The United States Postal Service

There have been a couple threads over the past day or so regarding the USPS and its finances. In those threads, there has been a great deal of misinformation posted; clearly, someone who knows something about the USPS should say something. As a postal employee for about fifteen years, I am intimately familiar with the organization and how it works as seen from the point of view of those who actually sort the mail.

As a rule, I have found that the general public has no idea at all of how we do what we do, the effort- often backbreaking effort, literally- involved in moving the mail, and yes, the dangers the workers face- even ordinary plant workers like myself. It is a very complicated system that has been developed to provide universal service to all addresses in the country. I'm not going to talk about rates or labor/management issues here; however, I think you deserve to know how we do what we do.

I could just resurrect an old post or two of mine, but I think I'll take the effort to just rewrite what I've written before. Thus, I give you

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A LETTER.

Hai! I'm a letter, and you just dropped me into a blue box or your own mailbox. Your local carrier will pick me up soon; I'm stamped and ready to sort! You've clearly- CLEARLY- written the destination address on the front of me, didn't you? Oh, well, no matter. The machines that will sort me can puzzle it out- oh, but I'm jumping ahead of myself. Let's go off to the plant!

Now that I'm actually in the mailstream at my Processing and Distribution Center, things really get rolling. I'm dumped into an orange, plastic hamper along with hundreds of other unsorted letters. Gosh, it's crowded in here! We're all facing every which way, some of us are getting bent or even folded, and our addresses are directing us every which way in the local area. WOW! There's one going to England, and another that's written in Cyrillic! I guess we're destined to go all over the globe in this group!

Whoa, what's this? We're all being swung up into the air! Oh, I see- were being dumped wholesale onto a conveyor belt. Gosh, this is quite the ride! But I'm told I haven't seen anything yet. Now that I'm on the belt with all the other mail, I can see that there are rotating drums up ahead with a set gap at the bottom. Larger versions of my companions- envelopes with a thickness to them, for the most part- are being diverted to another part of the machine, but I'm just a letter, so I'll go right on through.

I've dropped onto another belt now and.... what the hell?!??! There's a fast-moving pair of belts up ahead! The letters in front of me are getting pulled into the belts and flying off between them with a quickness. I'm getting squashed between some other letters now, and I can see some metal "fingers" holding us in place until we each go through individually.

What was that giant sucking sound? That's the biohazard detector. The USPS uses this to detect anthrax in the envelopes, and if it's found, the whole facility closes; the employees are evacuated, stripped, and sprayed down, and I guess they have to surrender everything they brought to work with them for destruction. Wow, that's quite a sacrifice hanging over their heads- all their cash, electronics (from an Ipod to a laptop), even their keys! I'm glad I didn't have any anthrax in me!

Well, now I'm in another part of the machine and that was a camera! This is pretty high-tech stuff- the camera just read what you wrote on the front of me and used optical character recognition software to puzzle out your very handwriting. And it does it with incredible speed, so much so that tens of thousands of letters per hour can be read in this way. Oohh, now that tickled... I just got sprayed with a barcode.

That barcode is pretty important; the machinery up ahead will use that to determine how I'm sorted. Now that I have that information, the machine's operator is putting me into a tray with a whole bunch of other letters, all neatly stacked from one end to the other, and all of us faced the right direction. I guess the machine has belts that twist once to flip us, but I didn't have to go through that part- I was lucky enough to be faced the right way to begin with.

I'm in a tall metal cart now, a holding container with around thirty other trays full of letters. There must be thousands of us in here! Are we ready to go through another machine? Well, ready or not, here we go! I'm being inducted into a machine called a Delivery BarCode Sorter now. This machine will sort me and all the others at high speed into one of up to 270 (or even more) stackers on the machine. I'll whip around through the belts, and in front of another camera that will read my barcode. That barcode tells the machine where I'm ultimately bound, and the machine's sortplan will use that information to send me to the proper stacker.

I'm a little bit closer to being ready to be delivered now, but there are still two major steps to perform. This will involve two more passes through the same type of equipment I just went through. I know, I know- it sounds redundant, but it's actually vitally necessary. On the first pass through the machine, I and the other letters bound for a specific locale will be put into a sequence in the overall first pass run. At this point, there aren't any specific locales to worry about- each tray is labeled Seq. 1, Seq. 2, Seq. 3, and so on. Here we go!

Now that the first pass is complete, I'm going into the second pass. This is called the Delivery Point Sequence operation, and it's an ingenious way to help your local carrier do their job. After the first pass is complete, the second pass sorts the mail into each individual carrier's "walk sequence"- the exact path the carrier will take when making his or her rounds. The machine "knows" which sequence I'm a part of, and (assuming all the trays are "in sequence") sorts me to my proper place automatically. Again, this is done at a speed of tens of thousands of pieces per hour, so I know I'll be getting to my destination soon!

I'm going onto a truck now, in the same sort of container I've been staged in this whole time. Amazing! In a single day, I've been collected, faced, had my destination determined, been sprayed with a barcode, sorted at least three times through a DBCS machine, placed into the carrier's route sequence, and now I'm on my way to the local office for delivery. Wherever I'm going, I'll be loaded into the carrier's truck, and then it's delivery time!

---

The above deals only with a single letter. The USPS uses a large amount of high-tech equipment to sort the mail. Perhaps the most impressive, visually speaking, is the Automated Flat Sorting Machine, or AFSM. This monster of a machine has something like eighteen computers inside it, and can sort large, "flat" envelopes, magazines, and letters that cannot be sorted on a DBCS. Many of the magazines and all large envelopes are sorted on this equipment; it's a mazelike contraption with conveyors, elevators, and a long, rotating carousel equipped with buckets that literally drop the mail into its respective bin.

People, this is often backbreaking labor. The carts we push and pull around weigh hundreds to thousands of pounds apiece, and they all need to be moved prior to being sorted. Pallets of advertising mail- officially, "Presort Standard"; colloquially, "junk mail"- come in by the dozen, each loaded with thousands upon thousands of pieces of mail. We have to take off each cardboard sleeve, stage the trays on carts, and move them for processing, lift them again onto the machine- trays which can weigh upward of fifty pounds apiece- and load them into the machines, tray by tray. This part isn't automatic in most cases- many plants, such as the one I work in, do not have the system (called the Tray Management System) that is used to do all the bulk movement automatically.

Employee injury is a constant danger. I had a fingernail torn off last fall by a falling metal shelf, and I could as easily have lost the fingertip. Other employees have suffered nerve damage and repetitive motion injuries, serious back problems, and of course the ever-present danger of muscle strain. We have to constantly be aware of where we are and what we're about; the equipment we use can (and has been known to) bite off fingers. One employee a few years ago was killed in a facility near me while working on the above-mentioned flat sorting machine, and a year or so ago a city carrier slipped on some ice and was impaled through the head by one of those plastic marker rods sticking up out of the snow that people use to find the curb in a snowdrift.

It's a dangerous job, and for the most part- for those of us who work in the distribution centers, at least- bluntly unrewarding. It's noisy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work, but it has to be done. Were the USPS to collapse tomorrow, the economy would crash completely- we really do handle that much critical information. I shudder to think of the value of the registered mail that goes through our facility- that's mail that is sent in a special way and closely watched and guarded the entire time: things like end-of-week store receipts, mail that has been insured, confidential mail too sensitive to be included in the rest of the mailstream, and so on. It's work so critical it's performed in a cage within the distribution center itself, a locked wire box that cannot be entered by anyone but the scheduled employee(s).

I hope I've helped to describe the how of what we do in the USPS. Bear in mind, this was only one small aspect of the overall operation; I didn't cover parcels, priority mail, express mail, or the manual operation at all. The automation section is but one little part of what the USPS does. Hopefully, you now have a little greater understanding of what's involved. It's a very complex process, and we do it millions of times a day.

I am always annoyed when people bitch and complain about the post office.
It is truly amazing what they accomplish!
And for a price that can't be beat.

If it could be beat, then I'm sure that UPS, FEDEX et al would be all over the daily mail service.

They know that you can't make a profit so they don't get into the market.

If the USPS is privatized, some locations will be very unprofitable to deliver to- say, Nome, AK. Their service will suffer; I can only imagine the delay a Postal Corporation would impose on such places.

Fed Ex and UPS have their own drop boxes all over the place. It isn't too much of a stretch to think that if they thought there was an opportunity they could expand their operations.

have reached their destination THE NEXT DAY!

That said, the neighboring town has a crappy post office. It's so bad, people use mine instead.

From what the clerks tell me, some employees in certain areas might not be the brightest bulbs and the managers are sometimes really not too bright either.

I would hope not because as we know about 99% of it gets trashed immediately upon receipt. Hardly worth all the backbreaking effort.. imo.

The USPS helps bulk mailers with the databases that make that possible. In exchange the mailers get a lower rate for their postage.

thanks.

The standard mail that comes in on pallets of dozens of trays and thousands of pieces usually already has a barcode and is presorted to the first three digits of their destination ZIP code, but it does get inducted into the initial sort, and then the Delivery Point Sequence operation, along with all the other mail.

Because those large mailers send their advertising in bulk, they pay a lower rate per piece than that of a first-class letter. This doesn't bother me in the least; the revenue generated by those mass mailings helps keep the price of a first-class stamp low. What does bother me is the complete lack of any hard-and-fast "standard" for "standard mail".

Because we use high-speed machinery to sort the mail, the quality of each piece is very important. The absolute best standard mail, from a sorting standpoint, is the 3x5 index card. These zip through our machines so fast they literally blur. But the absolute slowest and hardest to deal with are the thick ones (Haband! and Paralyzed Veterans of America, I'm looking at you), mailings with coins in them, church offering envelopes, and thick pamphlet-like catalogs.

And Publisher's Clearinghouse. Oh, ye gods, Publisher's Clearinghouse. These thick envelopes are often unevenly loaded, and regularly "squirt" out onto the floor from the feed belt, much like a liquid. They move much more slowly through the machines and often cause jams, or the plastic "window" on the front reflects the light from the camera so it can't properly read the barcode, etc., & etc.

If we had a true "standard" for "Presort Standard" mail, we'd be a lot better off!

such a huge amount of material moved and delivered that usually isn't wanted (that's key --and it's really hard to stop, if not impossible altogether), material that's thrown away unopened -or only opened in order to dispose/shred, material that's a nuisance, etc.

keeping the cost of a stamp down? you mean we need to waste resources for a stamp to be a price you find acceptable? no we don't. yes, the way the USPS operates and charges depends on that now --but we don't need to do it that way forever.

I do wish there was an easy fix for the post office. It is troubling.

Currently, the USPS is the only government or private agency, company, or corporation that is required by law to pre-fund its retiree health benefits. That fund has been overpaid by billions; on another thread regarding the USPS from a day or two ago, it was mentioned that Rep. Issa famously said the USPS doesn't deserve to have that money back.

Revoking that requirement, as I understand it, would return the USPS to financial health.

USPS has to pay those benefits at some point.. right? Also, isnt the USPS operating at a loss even without the cost of pre-funding retiree benefits?

We're talking about tens of billions of dollars here that have been overpaid. And again, that appears to have been intentionally put into place by legislators with an eye to privatization.

You know- Republicans. They think everything can be done better, faster, and cheaper by private industry, and they have absolutely hated the fact that the USPS, from the 70s to today, has thus far proven them conclusively wrong about that.

then that changes the debate somewhat. I have not seen the details on the profit/loss split out without the retiree prepayment figure but I suspect USPS is still losing money considering all the other factors and issues.

The USPS would still be losing money, but (again, as I understand things) were it not for that requirement, and the prior overpayment, USPS would be in the black. Losing money, but in the black nonetheless.

That's a much easier situation to deal with.

Another problem is the almost total lack of forward-thinking on the part of upper postal management. They almost totally neglected the advent of email and the internet. While the USPS does have an online presence now, there are a few things missing.

One thing I think the USPS could do to strengthen its Internet position would be to offer a truly secure email service/ISP function to the public. I have no idea how it would go about doing so, though.

Another thing we could do is set up a "Standard Mail Scan" system, wherein postal customers could direct the USPS to open, scan, and send in email the images of the indicated standard mail. Since the customer would give permission for the USPS to do this, I don't think it would run afoul of existing laws. Those scanned pieces could then be sent to a postal recycling center and recycled, the end product for sale to the major mailers.

I'm just thinking out loud here; lots of people dislike "junk" mail, but for the moment, the revenue generated by it just cannot be ignored.

I think I'm going to puke. The good they do is a lot more important than how fast their mailings go through your machines!

I'm sorry we can't all mail 3" x 5" index cards so you can sit and let machines do all the work for you.

Which reminds me, speaking of waste, a recent change in procedure our local PO's are doing:

Our mail goes out to one of two large cities, just to be sent from one town to another one 5 miles away. That's right, depending on what day of the week it is (yes, this is what the postmaster explained), a letter being sent 5 miles has to go to a town 50 miles away (100 mile round trip) or one 150 miles away (300 mile round trip).

I asked why, and was stunned by the answer: Because mail's being sent to those cities' distribution centers, so that workers in post offices don't have to sort the mail for their own towns.

All this time wasted, all this pollution being belched into the air unnecessarily, for THAT?

And you're complaining about the Paralyzed Veterans of America mailings?

Don't you realize that your job is to handle the items we are sending, whatever they may be? It's not our job to make our mail fit some ideal, just because your machines are too poorly-designed to handle different types of mail.

It's this type of "the consumer works for us" thinking that's making people turn away in droves.

I'm not at all speaking to what they do or how they say it in the mailings. Those embedded coins cause us no end of grief.

Keep in mind, when these get to me, there are several hundred, sometimes thousands, of these. One coin stacked on another on another on another on the feed belt. If we walk away, they all fall off the machine.

I'm saying this more for their benefit than for mine; if their mailings were more reasonably loaded and shaped, they would enter the mailstream faster, and allow mailings behind them- first class OR standard- to get through faster. The thing you have to remember about the USPS is that we are efficient. We always do the best we can to ensure that all the mail is sorted properly, as quickly as possible. The PVA mailings aren't built to facilitate that core principle.

The system is complex because this is a large country and we need a robust system.

Workers are not allowed to sort mail for their own cities? Bull. I've sorted my very own mail on numerous occasions; you live where you live and if the mail goes through your plant on its way to you, fine. It's lost in the rest of the pile. There used to be a rule among the remote coders that they not code mailpieces for their own area because of potential bias, but I don't know if that's in place currently. I do know that was the case for remote coders because I was one of those once upon a time, too.

I've always found USPS to be both reliable and efficient and I'm both English and in the UK. Same applies to our Royal Mail here. Both are great outfits and neither should be privatised.

:D

Sure, shit happens, but it happens everywhere, and considering the amount of mail I've sent and received over the years, shit happens a lot less at the Post Office than most other large places I've dealt with.

FedEx and UPS can't find me half the time, and I MIGHT get a postcard from UPS two weeks later saying I have to drive 50 miles to their center to get some gadget I ordered online. If the Post Office isn't a delivery option, I don't order it.

I told the job to NEVER FedEx me anything that absolutely, positively has to get here on time. Express Mail it and I'll get it-- even on Saturday morning, and without the weekend charge.

Can you imagine UPS getting a letter across the country, or to an APO, for 44 cents? If the PO is privatized, better not have any friends in Hawaii, overseas, or in all those rural addresses UPS and FedEx don't deliver to.

I'm in a long process of moving, so I have a PO box now. That really screws up UPS.

driver will knock once on the door and then turn around and practically sprint for his truck, apparently trying to get to it before anyone can come to the door.

When you miss a delivery, they leave a note telling you that they will try again on a certain day, but you end up having to stay home all day--and then they always deliver it at the last possible moment--or else if you are gone even for a short time during the specified day, you caome home to another of those "attempt to delier" notes stuck to your door.

The only way to get your package is to drive some distance to a UPS station to pickit up yourelf.

I haev made it a rule never to order anything from a site that delivers by UPS, because I don't have the time to sit at home waiting for a re-delivery, nor the time to drive out to pick the darned package up.

I have had a couple USPS mail carriers that were problematic, but most have been great. But UPS always is a problem.

i was one of the people who made your life hell...i worked on the bindery lines at rr donnelly in mendota il. i know -actually- what you are talking about.

i think the worse line i worked on was the clear bagging line.ever run across a magazine that was black with a clear return address window? we ran almost 2000 before we could get the machine set up. other times we`d tape the bags. the machine was junk and it never did work right the years i was there.every run we find labels under the machine,stuck together,or other horrors. the right zip codes in a tagged bag? 95% of the time depending on the crew. the new bar code pallets?that depended on the post master checked before it was loaded on the truck. when people bitched about the mail i knew that it was`t just the us mail that was to fault.

i got the hell out of there 4 yrs ago..but that was to late to keep my shoulder from going to hell.

They play merry hell with the flat sorter because they stick to each other. Sometimes, the bags aren't properly separated from each other, and off three or four go to the same bin, there to be mis-sorted.

I know they're there to protect the magazines from being chewed up, but they really cause more problems than they solve.

for some time. Our route had close to 700 addresses on it. When I had people tell me that carriers didn't work hard, I would dare them to waive their arms in the air over their shoulders and heads, for 2 hours straight (as if sorting mail), and then sit down and get up 700 times over the next 6 hours. That would generally shut them up.

Also, as respects "junk mail", the USPS is obligated to deliver all mail according to what the sender pays for. If a junk mailer wants to pay first class, it will be treated as first class, or second, or bulk, and so on.

We do treat Standard Mail differently from First-class; Standard mail can be delayed for time to prioritize the first-class stuff. I do occasionally see first-class advertising mail, but it's the exception, rather than the rule.

of packages and never had a single problem.

I didn't know there was an "anthrax detector"!

It's amazing to me, really, that the vast majority of the mail gets to exactly where it's going among all those millions of other pieces. And though I bitch about price hikes like everyone else who does a lot of mailing, it's still a bargain compared to UPS and FedEx. You just have to know how to send items to get the best rates; sometimes Priority is cheaper than Parcel depending on how far it's going, and if you factor in the free tracking info you get if you pay online. And I love Media Mail, since I send a lot of books, and I don't actually find it to be significantly slower than First Class.

Fortunately, it was my only injury while employed. Thank goodness the fingers were not broken, but a bone was slightly chipped.

Thanks for the post. I've been retired for some time now, but you just brought me back to the "floor".

You have my deepest apologies.

:D

If we let fedex or ups to deliver mail it'll be over priced and cost twice as much as it does now.

I've been shipping packages all around the world since about 1998 and in all that time only 1 has been damaged and 1 has been lost (and I really didn't believe the buyer). A couple of months ago I sent a rather pricey painting to a gallery in Morocco and I was able to track the package every step of the way. I routinely send packages to the other side of the country and have them arrive in 2 days. In my experience, the postal service takes more care with articles than other carriers like UPS or FedEx. We recently bought a microwave online and it arrived in a package that looked like it had gone a round with Mike Tyson. That was UPS. A few years ago I bought a watercolor from an artist in Great Britain - a special present to myself - and it was almost destroyed by FedEx. I'm always annoyed when the post office is bashed because it's a victim of technology (emails), but its function is still very necessary. Does everything have to make a huge profit in this country?

The USPS does a much better job now than when I was a bill collector many years ago.

Payments got lost in the mail quite regularly and often from the same person month after month.


:rofl:

The privatizers have chiseled off small profitable pieces of it at a time leaving the USPS with most unprofitable dregs. Still, the occasional bill payments and priority parcels are a great bargain. I think we may rue the day when it's gone. Yes, the financial mismanagement is probably intentional with an eye towards killing the service and handing it over to the profit merchants.

...of the country in a couple of days for 44 cents is a pretty fucking good deal. No OTHER service can do that.

For example, don't mail a toothbrush in a regular envelope.

Please...... just don't. Bad things happen when rigid solids try to go through our machines.

We had a license plate try to go through the machine once a while back. That was fun. And don't even ask what happens when lotion samples get pressed between two high-speed conveyors with a great deal of tension to them. You really don't want to see the results :silly:

We had that happen once, actually. "MESS" doesn't begin to describe the result....

I'm not sure WHY anyone would mail a toothbrush, but I'd probably put that in a padded envelope.

And I use them a lot.

Better prices and usually less damage than UPS / FedEx and pretty quick too.

Of course, now having a PO box helps things get here without issue.

Like, it's wrong to keep remodeling post office waiting rooms when there's nothing wrong with said rooms in the first place. It's a waste of money.

It's wrong to keep changing your forms, creating tons of non-recyclable waste, because the adhesives on the back of each form would contaminate other materials scheduled for recycling. Case in point: The customs form, which has become so ridiculously large, that it literally adds weight to lighter parcels, costing consumers more money.

It was wrong to rename airmail "First class international mail," creating even more waste by rendering the USPS' and consumers' airmail rubber stamps useless. Additional resources have been wasted in the creation of new "First class international mail" stamps for every post office and most office-supply stores in the nation.

It was REALLY wrong to eliminate the small packet and printed matter rates, claiming to "reduce confusion", when all it actually did was force everyone to use letter rate, which is far more expensive...even when there isn't a letter in the package.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Nobody is questioning that a lot of letters and packages go through the USPS system daily. What's wrong is the waste of money and resources, the endless confusion, and the poor service. (Right now, a friend of mine is having problems because when he mails letters from L.A. to his friends in the central Plains, it's taking EIGHT DAYS for letters to arrive.) I, myself, have had so much important mail destroyed because postal workers ignore the big, red "DO NOT BEND" warnings, and cram said mail into my tiny P.O. box. I once received a poster from overseas, in a mailing tube, and the postman literally folded it in thirds to cram it into my mailbox. There is the option of either leaving such a package at the door, or leaving a pickup notice--S.O.P. for when a package is too big for the mailbox.

This cutesy "Hi, I'm a letter!" tale glosses over the reasons people have chosen to pay bills online and e-mail pictures to grandma instead of mailing them. People are tired of checks getting lost in the mail, letters getting delayed, and goods being damaged (I received a magazine that had been run over by a truck!).

I've had penpals for decades, so I love mail. It saddens me to see how the USPS continually shoots itself in the foot, by being so wasteful, and allowing workers to treat consumers like mere annoyances. Yes, there are lots of good postal workers out there, and they're terrific people. But the postal service could save a lot of money, confusion, and ill will, by treating consumers more fairly.

:shrug:

The machines helped to move the mail faster, but someone has to run the machines.

I hate to see her demise for the sake of corporate profits.

They should have become an ISP to save their soul.
Getting rid of bulk rates would help us all. Let corps pay their fair share.

i tried to mail a letter to a house a mile from me. There was 1 number off on the address. It got bar coded and stamped, "no such address" on the front and back of the envelope and then it got sent back to me.

I tore off the barcode, put a new stamp on it, and fixed the address. I also scribbled over the "no such address" and gave it back to my mailman.

The next day it came back again!! Someone or Something? read the "no such address" on the BACk of the envelope and sent it back to me.
I then hand delivered the letter.

I rest is special interests.