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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The U.S. Postal Service Doesn’t Want Night Owl Business

Most people occasionally need to mail packages. Most people also have jobs. The U.S. Postal Service is in financial trouble, and desperately needs our package-mailing funds. They're not about to expand the hours that post offices are open to accommodate office workers, though, so they compromise: post office lobbies are open 24/7 and Automated Postal Centers are ready for your package-mailing needs. Blue mailboxes can only accommodate parcels up to 13 ounces, but you can drop much larger boxes in the package drop at your local post office. In theory. Dan found that this was trickier in practice, when every post office nearby had an operational postage machine, but the package drops were all locked.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

USPS problems are due to:

1) Operational decisions that inconvenience the customer based on the assumption of a monopoly. No more! When the stamp machine left the lobby, I started paying bills on-line. Used to use more than one book of stamps per month; now perhaps one per year, excepting Christmas cards.

2) Bigger problem for them is that Congress and administrations have used their pension and health funds as piggy-banks. Current USPS problems are due to enormous payments they have to make to fund their retiree health care 75 years down the road.

Anonymous said...

WHAT automated postal center?? Where is the nearest one to 21801? Probably Annapolis.