Amazon delivers to your door in urban areas, but in rural areas Amazon relies on the U.S. Postal Service for that "last mile" of delivery. As reported by the StarTribune:
Since early November, Bemidji has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages - and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first.The result has been chaos at the Bemidji post office. Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say... Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state's San Juan Islands...In Bemidji, postal workers said they had been told that Amazon was coming to town for years. It finally happened one morning in early November, when the post office was flooded with thousands of Amazon boxes and carriers said they were told they all had to be delivered by the end of the day.Carriers who previously had delivered dozens of small parcels a day plus paper mail suddenly had to deliver between 300 and 500 boxes that they said had previously been handled by UPS...For all the extra work, mail carriers weren't making much more money. Rural mail carriers are paid only for the amount of time the post office estimates it will take them to finish their jobs. And in Bemidji, the routes had been reevaluated in October, just before Amazon changed everything.
There are a lot of people in the business world who want the USPS to fail and have it restructured as a private business, because there is a lot of potential profit to be derived from it.
There are a lot of people in the business world who want the USPS to fail
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of people who do not understand what the purpose of the government service is.
Oddly, no one complains that libraries, schools or highways don't make money or pay for themselves. But when it comes to mail, utilities or transit, suddenly profitability matters.
This makes no sense.
Finally, I point out that a first class mail stamp in the US costs $0.66, while the same stamp in the Netherlands is €1,01 (going up to €1,09). The Netherlands is about the size of Maryland. To send a card or letter to neighboring Belgium is €1,65. In Belgium a stamp for national mail is €1,36. Sending a cad back to the Netherlands is €2.53.
So, if USPS has a hard time financially, there's an obvious reason for that.
"Sending a cad back to the Netherlands is €2.53."
DeleteThat's a bargain!
USPS = United States Postal Service, not USPB for Business.
ReplyDeletePrivate business would love to grab the cities/suburbs and let the devil take the hindmost. The Aleutian islands of Alaska only get their mail once a week but they always get it. It cost the USPS plenty to hire a helicopter every week, but they do it. There are plenty of places in the lower 48 that they need 4 wheel drive or horses but they do whatever it takes to service everyone.
xoxoxoBruce
I'd consider resigning on the spot if my employer tried to pull this. "In Bemidji, postal workers said they had been told that Amazon was coming to town for years. It finally happened one morning in early November, ..."
ReplyDeleteWith years warning, literally years, the employer has no excuse to be so catastrophically badly prepared, and to dump the consequences of their lack or prep on their workers.
Wow... Seriously out of touch with what it means to be a worker in the US today. Quit the USPS and grab a job at Walmart?
DeleteNo, my solution is to live in a country that is less godawful. Look, this kind of behaviour is American people being vile to other American people. Until your very culture changes to the point where people refuse to tolerate this kind of abuse, it will continue. So, how long is it going to be until your culture changes? Never? I mean, it's no skin off my nose if the answer is never, but Americans are suffering for it. And if you never change, this will never be fixed. Individual workers HAVE to draw the line somewhere. You're not a nation of doormats, I hope.
DeletePart of the issue is the same worker shortage that is plaguing many businesses. I have a good friend who recently retired from the USPS. He said it has been a struggle the past few years to replace workers who have left the USPS since COVID started. He also indicated that the USPS used to hire substitute mail carriers to fill in for people who were ill or on family leave, etc, but that hiring pool has mostly dried up. USPS had no problem hiring temporary seasonal workers for the holiday season prior to 2020, but since then there are just not enough people applying for the jobs. It is likely that when Amazon first announced they were coming to Bemidji, getting extra workers was thought to be no problem. Things have changed.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter lives in the suburbs of a large metro area in the mid-Atlantic region, not far from DC, and there are postal workers delivering Amazon packages to her house. I live near the middle of nowhere (seriously, there is a big "H" at the end of my driveway), and I still get Amazon packages from Amazon trucks. Go figure.
nowHere. Took me a while to figure that out.
Deleteassist me. i dont understand the nowHere reference or know of any place with an H at driveway. what do these things mean?
ReplyDeleteI didn't get it either. hint: I might have done if the letter 'h' had been lower case. :-)
ReplyDeleteCheck out Minnesotastan's comment from yesterday. November 30, 2023 at 10:06 AM
ReplyDeleteThe "middle of nowhere" is the h... now H ere.
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce