Posted on 11/11/2013 4:35:42 AM PST by RoosterRedux
The cash-short United States Postal Service, which has failed to win congressional approval to stop delivering mail on Saturdays to save money, has struck a deal with the online retailer Amazon.com to deliver the company’s packages on Sundays — a first for both, with obvious advantages for each.
For the Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, first-class mail delivery, particularly on Saturdays, is often a money loser, whereas package delivery is profitable.
The deal, announced on Sunday and taking effect immediately, in time for the holiday shopping season, gives the Postal Service a chance to take some business from United Parcel Service and FedEx, which do not deliver on Sundays. Now, some orders that would have been handled by either of those carriers for Monday delivery will go through the Postal Service and arrive on Sunday.
The Postal Service said it expected to make more such deals with other merchants, seeking a larger role in the $186 billion e-commerce market. Amazon.com would not say if it would try to arrange Sunday deliveries with other parcel carriers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Face value it looks great.
Reality it is our subsidy that makes it happen. That isn’t a level playing field.
It boils down to actually a bit of fascism.
“I’ll go out on a limb and predict double the losses if they have to pay triple time weekend differentials to the union employees.”
Not to worry. Most Post Offices have enough under worked substitute carries (who are paid less) to deliver on Sunday and thus avoid the expensive overtime. As it is now, (without Sunday deliveries), overtime is still very difficult to come by. Individual Post Masters are necessarily stingy with overtime.
I buy tons of used books from Amazon, all of which come from small sellers.
The Post Office really can’t be fully privatized, because much of it exists by treaty, the Universal Postal Union, that took both the British Empire and the United States to create in 1874. Today, it would be impossible to create such a treaty. It is administered by the UN, in the French language.
This means that international post goes from one nation’s post office to another nation’s post office, instead of from nation to nation.
However, that still leaves a LOT of partial privatization that can be done.
Do union postal workers get premium pay for working the Saturday shift?
I do a fair amount of small carton shipping and I save a couple dollars on each carton by going to my UPS store. And I don't have to wait in line forever like I do at my post office.
Leni
I am not an Amazon Prime subscriber.
So, when I do order anything from Amazon, orders takes up to 6 weeks to be delivered.
Thus, I order very little from Amazon.com.
Their ‘storefront’ providers have a bit faster delivery, but most time, it takes significantly longer than ordering from Newegg or TigerDirect or Walmart, etc.
I follow the online trackers. Many time, a package will sit in a location for days without showing any transport movement.
Six weeks is very unusual. I usually get it within a few days. Perhaps you’re ordering items out of stock?
We are Prime members and love it since it is 150 miles to a big town. Need an ink pen? Get it in two days with no shipping. But we live in some geographical mystery spot where some people around us have mailboxes but we are forced to have a post office box. On Saturdays they hand out packages for 30 minutes mid-morning if they decide to open the window. Sunday delivery for us would mean we get a notification in the post office box on Sunday instead of Monday.
No. The online invoices show ‘items shipped’.
I have tracked them to distribution center. One was in NJ, where a package sat for over 3 weeks and 2 additional weeks in PA. Others have sat for 2 weeks in NY, PA, or north MS.
If they were marked ‘back order’, I would understand, but when they are marked ‘shipped’ and takes weeks, that is some other problem.
If you're looking for something they don't carry (or even if they do) there are options that come up from other, often small, businesses. The service through Amazon with them is very good, as they want a favorable rating. I've found real good sources for vinyl records, specialty foods, made-in-the-USA greeting cards, as just a few examples. Besides that, the purchases get points in Amazon prime.
I was thinking about junk mail!
Pity it’s just NYC and LA. I guess the rest of us in flyover country don’t count. . .
Netflix (dvd shipments) used to be the biggest client of the USPS, but when Netflix split dvds from streaming, their dvd business dropped significantly.
About the same time, the USPS was closing some regional distribution centers, thus creating delays in delivery.
Under their original arrangement, I would get dvds in about 2 days, so the cost wasn’t too bad. Afterward, deliveries would take 3 to 4 days, so the cost was substantially more. I dropped the dvd service but kept the streaming.
LA & NYC is just where they will start. They will expand to other areas later. I would not expect it to get to anywhere in rural areas anytime soon.
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