The Styrofoam Cube In This Letter Serves A Bureaucratic Purpose

http://consumerist.com/2011/10/the-styrofoam-cube-in-this-letter-serves-a-bureaucratic-purpose.html

by ubasu • 15 years ago

158 44 15 years ago

consumerist.com

heyrhett• 15 years ago

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- Oscar Wilde

TruthElixirX4• 15 years ago

Ugh. USPS. I cannot actually remember the last time I used their service.

aaronbrethorst• 15 years ago

Likely more recently than you might think. See, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on FedEx Smartpost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Ground).

edit: regarding UPS: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22924632-ups-using-USPS-for...

TruthElixirX4• 15 years ago

:(. I will have to switch to UPS now.

Samuel_Michon• 15 years ago

You never receive snail mail?

TruthElixirX4• 15 years ago

Nope. I am pretty much 100% electronic.

felideon• 15 years ago

I use it every two days, thanks to Netflix. (I also receive medical bills through the mail. Everything else is garbage.)

watmough• 15 years ago

According to my wife, delivery confirmation on a parcel is around 20c, saving money against using registered mail.

drinian• 15 years ago

Registered mail is supposed to be held to a different standard for proof of delivery than delivery confirmation as well.

rudiger• 15 years ago

Maybe there's a technical reason for this? It's possible that the handling of parcel packages is different and is helped by a minimum thickness.

ajross• 15 years ago

More probably that the detection of parcel packages is machine-driven and based on thickness.

I don't know why everyone is up in arms about this. The Indiana people had a problem (how to get the letter mailed via the service they wanted) and solved it creatively.

This is called a "hack", not "bureaucracy". And we should applaud it. Is the rule dumb? Yeah, probably. But it's hardly alone in the world. For every styrofoam cube there are a dozen people putting letters into boxes needlessly, and that is the bad thing. This is cute.

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

AT&T told me I can either get an unlimited Text Messaging plan or no text messaging plan and pay per text message.

Comcast told me that the 6mb internet service would be $50, and that I could only get the 20mb service, the service I wanted for $50 for the first six months, 60 for the next six months, and 70 for the next 12 months after that. They called it a "bundle" because it included local TV channels, channels which I get for free. The didn't offer me the choice of no free TV channels over cable.

Apple continually charges a ridiculous amount on memory upgrades.

Half the places I shop at want me to register with them in some capacity. No REI, I don't need a special card for the 2 annual purchases I do a year. You can keep the $2 I'd get back at the end of the year if I did have the card.

Amazon sells the same kindle at two different prices, depending on whether or not you like advertisements.

Are all these things stupid? Yes. The USPS is not alone, so stop pretending it's some government bureaucracy thing. People sometimes complain that the government should act more like a business, and get upset when they actually do.

forrestthewoods2• 15 years ago

Huh? Every business example you provided are money based decisions. They are all unfortunate for the consumer and may or may not maximize profit in the long term, but profit is the basis for each decision.

The goal for the 3/4 inch minimum dimension regular for the USPS is based upon what logic or reasoning exactly?

Steko• 15 years ago

It's so the carrier doesn't waste hours every day scanning every letter for a service that only 0.05% of them need.

The charge for a return receipt is also higher and the USPS takes advantage of this just like all kinds of businesses have higher margins from certain products.

The many savvy people who take advantage of the lower rate for parcel delivery confirmation are like people who bring their own soda to work because it's cheaper then the vending machine.

TLDR: angry mob on the street probably wrong about finer details of world again.

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

It's big organization beauracracy thing. Businesses have a little more pressure to economize, and that's the biggest practical difference. Large groups of people get stupid. Also, businesses have more of an incentive to extract money from you, which alone explains many of your examples.

Even so, I think this example is exceptionally atrocious, and it's really hard to imagine a for-profit organization getting away with that for long. It's a matter of degree, and government organizations can go farther out before they die.

njharman• 15 years ago

> so stop pretending it's some government bureaucracy thing

Yep, USPS is not a normal government agency. Also "The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters."*

If people point to USPS as example of government waste they do so out of ignorance.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service

jerf2• 15 years ago

Not necessarily. There's a big question facing the Post Office right now that becomes acute in the next few months, which is whether the US government will bail out its pension fund, which is utterly and completely unsustainable. Google "post office pension" for things like [1], in which it becomes evident that however they may be not the Federal government de jure they sure are a part of the Federal government de facto, just as trying to pretend Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac are fully independent entities whose actions are wholly their own and have nothing to do with the government is a complete joke. At the very least they have the same special Moral Hazard relationship that the Federal government does not extend to just any "entirely separate business entity".

(The only thing that would be any different if they were an officially recognized Federal agency is that instead of worrying about whether they might in the future cost us billions of dollars in pensions by act of Congress, they would have already cost us billions of dollars in pensions by act of Congress.)

I'm way more interested in de facto relationships that de jure. You can say anything you want legally, what matters is the actual relationships.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/22/justice-depa...

sp332• 15 years ago

USPS has been running a massive deficit. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0911/090611l1.htm So how are they still operating if they don't get taxpayer money?

kevinpet• 15 years ago

If you give me free access to monopoly powers (i.e. you guarantee me no competition), I'm quite sure I can suck the public dry without ever getting a direct handout.

The USPS is waste that endures solely because of government power. It just happens that it isn't government's taxing power that keeps it alive.

13rules• 15 years ago

Might not be government "waste", but it is a perfect example of government inefficiency!

jerf2• 15 years ago

"stop pretending it's some government bureaucracy thing."

You added the word "government". I checked. It doesn't appear anywhere in the original post, or as of this writing, anywhere in a comment not in a reply to you. I don't consider listing other failures anything like a defense for the failure at hand. I'm pretty happy to indict large bureaucratic organizations in general.

whimsy• 15 years ago

Read the return address on the package

joshz2• 15 years ago

Polish equivalent of USPS has, still until 2013, a monopoly on delivering mail weighing up to 50g at some low price, 1.55 pln i think, while private delivery companies would have to charge 2.5x that. So they attach metal plaques or small notepads to letters to increase weight.

delinka2• 15 years ago

Maybe I need caffeine, but I don't follow your comment.

Who adds these items to increase weight? Why? If my item is <50g, I use the Polish monopoly mail service (PMMS?) and pay 1.55pln (40% of what I'd pay with the competition, according to your numbers.) If PMMS is adding this weight, the mind boggles - they're wasting fuel delivering light items. If customers are adding the weight, why would they want to increase their costs to mail light items?

joshz2• 15 years ago

Perhaps I could have been clearer.

> Who adds these items to increase weight?

Private delivery companies add these items.

> Why?

Because due to the existing PMMS (Poczta Polska to be exact) monopoly on mail <50g, private companies would have to charge 2.5x the PMMS rate to deliver the same piece of mail. Adding the item allows a private company to circumvent the monopoly (by increasing weight >50g) and thus being able to deliver this piece of mail at a lower rate than PMMS. How this ends up being profitable is a bit of a mystery.

> If PMMS is adding this weight

They're not. They have the monopoly so they don't need to.

> they're wasting fuel delivering light items.

No arguing there...

This is what one of those metal plates looks like http://gfx.mmka.pl/newsph/222924/44881.3.jpg

steve8918• 15 years ago

Wow. This is the reason why the USPS is going bankrupt in front of our eyes.

If they don't change ridiculous rules like this, they'll never survive.

clawrencewenham• 15 years ago

The post office themselves claim it's a congressional mandate to pre-pay 75-years worth of employee pensions and benefits in a 10-year window. They give Congress 5.5 billion dollars every year, and it's that which is driving the crisis.

ahi2• 15 years ago

I believe the USPS snark is that they are paying pension and benefit costs for mail carriers that haven't been born yet. How unusual, congress screwed something up. The cynic in me is yelling "conspiracy!"

ROFISH• 15 years ago

As someone who ships items daily with the postal service, the cube is not necessary. Yes, you have to pay extra for the "package rate" to get delivery confirmation, but you don't actually have to add extra items to make it a package.

This is the fault of the shipper, not the postal service.

DougBTX• 15 years ago

I'd expect they have some sort of rule that obliges them to use the cheapest service for each particular item sent, but that leaves them free to send whatever they like. So if they wanted to send a letter, and the letter rate was lower than the package rate, then they would be obliged to send it at the lower rate, otherwise they are "wasting" money.

Symmetry• 15 years ago

Large corporations generally don't feel like they can get away with ignoring rules just because they aren't enforced. What if the Post Office suddenly started rejecting "packages" that their policy said they should reject? The corporation wouldn't be able to change their process quickly, and would lose a lot of money until it was fixed.

bfung• 15 years ago

nice hack.

ck2• 15 years ago

Except what the article doesn't mention at all:

Cost to ship up to three ounces as first-class-PARCEL with tracking is $1.75

Cost to ship 8x11, same three ounces without tracking that is machine-sortable (bendable) is 88 cents.

So you are paying for that as a parcel, it's not just bureaucracy.

They cannot put tracking on every first class item, it would destroy their profitability.

Just try getting FedEx or UPS to deliver anything these days with tracking for only $1.75

ahi2• 15 years ago

Most first class mail isn't touched by human hands until the mail carrier puts it into your mailbox. I'm guessing that you could ship a machine-sortable as a parcel with tracking if you brought it to the post office, but not when it's being mixed in with a thousand other machine-sortables in the out-going mail bag. You don't want to go through each machine-sortable letter to see if tracking is required. I suspect this is less about bureaucratic complexity and more about dealing with a corner case caused by operational efficiency.

edit: Jacob on the consumerist thread explained it better than I did. "I suspect that letters (or flats) are processed through equipment that doesn't scan the barcode for the delivery confirmation system. Only if your letter is really a package and doesn't fit through the equipment that processes letters does it go through the package system which does scan the barcodes."

bittermang• 15 years ago

I would hardly label what USPS offers as tracking.

There's a cost disparity because there's a features and performance disparity between Postal Service tracking, and FedEx/UPS tracking. Better tracking, better reporting, better user experience.

The Styrofoam Cube In This Letter Serves A Bureaucratic Purpose

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