USPS Mail Collection Box Questions -

[Colinmclelland]

...All of the houses have daily mail pickup...

Seriously? How is that a business model that still works?

We have daily mail deliveries, but I wouldn’t care if it were weekly. It probably takes us longer than that to get around to opening it anyway. But pick ups as well?

[NYCfixie]

It takes two to make a thing go right
It takes two to make it outta sight

College flashback there

High School for me....you just made my day!

[j44ke]

Seriously? How is that a business model that still works?

We have daily mail deliveries, but I wouldn’t care if it were weekly. It probably takes us longer than that to get around to opening it anyway. But pick ups as well?

It doesn't actually. But should it? I don't know, that's a good question. Without it some part of American cultural history dies I think. Mail was integral to our westward expansion. Part of the energy pushing the development of aviation. Okay, so email is cheaper and less harmful (is it? we're told so but all those wires quick to become obsolete & landfill?) to the environment, but what stature what importance does the mail have a cultural icon as something that only costs as much as cutting a hole in your front door to receive and less than half a dollar to send?

BRING BACK THE ROMANCE!

[Matthew Strongin]

I miss getting letters. Email doesn’t quite deliver in the same way.

[CJones]

High School for me....you just made my day!

It Takes Two: Me too! In high school I was the first one to have a drivers license and car. I picked up my 2 best friends Matt and John on the way to school every day. I'd always pick up Matt first. He was always ready. I'd pull up to his driveway and out he'd come. John on the other hand, was always running late. We'd have to beep. Matt would often have to go in and get him. But not matter how late he was running he'd always have the cassette of "It Takes Two" rewound and ready to go. We listened to that song on the way to school every day. I mean, EVERY DAY! He also insisted we sing along. Even all these years later I still know every word to that song and whenever I hear it it immediately takes me back.

USPS: My house growing up was next door to our local small town post office. The loading dock out back had a shallow side on one end and was deeper on the other end. On the way home riding my BMX bike from wherever I was coming from, I would always cut through the gravel parking lot, bunnyhop onto the shallow end, ride across the loading dock, and then jump off the deep end into my backyard. I did that jump about a million times. Like the words to "It Takes Two," I bet I could still do that jump today with my eyes closed...

[Colinmclelland]

I miss getting letters. Email doesn’t quite deliver in the same way.

Me too, but the only letter I still get are bills. No romance in those suckers.

[Tom]

Some places the only people to check in on old people are the mail carriers.

[Drew]

but what stature what importance does the mail have a cultural icon as something that only costs as much as cutting a hole in your front door to receive and less than half a dollar to send?

Clearly you haven’t bought any stamps lately. 55 cents now.

[Mark Kelly]

If I sent a letter addressed to

Audrey

Just down the hill a bit

(name of town)

Qld

I guarantee it would get to my aged P.

[Chik]

If I sent a letter addressed to

Audrey

Just down the hill a bit

(name of town)

Qld

I guarantee it would get to my aged P.

Someone in Oz sent me a parcel and forgot to write the house number. I live on a short street where I think the house numbers don't even go up to 120. I've lived at this address for well over 10 years.

The Belgian postie returned it to Oz.

It's best not to get me started on the Belgian postal service.

[caleb]

Someone in Oz sent me a parcel and forgot to write the house number. I live on a short street where I think the house numbers don't even go up to 120. I've lived at this address for well over 10 years.

The Belgian postie returned it to Oz.

It's best not to get me started on the Belgian postal service.

A friend of mine lives in the old city center of Dublin. Apparently address numbers still aren't really a thing there.

He said it used to be a little bit of a big deal to become a postal carrier there, since you had to really know the city.

Amazon making everyone with a smartphone a delivery driver has been a disaster for them. It's like 50/50 if a package will even show up.


@Colinmclelland There was a fight during the last recession about possibly doing away with door-to-door service on Saturdays during the last recession. The reformers lost. We still get delivery and pickup on Saturdays. The whole thing is a miracle.

[j44ke]

Clearly you haven’t bought any stamps lately. 55 cents now.

I have but I suck at math. Plus they are "forever" stamps. Or forever envelopes, which is what I buy.

[slwrnu]

the post in the UK used to be famously proud about delivering mail even if inadequately addressed. It has slipped a bit (although most of the posties still wear shorts all year round) but the other month I got a a letter from my daughter (at school) addressed "Daddy. [name of house] [village name]. " Nothing else, she obviously got distracted or couldn't be arsed. But it arrived promptly.

[doomridesout]

Now I'm feeling a bit misty-eyed about the civil servants in charge of the whole thing. A noble calling, if you ask me.

[Chik]

A friend of mine lives in the old city center of Dublin. Apparently address numbers still aren't really a thing there.

He said it used to be a little bit of a big deal to become a postal carrier there, since you had to really know the city.

Amazon making everyone with a smartphone a delivery driver has been a disaster for them. It's like 50/50 if a package will even show up.


@Colinmclelland There was a fight during the last recession about possibly doing away with door-to-door service on Saturdays during the last recession. The reformers lost. We still get delivery and pickup on Saturdays. The whole thing is a miracle.

Ha! These guys should try being a postie in Japan! The buildings are numbered, but 1) most streets have no name, and even if the street has a name, the addresses are not based on street names, and 2) the number sequence appears to have no discernible logic. I know this all too well after spending one pubescent summer delivering parcels by bicycle for a department store. It was a real nightmare. No Google Maps back then!

One of the guys I work with lives in the middle of nowhere in France. His street also didn't have a name until very recently. I once sent Fedex to fetch the order he completed, and the driver couldn't find his workshop. It's a little hamlet so there aren't that many options, so he should have been able to figure it out if he actually wanted to. Luckily, the cock up happened only once.

Speaking of Amazon, they are really surprising. Belgian posties don't deliver normal stuff on Saturdays, but they deliver Amazon parcels. Not Prime, just standard orders.

[j44ke]

USPS can't even deliver mail fully addressed. I regularly have to go looking for our packages at other buildings in the neighborhood. I worked out all the possible permutations of our address within the same delivery zone, and often the missing package is at one of those buildings. And we routinely get mail for the other buildings around us.

A year or so ago we had a package guy who was dumping packages at the end of his route, but not before scanning them as "delivered" because he knew there was no recourse for the recipient once that bar code had been scanned. But we only figured that out after I sent the details on each missing package to the postal inspector who agreed that it was curious that many of the packages went missing on Friday a few minutes after 5PM.

The best thing that happened to us with respect to mail delivery was the completion of a giant 29 story building on our side of the block. Otherwise we were one of three small buildings in the middle of our block with no other delivery addresses on either side of us due to through-block buildings that took up the rest of the street. And we were the last block on the route in our zone. So before that 29 story building arrived with all of its apartments and the resulting mail load, we sometimes got mail 3-4 times a week.

[weavie]

I’ve always been fond of the Japanese address logic.

“ The buildings within a block are either numbered in the order that they were built, so they jump all around, or numbered in clockwise order around the block. In this clockwise numbering there is sometimes skipping of several numbers for later assignment, where future construction between existing buildings is possible.”

How does the Japanese addressing system work?

[j44ke]

Can’t wait for Monday for the answer. Still betting that mailboxes are harder to move than steamships.

[crumpton]

They are leftover from a time when one would read “local mail” and the other “out of town mail”. We have the same here in Coupland but no one ever bothered to remove the old labels. I asked the clerk about it a couple years ago, she said it’s all the same now but there was a time when mail addressed to the local zip would be sorted here while all else shipped out. Now it all ships out(next larger town over) regardless of zip.

[King Of Dirk]

It's a backup in case of collection box failure...

Two is one and one is none.