Posted on 01/25/2013 12:19:11 PM PST by SMGFan
It’s a brand new year but already the cash-strained United States Postal Service is showing that it’s feeling the financial heat that kept zapping it in 2012. Starting on Sunday, the price of a first-class stamp will go from $0.45 to $0.46 as we were warned last year. Post card stamps will also rise a penny to $0.33. Sure, it’s only a penny, but it’s a penny you don’t have to pay on Saturday that you do on Sunday.
Of course, we’re fans of Forever Stamps, which you can buy now and use no matter how much a regular postage stamp goes up in price, so perhaps today is a good time to stock up on those.
Letters you send off to international friends or family are rising even more to $1.10. It used to only cost $0.85 to mail letters to Canada and Mexico and $1.05 for other international destinations. Overall, notes CNNMoney, all kinds of shipping services will cost 4% more on average.
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
The USPS is a government agency ~ it is not a private entity. Everybody knows that.
The first page had SEVERAL $100,000 value stamps ~ and the rest of the album was like that.
She was concerned that her brother had been taking stamps out of the album and selling them and cheating her.
Those stamps were startlingly beautiful!
She retired early shortly after that.
“Thankgoodness for him ~ lot of those job sharing guys ended up getting hit with felony convictions.”
I guess I don’t know what you are saying? There was no “job sharing” involved in this case. The young man was a temporary summer employee. He was given a jeep and a route that he was told should take him all day. It took him until noon, so he went back and asked for another route for the afternoon which pissed off the shop steward or whatever you call the person who is there to make sure that nobody does too much work. Where in any of what I just related is there any hint of any felony activity, inquiring minds wan to know!
He will have from 20 to 24 carriers under him. Going through your route too fast can increase delivery errors ~ known fact ~ not union fiction ~ ask the customers.
So, he went through the route fast enough to raise suspicions on the part of his supervisor.
That's normal anywhere.
When my regular postman goes on vacation, I usually get my mail several hours earlier, and with it mail belonging to my neighbours.
I hate attitude in a moron. Shut your flapping mouth for two minutes, see what it feels like.
“The USPS is a government agency ~ it is not a private entity. Everybody knows that.”
I understand that the USPS isn’t private in the traditional sense, but the Congress did pass legislation a few years ago that mandated that they “ run out of the till.”
I guess we should have known that that was just Congressional BS, because they have allowed the USPS to continue to collect what it needs to make ends meet from the taxpayers. Before responding, I took a look at what’s being said about the USPS and there are a lot of people who are saying that it should be completely privatized like the postal services in many of the European countries. There was a time when the USPS was really the only game in town, but now there are competitors who are taking the parcel business away, and a lot of us are not using the USPS to the extent that we once did. We now pay nearly all our bills through our bank electronically. And the time is not far off when we will get most of our bills through our computers ( which is also a good thing). Bulk mail should be outlawed. It just creates unnecessary trash, but as long as it’s there, it should pay the full rate for the crap it sends. There are now days when the only thing in the mailbox is stuff that I walk directly to the recycle bin. It’s all such a waste of resources, and some of those resources come from the USPS.
“Your friendly UPS driver is a member of a thug union called the Teamsters. Postal Service is one of the requirements of the Constitution. Don’t like the Constitution? Or perhaps don’t like parts of the Constitution? Well, meet your friend Barry Soetero. “
First of all, Barry isn’t a friend of mine! The USPS may be in the Constitution, but that doesn’t mean that we should let that bloated entity continue to consume taxpayer resources in excess of that which is necessary for it to function at the level required by the current usage! BTW, UPS may be union, but FedEx is trying to bust theirs!
OK, we don’t disagree then. Still, the focus should fall elsewhere, when it comes to bloated entities, in my view. Unlike most Federal departments, the USPS brings in revenue, and will never have to be supported to the obscene extent that the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development for example is supported. You and I and most citizens use the services of the USPS, while HUD’s services are directed toward a few.
I guess some one who’d spent their life in government would think that charging the cost of a service is the same as charging the market price...
even if they weren’t an idiot.
Just from never having to think about it.
The law requires that market-dominant mail (like junk mail)not subsidize competitive mail.
No business can succeed like that. New products require subsidy. Of course they’re expected to be profitable in time.
“That’s normal anywhere.”
That’s not normal anywhere else! He was threatened by the other workers so he just took the jeep home and studied or slept. BTW he’s now a well known attorney in Las Vegas, and a very ethical one at that! By your words, you are making the case for why something substantive should be done about the USPS. You may get “to complete the ride,” but I’d advise a young person to try some place else to start a “career.” The USPS will not survive as it is currently constituted, the Constitutional Requirement not withstanding. The money will run out!
“OK, we don’t disagree then. Still, the focus should fall elsewhere, when it comes to bloated entities, in my view. Unlike most Federal departments, the USPS brings in revenue, and will never have to be supported to the obscene extent that the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development for example is supported. You and I and most citizens use the services of the USPS, while HUD’s services are directed toward a few.”
For sure, the agencies you mention need to be done away with, and there are others ( most all actually when you look at what The Constitution mandated for the Federal Government). I just think it’s prudent to make the USPS into an entity that serves the citizens today. Fact is, most people don’t use the mail as much as they used to. I guess it would really be too much to hope for, for the USPS to start acting like it would if it were a private business.
Yeah, the USPS has chosen to shrink to practically just a junk mail carrier.
That was probably to be expected when they were opened to competition- it would be hopeless for a government agency to compete against a private business.
I just wish they’d charge half as much for junk mail as they do for letters, instead of only a third.
I was assigned to the battlion motor pool for a couple of weeks when I first arrived at a TOE outfit.
Infantry motor pool guys have a traditional hazing practice ~ now that's a threat!
Here, in your friend's case, sounds like he was 'threatened by a supervisor' ~ and that's what i referred to as normal anywhere.
The other trick supervisors are always watching for is the guy who gets done with his route fast because he tossed the mail down the sewer or took it home to store in his basement. We had a bunch in Northern Virginia who regularly got through their routes in about 5 hours then stopped at a bowling alley in Annandale. One day Bill Bolger, then Postmaster General, stopped by that alley and talked to them while they bowled. They didn't recognize him. Of course at the same time postal inspectors were out in the lot securing their postal vehicles.
it's not that a newbie can't do a route fast and deliver all the mail ~ the point is those routes are engineered to take 8 hours ~ so in most cases if there's a serious time deviation something else may have gone wrong! Supervisors hate to have to explain such events to tour superintendents. it's still quasi-military in the ranks.
The law is the law ~ talk to your congresscritter, not me. i’d change the law in a second ~ have a new one all written up that will solve all the problems and cut the workforce in half.
USPS doesn’t use taxpayer resources ~ Department of Education, Defense, Labor, Justice, etc use taxpayer resources. They should all be eliminated and the federal judicary should be reduced to one guy, the Chief Justice ~ no clerks!
UPS was created in its modern manifestation when a group of Headquarters postal operations specialists bought a moving firm in Seattle ~ they'd given up on Congress acting on some necessary law changes to improve parcel post.
Guess they were right and Congress was wrong. However, USPS didn't invent parcel service, but I can tell you there's no way you can be a government agency and make contracts with shippers the way UPS does!
you have no sense of humor.
What I noticed in the past year is that some of my Internet purchases, such as parcels from Amazon, are sent by U.S. Mail but delivered to me by UPS.
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