U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

i’m so fucking upset - i had christmas presents almost prepped to send next week because i knew with slowdown they would take forever

here’s the full list of affected destinations from USPS.com

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international/welcome.htm

The last time I tried to mail something to family in Australia I want to say they were asking $70 to send a $10 book, so we'd pretty much just given up sending things, anyway.

i send stuff 4 or 5 times a year! all my family are there

I started as a carrier last week, haven't been scared away yet haha

When the f are they going to get rid of DeJoy?

if Biden or anybody in the White House could, he'd be gone. but the Board of Governors are the only ones who can and they're not unhappy w/ him cos they're also sons of bitches

true, but, as noted above, Biden etc could remove the pre-funding nonsense if they wanted

so I guess that's the next thing I yell at my Senators about

(I guess my point is, that would help even if Dejoy remained)

geoffreyess wow! what's it like?

If the new service standards weren't cover for further crippling the Post Office, I think it would probably be a good thing to normalize packages taking longer to be shipped across this giant country. Have a special class of faster service for medicine (the opposite of media mail) but let general Priority take 7 business days to get from New York to California.

wow! what's it like?

all the walking and going into random buildings I've always wanted, but the staffing/overtime situation is uh quite something, so we'll see how I feel in a few weeks or months. everyone's incredibly nice.

lol like an open-world game where all the doors work

what is the staffing/overtime situation

Good luck, Geof!

To be fair the Australian postal service is fucked right now because they have so many staff isolating for COVID reasons (who’d have thought people who move around the community and interact with thousands would be high risk)

I just had an express mail thing take three days from Portland to Sydney and sit there for a week. Regular price packages sit in Sydney for weeks.

Last Christmas DHL was quicker and cheaper sending from Australia using a Pack and Send shop. Doesn’t seem to be the case going the other way, though.

not at all :(

OK, just giving it a glance I can see why this no mail to the Antipodes makes some degree of sense. First, it's supposedly temporary. Second, it's because New Zealand and Australia (to name two) have had next to no flights from the US since they locked everything down. Given the US mail often piggy backs on commercial flights, there just aren't any/many planes going in and out of those countries right now. Supposedly things are set to be back on track come November.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/consumers-fume-after-us-postal-service-suspends-australian-deliveries-20211001-p58wb8.html

Australia Post said it was affected by a global shortage of aircraft and reduced passenger flights.

“Postal operators around the world are experiencing limited international flight capacity,” a spokeswoman said.

“While Australia Post continues to accept all incoming international deliveries, the US Postal Service has temporarily suspended some outgoing parcel services to a number of countries, including Australia, due to air freight capacity issues.”

The anticipated reopening of international borders in November will likely ease the air freight capacity issues.

“More international passenger flights will add capacity to the freight moved across the border and presents opportunities for all industries, including postal services,” said Peter Liddell, a logistics expert and partner at professional services firm KPMG.

But he said the resumption of United States Postal Service deliveries would depend on which routes reopened.

The federal government invested more than $1 billion in the International Freight Assistance Mechanism, a scheme designed to keep Australia’s key international air-freight routes open during the pandemic.

The scheme was introduced last year, shortly after the pandemic hit, forcing the number of commercial passenger flights to drop more than 90 per cent. It prioritises the export of high-value perishable products and the import of medical supplies, equipment and other goods of national importance.

lol like an open-world game where all the doors work

yeah!

what is the staffing/overtime situation

similar to what's been mentioned above: ~60 hr weeks, limited days off, longer routes, not enough carriers / lots of turnover. hard to tell this early on how much of that is artificially created and how much isn't (e.g. # of addresses in my zip code has exploded recently). definitely looks like a hiring blitz locally, but I don't know what normal is.

Good luck, Geof!

thanks!

Yesterday was my birthday, and lo and behold, the package from the UK that I was very worried about arrived, alongside two other packages containing book orders. I was a very happy lad.

I know I've often seemed to have better luck with the USPS than other posters in this thread, but I am feeling particularly positive about them today. 17 days ago, I accidentally dropped an envelope into the slot with no postage on it. I've been waiting ever since for it to pop up in my PO Box (the listed return address). Well, today I received an email from the company I sent it to, acknowledging receipt! Whether it showed up there postage due and they'll hit me with a surcharge for that, I can't say, but I'm fucking amazed that the USPS delivered it with no postage. (I will not be trying this trick again.)

Not the post office, but wow:

Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K

— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022

Damn.

wow

interesting follow-up https://www.lataco.com/union-pacific-theft-police-laid-off/

who could have predicted!! it_is_a_mystery

Re-fund the police?

more like security guards josh in chicago

I guess I was confused by the references to the railroad police force, Union Pacific Police, the Union Pacific Police department, and the picture of someone with "Police" on their police uniform. But ... not police? OK, re-fund the Union Pacific (not) police, then.

well, fun fact! railroad police *are* police with police powers in the state they are in, but they are paid to do so by the railroad on railroad property. and, by federal law, their state police powers transfer to other states as they move or are transferred between states.

relocate the police

josh in chicago there's no hypocrisy or bad faith in, on the one hand, having serious problems with the whole concept of police departments as presently constituted on the other hand, rolling my damn eyes at railroads laying off the people whose job it was to guard their shit and then complaining that everyone is stealing their shit

the union pacific police department, as far as i know, is not called into domestic disputes to brandish their firearms, they do not accost young black men walking home from a friend's house and tell them to empty their pockets, etc etc etc you donut so spare me the easy zing

just the laziest regressive sub-conan gag you could have made and ordinarily i wouldn't respond but i dunno sometimes i just don't feel like letting it slide!

oh i completely missed the point of josh's post!

Train robbery has also been around since forever. Railroads have had their own private 'police' forces, commonly known as 'railroad bulls' since forever, too, but big part of the job has always been to break the heads of anyone attempting to ride the rails for free.

let me Aimless that for you

I do love you all

jeez, take it easy, everyone. if you can't make lazy sub-Conan (?) easy zings about train robberies, then what is ilx even for?

copaganda working on JiC, Manchurian Candidating ILX: 🧵

THREAD. I noticed something fascinating: around the same time in recent days, each major corporate news source began talking about a new crime hysteria: a supposed crisis of theft from the railroad industry. But if you look deeper, something very scary is happening.

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) January 22, 2022

somehow this whole story ended up on the USPS thread, when its not even about mail theft (which btw is a federal crime)

good thread sic, thank you

yes, thank you, abolish the police now plz

like if the liberal media could maybe just approach anything other than absolutely baby-brained credulity when reporting cop shit

they are just doing their job, upholding hegemony

Good thread, thanks sic.

Also Aimless is right, most railroad bulls are the same as any other numbskull cop. I've been chased by a few in my lifetime, and they suck.

Had a package due to me today, as of about 6 it was out for delivery. But when I checked a bit ago it was suddenly "insufficient address - return to sender". Google tells me that either it was indeed returned to sender, which means I have to contact them and wait god knows how long for it to come back or, as happens sometimes, the carrier was overloaded today and scanned it as such to game the metrics and not have it count against them.

Knowing better than to call the main 1-800 number, I called the local post office this morning. Creeping up on 90 minutes on hold so far. Either still understaffed, or their morale is (understandably) sufficiently low to the point where they just do not give a fuck.

even like.....6 years ago I was having that problem with my post office (where I couldn't get anybody on the phone). gotta imagine now it's multiplied 100 fold nationwide.

I mean, I get it. Things are awful there, not much I can do, but wait. I planned for some hold time, but didn't anticipate needing to book a full business day being on hold.

yeah, sadly "driving down there" seems to be the only option, and then it's waiting in a 2 hour line :/

It's just annoying because a lot of the advice I'm seeing online is to try and contact them ASAP, in my specific situation, because you can sometimes catch them before it gets shipped back. Couldn't go in person today because of work, but I apparently will waste my entire day today on hold and all day tomorrow standing in line. I mean, c'mon, I know it's the USPS and my expectations should be sufficiently lowered, but I would imagine they can't just provide absolutely zero customer support.

Holy shit, hit almost two and a half hours and they hung up on me. This is infuriating.