The U.S. Postal Service hopes to save $3 billion a year through a series of changes reflecting greater reliance on streamlined regional networks.
    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
      3111·
      22 days ago

      It shouldn’t, though to some extent, it operating more efficiently can be a good thing if the efficiency gains can be gotten without significant detriment to service, because then more money is available for either improvements to the mail service or for other services. Profit does not impy efficiency of course, but making something more efficient can make it more profitable.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
        694·
        22 days ago

        No. They’re strangled to pieces as it is.

        RepubliQans hate the USPS for reasons and have gone to extraordinary lengths to injure it. It’s bullshit. Fuck that.

        They are a service, like the army is a service. It costs taxpayer money and they’re out here selling pencils in a cup to make barely enough to pay everyone. Fund them properly, for fuck’s sake.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
        4·
        22 days ago

        This ‘efficiency’ hit us a few years ago as one of the cities mentioned in the article. Since DeJoy’s changes, our local sorting facility was shut down and if I want to mail a letter to my neighbor, they drive it an hour north, sort it, and then drive it an hour south where it’s then put on a truck for delivery.

        • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
          42·
          22 days ago

          I’m not arguing that this idea in particular is necessarily a good one, just that the concept of making the service more efficient has merit. Obviously, to actually see the benefits, the idea in question has to actually succeed at making the service more efficient.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
            31·
            22 days ago

            the concept of making the service more efficient has merit

            I’m really not sure it does. USPS needs to serve all citizens, regardless of efficiency. Just the fact of having to be everywhere for everyone necessarily means accepting all sorts of situations that can never be efficient, but nevertheless should have service

    • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
      8·
      22 days ago

      Somebody ask how much revenue their corporation’s IT dept generates. Then, ask the executives if they’d be fine if servers crashed, critical payment systems failed, and (God forbid!) their laptop stopped working…

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      81·
      22 days ago

      The government as a whole shouldn’t have to worry about it. Republicans think the government should be run like a business when it is nothing like a business.

      They think that it is like a business because it provides services and a business does too and they equate paying taxes with paying for restaurant food. It’s utter nonsense.

  • callouscomic@lemm.eeEnglish
    102·
    22 days ago

    Government is a service. An expense. Nobody says the military is unprofitable.

    We don’t have enough money for public Healthcare or even just mail, but we always have room for more fucking bombs!

    • P1nkman@lemmy.world
      8·
      22 days ago

      How else are the oligarks who owns the majority of stocks in the weapons manufacturing industry going to take even more wealth from the general population? Line. Must. Go. UP!

  • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.worldEnglish
    84·
    22 days ago

    In layman’s terms, they wanna move carriers to sorting facilities to cut down on cost for shipping mail to local offices. This could cause carriers who live in the towns the deliver in, like myself, to drive upwards of 45 minutes to an hour away to a sorting facility (this number is based on what my office’s situation would be, could vary office to office). After clocking in and sorting our routes, we would then have to drive back that same amount of time to town to deliver, then drive that far back to return to office.

    You can see the issue here, sure you’re cutting on transportation costs to local offices, but you’re now spending a lot more on carriers fuel in the already inefficient mail trucks to drive back and forth to their routes. We wouldn’t get compensated for the milage and time going to and from the new office and it would lengthen our days because of the new drive time. That being said, if that drive time is accounted to our routes, our routes are supposed to be adjusted to 8 hours total time for normal mail volume. Now you’re adding that much time, you gotta cut deliveries per route. Now you have to add more routes to compensate, which means paying more salaries to cover said routes. Sure it’s good for us as carriers because routes need readjusting anyway, but is not the cost saving measure they think it is.

    Edit: Another idea they’ve had is create regional delivery offices where 3 or more towns are in a single building, but this can cause the same issue, and in some regions it may not be possible due to the distance between offices in highly rural areas such as the Great Plains.

    TLDR: will cause more problems than it solves.

    Thanks for coming to my TED Talk

    • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      22 days ago

      I knew in my heart this would end up wasting money rather than saving, and would make life hell for employees. Thank you for explaining how it would happen. I hope it gets the same analysis in the news, and gets dropped as the bad idea it is.

  • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
    601·
    22 days ago

    Losses of $87 billion from 2007 to 2020. Why might they have chosen such odd dates to calculate? Perhaps it’s because in 2006, Republicans passed a bill requiring the USPS to prefund their retirement benefits for employees 75 years in advance. They’re forced to fund retirement benefits for employees that haven’t even been born yet and this is the #1 reason why they’re seeing losses. Fuck DeJoy and fuck Republicans who want nothing more than to destroy the institutions of this country.

    https://apwu.org/usps-fairness-act

    • EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world
      34·
      22 days ago

      Plus sending empty trucks out, getting rid of automatic sorting machines, generally burning as many man hours on things that could be more efficient - the idea is, as ever, to ‘prove’ it doesn’t work by making it as shitty as possible so whoopsie gotta shut it down.

      • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        Some of those automatic sorting machines are so bad. The manpower required to maintain the duds costs way more than just hiring people to sort the mail manually.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.world
    29·
    22 days ago

    Fuck DeJoy with something hard and sandpapery. This dude is scum, any plan he has for the USPS is aimed squarely at damaging it and privatizing essential public services.

  • ulkesh@lemmy.world
    21·
    22 days ago

    I mean they got rid of the drop boxes that we could drive up to, because DeJoy is a piece of shit.

  • garretble@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    21 days ago

    OK, now show me the monetary losses from the military and tell me how we are trying to fix that. I’ll wait.

    • FuzzyRedPanda@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      21 days ago

      Exactly.

      Stop treating the USPS like a business and start treating it like a government service.

      Fund the Postal Service.

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
    13·
    22 days ago

    Finally, slower mail. The one thing that was keeping the Post Office from being profitable was how fast the mail got sent.