An agency that is always in the red and getting worse and worse. All they ever do is raise the cost of stamps. Neighborhood delivery walking house to house is neither efficient nor cost effective. All residential mail delivered by vehicle would be required. All houses would be required to have a street mailbox. All subdivisions having one box location for all addresses. These new mail boxes would be paid for by the USPS with money they save on foot delivery. Maximize the bottom line. Improve efficiency. Control costs. We stopped doing delivery by horseback decades ago. Let’s get rid of delivery by foot traffic.
I think that’s going to be a tough sell.
The current postal service policy prohibits changing delivery methods (be it from on-house, to curbside to cluster). Likewise, there are places where a cluster box is not practical, due to the density of houses, so you’re looking at individual curbside mailboxes - by the time you account for on street parking, and other challenges, even that can be more time consuming.
Then you have to think about the urban apartments, where they have a cluster inside (especially places like New York’s “walkup” buildings, that might have a dozen mailboxes just inside the door, and a dozen or more identical buildings on the block), for the security of the mail, you wouldn’t want to move to clusters at the street side.
And finally, those cluster boxes are not cheap - my neighborhood has them (and they were installed by the developer) - and one was hit by a delivery van, requiring it to be replaced. Before the delivery company settled, our HOA was out of pocket, so I saw how much it cost. It would not be cost effective for the postal service to pay for those installations (not like they’d have the money for the one-time expense to install them), and I know many home owners (who currently bear the cost of the mailbox) would not want to subsidize this change when the existing service is already working.
You are not wrong. Tough sell for sure. Yet the cost of inaction is greater. How about setting a goal of reducing foot delivery by 80 percent? Anyway the answer has already been decided. Trump wants to privatize the USPS. Seems logical. The most efficient option.
Not saying it’s a good idea (but tough to implement), the fastest way to cut Postal Service costs is to move to 3 day a week deliveries - and for parcel/off-day deliveries the sender pays more (much like Amazon pretty much pays for the Sunday deliveries by the Post Office.
One carrier could then cover 2 routes, delivering one Monday/Wednesday/Friday and the other Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. Then you keep a few carriers to do off-day deliveries, but you’re seeing a 25-40% workforce reduction, along with the cost associated with it, the vehicles in the fleet, etc.
I can say from personal experience, the volume of mail that I get is virtually non-existent, other than a few bills that still send by mail, and of course all the “bulk rate” stuff - I have a cluster mailbox and am lucky if I check it more than once a week, so reducing the days they have to deliver wouldn’t bother me one bit.
We are in agreement and thank you for caring about our great country. I feel your idea would save the most money. More is needed, more effort instead of kicking the can down the road. Truly privitation would be the answer to the money pit we find ourselves in. My mail consists mostly of advertising. Email is my preferred method of communication. My bills are electronic. Paying my bills electronically as well. I bought a book of forever stamps 3 years ago. I’m not even half way through them. Make the USPS great again!