Bad news I just saw on the news that the mail will only come 3 days a week with in the next 10 years. This meens are Rubik's cubes will come solwer.

A bit of background would be helpful. i.e: where are you located-if this is the states, that doesn't affect me in hk. and visa versa:D
When will it begin? immediately-in which case, I need to keep track of what and when I ordered, or 10 years hence, and therefore totally unimportant at the present moment.

Thanks for clarifying.

I believe Jhahoua is speaking about the United States Postal Service.

To my understanding, the plan was that mail would be delivered 3 days a week. If this were to happen, our delivery time will be delayed up to a day - so it's not a complete disaster. If we are able to wait weeks to months for something to be delivered, it wouldn't kill us to wait another day. I think that the packages will continue to travel even during non-delivery days, so transit times would not change.

Ben

It would just build up slightly more over a day... I don't like that idea though, because chances are they'll keep reducing the number of delivery days over time. Hopefully Canada will have enough sense not to copy that

I am in the US and a mail man was on the news and said that this is going to happen not sure when though. they said that people do not use the mail as much now.

Remember, there are still delivery companies such as UPS and FedEx that can still ship your packages on time.

Yea that is good for US shiping but wen you order from a place like Meffert's (from china) it will probly take longer.

Only by the day that was pointed out earlier.

It was a shock moving from Canada to the US and discovering Saturday delivery.

If you care about a specific delivery date/time you don't use USPS anyway so if - IF - it saves money then I've been an advocate for years.

If they start delivering every other day instead of six days a week, we may just have to get a bigger mailbox. It came with the house, it's pretty tiny, and it gets stuffed with unsolicited junk ads on a daily basis. My mom bought a $10 paper shredder at Walmart and that's where 90% of the mail goes. When the shredder is done with it, it's off to the recycle bin.

Back in the 90s, they said that email would eventually spell doomsday for The US Postal service. Truth is, personal correspondence is only a tiny fraction of postal mail anyway. Instead, the internet brought online shopping to the masses and turned out to be the biggest boon for parcel services worldwide. Besides, nowadays, we get at least 2-3 times as much junk daily stuffed into our mailbox than we did in the 90s. True, rates have gone up, but that can be attributed to rising fuel costs. The service is actually better now: packages are getting to their destinations much faster today than 15-20 years ago. I just wish Meffert's free shipping from Hong Kong to US was a little faster.

Just so you know, shredding paper makes it harder to recycle. Many of the fibers are then cut short. Of course if it's personal information you should do it, but just remember that when you shred all of that paper.

As long as this is in off topic-I'll go further off topic. Shredded paper is much better for Keke bedding than chipped wood. I'd rather chop up the paper for it than trees.

HK post said a few years back that they would stop delivering on Saturdays. Around the same time the gov't offices closed on Saturdays-didn't happen. So, for the US...I'll believe it when it happens. Until then....

Some background might be useful.

The US Postal Service isn't actually in the dire financial straits the news likes to imagine. It's actually doing about as well as most companies and better than some while costing the US taxpayer nothing at all. The reason that it looks bad on paper is that the Postal Service is pretty much the only thing (in government or private industry) that pays it's obligations as far in advance as it does. When Fed Ex or UPS agrees to pay retirement benefits to their employees, they don't have to start putting that money into a bank account right now. The Post Office does. (Sort of, it's somewhat more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)

The difference between paying now and paying later is that if you pay now then you can't use that money now to do things that might save you money in the long term. The money is effectively lost, even though anywhere else it would be able to be used provided the ROI was non-negative.

That has a tendency to make things look worse for the Postal Service than they actually are.

Another problem is there was a time when those in government wanted to do away with the Postal Service (some would say that that time never ended) and those in power managed to appoint a lot of people to the USPS who don't want the USPS to survive. That's ... not good. When someone with authority to make decisions at a corporation wants the corporation to die off, bad things can happen.

As an example of the kinds of problems this can cause: recently at a local post office an order came down to stop doing overtime. Even though that meant it would slow down the mail. Even though it meant that a backlog of letters would pile up. It probably isn't a coincidence that person who gave the order would prefer that the Postal Service would wither up and die. (Interestingly enough, there hasn't been a noticeable slow down in mail delivery, stuff still arrives quicker through the post office than USP and Fed Ex, which I attribute to the carriers not following orders.)

Ok, so one of the places I'm going with this is that people in power have been talking about cutting back mail delivery for longer than I've been alive. They've yet to do it.

The alarmism hasn't been true yet. It's possible that this time is different, but I somehow doubt that.

-

One other note worth making: Fed Ex and UPS do not have the reach within the US that the Postal Service does. They actually deliver through the Postal Service in some areas. It's a lot cheaper for them to drop something off at a nearby post office than it is for them to send one of their trucks into the middle of nowhere. It isn't just that they don't want the expense of maintaining an office in the middle of nowhere, it's also that the roads tend to be poorly maintained which wreaks havoc on maintenance costs for the trucks that have to drive on said roads.

One of the things that this means is that if the Postal Service cut back on delivery some Americans wouldn't really have another option. They could ship through UPS and Fed Ex, yes, but since the local Post Office is the way UPS and Fed Ex interact with them it would mean that if the Post Office went to three day delivery UPS and Fed Ex would too. Obviously that only applies to the rural areas where UPS and Fed Ex don't operate.

Africa is pretty damn far out of the way, and possibly home to some of the most "rural" places on Earth, but it doesn't stop UPS and FedEx from shipping to and from there. An old friend of mine once told me about an experience he had with a package his family sent to him while he was stationed in the Congo, working with the Peace Corps:

His mom sent him a batch of homemade cookies in the mail shortly after he was deployed. She used the economy option. It arrived as promised, albeit a year-and-a-half late, near the end of his two-year term. Sadly to say, those cookies were in a little bit too to be worth eating by the time they arrived!


But, to make a long story short, on time or not, the package still finally reached it's destination. I'm sure my old friend got quite a good laugh out of his stale cookies. And I think we can safely assume that the Congo is a bit more "rural" than Alaska or Wyoming or anywhere else in the States!

I kind of like the idea of the mail coming three times a week since 90% of my mail is junk. I feel like I'm constantly throwing out hundreds of tree's worth of paper saying "Donate! Donate! Donations needed! Donate!" If they stopped wasting so much paper to ask for donations maybe they'd have some money to spend -__-

And I agree, a few extra days to wait for puzzles isn't a bad thing. It helps build patience and it feels ten times better once you get it delivered!

I think you miss the point.

UPS and FedEx don't ship to certain rural areas within the United States. It is not a question of whether or not they can. They don't. The reason they don't is because it is more cost effective for them to use the USPS to do it for them. Given that the "US" in USPS stands for "United States" that probably isn't an option in the Congo.

Any changes made to the USPS delivery schedule will necessarily have an effect upon the way UPS and FedEx deliver in those places where those organizations deliver via the USPS. It cannot be otherwise.

It is possible, though unlikely, that UPS or FedEx would decide that keeping their prior delivery schedule was more important than the savings gained by not delivering to those areas themselves. (In that case they would have to massively reshuffle their operations on the ground in the United States and possibly raise their rates.)

It is more likely that they would continue to use the USPS to ship to such places, in which case they would effectively have switched to the new USPS schedule in all such places.

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The point, such as there was one, was that MonkeyZ's point isn't entirely accurate. There are places within the United States where UPS and FedEx ship via the USPS and as such thinking of them as entirely separate entities is a mistake.

Where I live UPS, FedEx, and the USPS all deliver things themselves which means that I have the privilege of choosing one and only one to use. Not all Americans have that privilege. For some, no matter who they choose to do the shipping, the package will be delivered to them by the USPS because FedEx and UPS do not service their area. (Note that I said "delivered to them". If they choose Fed Ex or UPS the company they choose will still deliver the package most of the way, but the postal service will be the one that finally delivers it to them.)

To pretend that all Americans can choose to avoid the post office is to pretend that certain Americans don't exist. That's not nice. It's not nice at all.

Please do not swear on my posts.

Thank you.