Posted on 05/10/2011 3:36:03 PM PDT by Beaten Valve
Four or five years ago, I happened to stop at a convenience store near Pennsboro, WV. The store made sandwiches and other lunch fare and had an area where you could sit and eat. I sat next to a booth where three men in cheap sport coats sat. I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.
They were gloating, in every sense of the word about how they had scared a postal clerk when they had dropped in to inspect a rural post office and made her nervous. They appeared to be low level post office managers.There wasn’t any discussion of how the inspection went. It was all about how they had intimidated her. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut. They were petty dictators.
Since then I’ve made a point of talking to clerks in rural post offices in many places. From what I’ve heard that’s not an unusual occurance for the clerks at the counters and post masters in small offices. Post offices have to submit regular reports via the internet. The fact that local phone service was unreliable and the only access was dialup made no difference.
Postal managers seem to be focused on creating more reporting requirements perhaps to justify their jobs, That’s why I say the post office should eliminate half the management levels. Have you read any of the articles on the bonuses given high level postal managers even as the post office loses money?
I don’t know how big city facility post offices work, but the workers in rural offices have to work under a tyrannical regime.
If I ran the post office, I’d review all of the paperwork requirements and the management descriptions with the idea of eliminating everything and everyone that wasn’t absolutely necessary. If someone screwed up, fine require a report. If not, get the hell off the workers’ backs.
You wouldn’t need as many managers if the process was overhauled.
Because the process is so complex, you end up with tons of managers to supervise and inspect the process.
If the process was simplified, all these managers would be eliminated or moved into more productive roles.
“In a hub and spoke model, you would have zero sorting at a local office. This would be like your UPS (STAPLES) or Fedex (KINKOS) Retail Outlet sorting boxes, it makes no sense.”
UPS and Fedex deal primarily with standardized packages and large envelopes in contrast to what the USPS receives. Zero sorting results in all classes of mail being dumped together and shipped to the regional plants, a process that creates a bottleneck at the receiving end. Rough sorting at collection points solves this which is why it is done at local offices. It’s a process that begins with clerks at the retail counter and carriers picking up mail on their routes.
An expert trying to impose an idealized model is the bane of those who have to make a system function on a daily basis. Such experts invariably have little real world experience with the work that they expound upon with such confidence.
It wouldn’t be a receiving problem if the system was optimized around it, and you don’t even need regional hubs.
1-2 national hubs would do the job.
Yes, your letter will take longer to arrive if it was to a local address, but USPS wouldn’t be bleeding money.
There isn’t any reason 1M or more lbs of mail couldn’t be processed per hour when you have invested in the right equipment and centralized the operation.
Why don’t you look at what happened when the garbage was outsourced? No one saw them doing what they did at the time either. Look at them now.
You’re right!
“It wouldn’t be a receiving problem if the system was optimized around it, and you don’t even need regional hubs.
1-2 national hubs would do the job.”
Imaginary systems always work better than the messy ones based in real world experience. It’s like discussing the wonders of green energy with a true believer over the messy world of actual energy production, the imaginary green world always works better.
The post office already employs national hubs. It hires UPS and Fedex to fly its mail across the country.
The receiving problem always exists no matter what sort of outbound routing system comes next. Mail has to be separated by type. You dismiss it as a non-issue because you have no experience dealing with it and you imagine that it can be avoided by pretending it away.
“There isn’t any reason 1M or more lbs of mail couldn’t be processed per hour when you have invested in the right equipment and centralized the operation.”
The wonders of what can be achieved in the imaginary world never cease to amaze. The Soviets tried running an entire economy based upon their theories of centralization, with no knowledge from the real world needed.
In the real world the USPS invested in automated letter sorting machines several years ago. Mail carriers receive the majority of their letter mail ready to take to the street, no sorting by clerks or carriers required.
USPS is currently rolling out machines that do the same thing with what they call ‘flats’, ie magazines and large letters. This further reduces the need for clerks and carriers to sort mail. The clerk work force is being greatly reduced and carriers will be spending most of their workday on the street.
The USPS is losing money for a variety of reasons. They invested large sums in the automated equipment that will be transforming their labor costs. They had to prefund their retirement system. Their advertising mail revenue fell off a cliff when the recession hit. First class mail is in a long term decline as it moves increasingly to the internet. They have a very large fleet of delivery vehicles that use a lot of gasoline. Some of these factors will reverse with the business cycle, some are permanent.
Um, why do you think they are going bankrupt? Users aren't paying the actual costs for too many services. The postal service is just socialism. Everybody pays higher fees so some people can get a "bargain." Privatize the Post Office and make them charge people actual fees for services like UPS and FedEx.
This is the thing. Business models change and the USPS has had a bad business model for years.
Email has made the Post Office mostly obsolete in much the same way that Netflix made Blockbuster and other video rental stores obsolete.
Stick your Um where the sun don't shine, sanctimonious Umer.
I am a 27 year postal employee, I carry mail. I have watched management drag us into the ground for years, going all the way back to when the post office handed UPS their business. Back then, there was so much mail, the post office didn’t care about the parcel service. Low and behold, 10 years later, they are starving for business.
I have watched the changing face of management, going from experienced carriers with over 30 years of service, to picking private people off the street, and people with less then 5 years in the business, becoming management. Most of those people with less then 5 years, could not carry a newspaper, never mind a bag of mail.
Speaking of management, is the public aware those of us in the Boston Area, are subject to being followed by 3 supervisors in 1 vehicle. Yes you did not misread that, THREE supervisors in one vehicle, the vehicle is a post office car, that is close to, if not over 250k of salary, not including the cost of the vehicle, a year. We are subject to GPS in our postal vehicles, to the tune of 35 dollars a vehicle a month, to track it, if you times that to over 100,000 vehicles, you can simply do the math.
The upper management of the post office, hides their supervisors, but if you go into any larger mail facility, you will find all of those hidden gems, hiding somewhere in a corner, waiting to retire. My case in point, we had one guy come in from the GMF, with over 30+ years in the service. His job got abolished. So, they put him into our station, which by the way is Medford MA. The one particular guy, after 4 weeks of training, couldn’t count the mail correctly, so they sent him back in town to hide for the rest of his postal career. If a craft employee couldn’t do their job, they would automatically start with the termination process, however, if your management and in another higher managers back pocket, your good to go, and sit your postal career out till you retire, effectively doing nothing and getting paid for it.
Lets talk about another post office secret. It is called ‘performance pay’, effectively handed out to managers and supervisors, for good work performance. Ask yourself a question, how does a failing business hand out bonus’ to their management and cry poor mouth?
Lets not talk about Harry Potter’s the old postmaters retirement package of over 1 million dollars. The layers of fat in upper management are mind boggling, especially in Washington DC.
There is so much about management that is hidden from the public, so be aware, that IS the current management of the post office, that has put the entire business, my job, my livelihood in jeopardy, because they couldn’t manage a paper blowing in the wind, never mind a post office.
Aging workforce, yes. But as for insurance, retirees have to pay their own premiums if they choose to have insurance (as do postal employees). And as far as the pension, they have put their own money into a private fund which was supposedly invested for them in various places - and should be worth far more than the monthly pension paid out - except I’m sure congress has robbed that lock-box too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.