the only ones who could make things work?
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Post by Russell Letson on Nov 29, 2023 11:55:14 GMT -5
Not the only one. I've been following this story for years, including the 2006 law that saddled USPS with post-retirement medical-funding rules that no private company would tolerate and no other government agency had to work under. That 75-year rule was finally revoked last year. But even before 2006, some conservatives clearly saw the PO as a (unionized!) government boondoggle that ought to be privatized. (And, to be fair, conservative legislators from rural districts tended to support it because it benefited their constituents.) And a good deal of more recent PO hostility seems to have been rooted in Trump's opposition to mail-in voting. (The fact that the governing board of the USPS is overwhelmingly GOP/fundraiser-connected might be relevant, but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now.) On edit: Here's an interesting op-ed piece from 2012 that examines a lot of the classic privatization arguments. www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-07-la-fi-hiltzik-20120808-story.html |
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Post by millring on Nov 29, 2023 21:45:11 GMT -5
It's not working. It hasn't worked for decades. Mail's necessity has diminished past the point of needing such a big institution to carry it off.
But if you want the post office to carry on and offer you free shipping for the things you want, and cheap shipping for the things you want to send -- subsidized by the growing debt of the post office -- then for god's sake pitch in and do your part. Get a mailbox appropriate to the amount ordering you do. Have VISIBLE numbers on your mailbox and your house. Keep the lights on. Clear the walkways. Kwitcher bitchin about poor service. You get what you pay for and you're not paying squat.
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Post by John B on Nov 29, 2023 22:50:51 GMT -5
Personally, I think the people (including me) incurring the cost of shipping by ordering products should be the ones paying to get stuff delivered to them (me). This season I've ordered a number of things from small businesses, and I've paid for shipping. It shouldn't be a foreign concept, and I blame Amazon.
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Dub
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Post by Dub on Nov 29, 2023 23:30:22 GMT -5
It's not working. It hasn't worked for decades. Mail's necessity has diminished past the point of needing such a big institution to carry it off. But if you want the post office to carry on and offer you free shipping for the things you want, and cheap shipping for the things you want to send -- subsidized by the growing debt of the post office -- then for god's sake pitch in and do your part. Get a mailbox appropriate to the amount ordering you do. Have VISIBLE numbers on your mailbox and your house. Keep the lights on. Clear the walkways. Kwitcher bitchin about poor service. You get what you pay for and you're not paying squat. We do all of that. I only wish it could benefit you and your coworkers directly. I also think Amazon and their ilk should either pay the entire, fair, cost of their shipping and treat that as a cost of goods sold or add the complete shipping cost to the price of each item. They can use UPS, FedEx, or their own trucks and warehouses. Amazon has become more convenient and cheaper for the individual buyer than local stores. We need to stop subsidizing them so the total cost of storage and delivery is included in the amount paid by the consumer. |
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Nov 29, 2023 23:54:53 GMT -5
It’s a complex problem. Often, brick and mortar stores don’t have the product you want, but Amazon does.
Mike
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Dub
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Post by Dub on Nov 30, 2023 0:07:10 GMT -5
It’s a complex problem. Often, brick and mortar stores don’t have the product you want, but Amazon does. Mike That was true before Amazon as well. Local stores could special-order things for us or we could order from a choice of catalog stores. What we didn’t necessarily have was instant gratification. |
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Post by millring on Nov 30, 2023 6:38:17 GMT -5
Am I the only one who remembers discussions - here and elsewhere in the news - that the Post Office was just another wasteful government boondoggle filled with fat and sassy union employees who were paid for eight hours when it only took them five to do their route? All the result of public service unions whose lazy members voted in Democrats who would then turn around and raise their salaries in exchange? We should get rid of the Post Office and the public unions and turn everything over to efficient privately-owned for-profits like FedEx who were the only ones who could make things work? You're not making a case for the Post Office. You're trying to continue an argument that happened some time in history, and apparently you felt as though somebody attacked an institution you admire -- public sector unions. The way you framed your grievances only characterizes real problems in a manner you appear to think will make it sound unreasonable to argue with. For instance, Rural Postal workers WERE working 5 hours and getting paid for 9.5 hours. The Rucker brothers, Julie, Alisha, Annette in the regular (non-peak) season were working 5-7 hours and getting paid for 9-9.5 hours. It was a complicated calculation, but in the end, they were the winners. Until Amazon. They can still beat the evaluated clock, but the physical nature of parcels is now taking its toll. But the rural carrier being paid by evaluated time demonstrated that the city carriers -- paid strictly hourly -- were "pacing" themselves. What is possibly going to happen is that the rural carrier contract will be re-negotiated and will end up like the city contract. Rural carriers will probably go hourly and have to work multiple routes because Amazon is making entry into the job nearly impossible (I've outlasted almost 30 RCA hires in three years. Nobody can do it). Public sector unions are problematic. Private sector unions bargain against management AND the company's (and therefore their own employment's) survival. That's absent from public sector unions and it's proven time and again that bargaining against an entity that can and will continue to go into debt instead of collapsing ... will ultimately only lead to what will probably be a more catastrophic collapse that should have been corrected for ... but didn't need to be because we could simply put ever more "on the tab". But I think that history has moved on from your grievances -- not because anyone won some political battle, but because technology has made the Post Office's historical role -- carrying mail -- an unnecessary part of modern life. What the post office used to do has gone the way of hula hoops, vinyl records, and good music. You can still find all three, but they aren't a meaningful part of the mainstream of American life. Additionally, there has always been a (at least) third way of framing what's happening. Were there people who wanted the Post Office to fail and be taken over by private enterprise? Absolutely. But there has always also been those who are merely expressing the obvious: 1. The Post Office offers a service that has been so marginalized by technology that it has become unnecessary in its current state. 2. Private enterprise is poised to take over the only fraying rope from which the Post Office has been dangling for the past ten years -- parcel delivery. And eventually the Post Office is going to fail at this service because we don't have the infrastructure (our trucks, buildings, and equipment were made for MAIL, not parcels...and to re-equip at this point in our indebtedness is not probable) or the manpower (our force is aging and parcel carrying is polishing it off at a frightful pace). So, I get the anger in your snarky post. It's been heated debate in the past. I just think that the discussion and the issue have moved on. |
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Post by Cornflake on Nov 30, 2023 7:07:45 GMT -5
The article leaves me pissed off about all this. I think the postal service should be something the government provides even to dinky communities at the end of the road, just as the government provides the highway that reaches their town.
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Post by drlj on Nov 30, 2023 8:04:18 GMT -5
There was not anything snarky or angry in David’s post.
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Post by Cornflake on Nov 30, 2023 9:23:57 GMT -5
As an aside, the internet has created the potential for a lot of mail to be obsolete. There would be no need to transmit information via any tangible medium, such as paper, if access to the internet were more nearly universal. It might look as if we're already there to middle-class white guys on a computer forum but in my estimation we're not. Eventually we'll need to rethink and revamp the postal service in a pretty comprehensive way.
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Post by epaul on Nov 30, 2023 10:29:07 GMT -5
If a business offers "free shipping", they are still paying to have the item shipped, they just tack their cost of shipping onto the base price of the product and their cost of doing business. There is no free shipping. A company contracts and pays for shipping. Which means, one way or another, the customer covers the cost of the business or the business goes out of business.
If business, shipping or otherwise, makes a bad deal and signs onto something it can't deliver or manage, that is another matter. But, for the company and the customer, there is no free shipping, it is just a matter of how the cost of doing business is packaged.
(Prime isn't free/ And any 'cost of shipping' advantage Amazon has over a "brick and mortar" is dependent on scale and what the shipping entity is willing to discount for that dependable volume of business a large outfit can deliver. ((fill a big truck at Amazon or run a bunch of smaller trucks all over town at greater expense)).
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