That is the beautiful thing about being a Federal employee (not all, but most). You can only be fired essentially one of two ways.

1. You do not report for work for 6 months.
2. An act of Congress.

:disgust

Welcome to now.

That statement pretty much sums up just how out of touch with reality our government is. The postal service is just NOW catching onto this new revolution called the internet?

Wait until they find out there are two of them. :1orglaugh

i agree with the comments re: the postal employees. very slow, unionized, etc. virtually impossible to get fired from there. i use click & ship for our domestic shipments, we go online and create labels, print them and drop off on the dock at the local center but international makes more sense to take them to the center and have them processed. the employees are generally nice, esp. after they get to know you but they are all very slow.

they have a remarkably well thought out service called click & ship. it works off a database of every viable shipping address in the united states and runs in real-time. quite impressive.

and it prices shipments at a slight discount over counter transactions at the post office.

fuck USPS those assholes are useless. Anything that can be paid online gets paid online the rest via phone. 99% of the mail I get is crap anyway.

I can't remember the last time I even touched a stamp.

They should do anything but cut a day. Hell, I wish both the post office and banks were open 7 days a week. They're the lifeblood of business.

Seriously? Wow... have never gotten mail on a Saturday. Stooopid. :2 cents:

I have been thinking the same thing for years. Every time I see a USPS ad on tv or a huge billboard at a ballpark it makes me laugh. There are so many ways this monopoly could cut costs and add creative services without building new infrastructure. Unfortunately government agencies love wasting money and keeping things status quo.

The counter workers are also more interested in their lunch break or shutting down the window gate at the end of the day than helping a line of 15 people trying to use their services. I want to say that DMV workers probably move quicker then these people.

The government is about controlling their budgets and theifdoms. Nothing else. Case in point, the road commissions on the state level. The military on the Federal level. Followed by the DEA, and on and on.

A lot of pork, and big budgets going to agencies who's 'success' is marginal and open to interpretation at best. If you knew about how the CIA/FBI/Homeland Security/Customs work together, or do not. That would burn you even more.

The whole point of this new bloated bureaucracy (H.L.S.) was to get ALL intelligence centralized. It isn't. It's the same as before. FBI/CIA/HLS.... none of them work together. All think the other is going to steal credit for their shit, and so forth. Fucking ridiculous. Now you just have the S.S. (HLS) waiting to goose step down Michigan Ave. Which seems to be their real function.

:disgust

There have been some interesting documentaries on this type of stuff. Especially when it comes to the Pentagon, and DEA. Their budgets, and insane amount of government waste.

delivery 6 days a week is a huge pain in the ass, especially as employees only work 5 days a week and you have to have a huge group of employees covering their days off..

the most cost effective way is to cancel saturday delivery and let the delivery employees work M-F....the draw back is delivery volume would be a little higher on Monday and thus a small amount of overtime may occur...

the larger question is what are you going to do with the surplus employees that would result from going to 5 day delivery....in most cases they would be federal employess, so they would be expensive to get rid of...a hiring freeze and expedited buyouts/retirements would be required and that takes years to work through the system...

I agree with streamlining.
I am pretty sure they already have their own form of bar codes though, also if someone does presort and does electronic postage, they can already cut costs. Er guess I am saying they have such discounts already in place.

Besides streamlining, I do think people need a bit more education about the postal services. Almost everyone uses a 1st class stamp when they do not need to. So when they do raise the rates on 1st class everyone bitches of course not knowing the options. Few know of everything that can be done online with them. They could automate and correct many issues with the offices themselves, like the whole human interaction part - most is not even needed.
As stated they should use the purchasing power to get better vehicles and of course that could spur development for the public at large. Delivery hours should get adjusted since they currently do it at times when they is a lot more traffic on the roads and there is no reason why they could not do early AM deliveries etc.
I also would not mind a special and much higher rate to send crap mail, like unsolicited offers and assorted junk mail.

USPS is competing with other parcel services as you can see others mention right in this thread. While they may be able to cut "some" advertising, you can't seriously suggest that a competing business cut off all advertising and still say in the competitive game. If FedEx were having problems, would your first recommendation being to cut advertising?

I've never used USPS, it's reliable?

i just looked into the ad budget for USPS, the last published #s are for 2006. they spent 126 million out of a total budget of2.2 billion.

only 5% of the budget spent on advertising is more than reasonable and not an area that would impact their current financial trouble if they were to reduce ad spending.

They should start to fine companies that send useless junk mail, why should a mail man waste his time delivering something that is going to get tossed in the trash. This should save them a lot of money and also make them money. The fines could be a couple hundred bucks. Half my mail is junk, I mostly go paperless these days.