"Chinny Raccoon" (chinnyraccoon)
09/15/2019 at 04:31 • Filed to: None | 1 | 17 |
I’m enjoying all this extra air you sent with a couple of punches, a short 3/8 extension and a socket.
Maybe it’s to balance out from a dev board I ordered that was just stuffed in a cardboard envelope, damaging the pins.
pip bip - choose Corrour
> Chinny Raccoon
09/15/2019 at 04:49 | 0 |
RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
> Chinny Raccoon
09/15/2019 at 06:27 | 0 |
I’m more used to seeing me order something miniscule like one nail and having it show up in a box several feet by several feet with a million of those massive air pouches in it...massive waste of paper and cardboard and plastic and hard on the environment. Almost every package they’ve sent me is OVERpacked.
I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
> Chinny Raccoon
09/15/2019 at 07:00 | 1 |
They do this as a cost savings measure. I think they have less than ten standard size boxes and use a lot of void fillers. I got an SD card a while back in a 12"x12"x6" ish box.
It's anither reason I don't use them. Bad for the environment. And they use USPS at a rate which is unprofitable for USPS, or at least used to. I love the USPS.
facw
> I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
09/15/2019 at 08:50 | 2 |
It’s better for USPS to be making those delivery than not. Maybe they lose money on them, but they lose less money than if they didn’t make the deliveries (which is why USPS agreed to them) . USPS has to make the rounds regardless, so delivering anything helps (which is also why they are so happy to deliver junk mail at a loss).
facw
> Chinny Raccoon
09/15/2019 at 08:52 | 0 |
I assume it’s quicker/cheaper to send things in the wrong sized box tha n to take the time to find the right sized one if they don’t have one handy.
I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
> facw
09/15/2019 at 09:09 | 0 |
That... doesn't sound right. How is losing money better than making no money?
facw
> I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
09/15/2019 at 09:30 | 2 |
It costs USPS more or less the same amount to drive to your house regardless of how much mail they’ll bring you (and even if they don’t have anything for you, they’ll probably still pass your mailbox delivering to others). So their costs are fairly fixed. Even if Amazon doesn’t cover the cost of making the delivery, the still eat into that fixed cost that USPS would have to pay anyway.
Again, no one forced USPS to agree to these terms, they did so because they felt like it would be a net benefit.
ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
> I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
09/15/2019 at 10:28 | 0 |
The USPS basically goes to or drives by every house/mailbox every day, whether they’re delivering nothing, one envelope or 12 Amazon boxes to your door. That service, and all the logistics behind it is an enormous fixed operating cost that doesn’t necessarily vary a tremendous amount based on volume. Delivering Amazon packages “at a loss” is probably better thought of a lesser degree of losing than not delivering them. The USPS operating costs probably don’t change much, if they don’t take those Amazon packages. Taking them brings in some amount of revenue they wouldn’t have otherwise had with really changing the costs side of the ledger.
DipodomysDeserti
> I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
09/15/2019 at 10:47 | 0 |
I’m with you on the amazon hate, but as someone who once ran a mailhouse, I’m perplexed by your usps love.
DipodomysDeserti
> facw
09/15/2019 at 10:55 | 1 |
That’s not how math works
That’s also not how postage works.
Have a nice weekend, Jeff.
facw
> DipodomysDeserti
09/15/2019 at 11:34 | 0 |
Well tell me super genius, if you have to make drive to a house regardless , how is it more profitable to carry fewer items? And why do you think the postal service would agree to ship these items for Amazon if it wasn’t beneficial to them?
DipodomysDeserti
> facw
09/15/2019 at 12:26 | 1 |
To preface my statement, my family owned a print shop/enve lope converter/ mail house for twenty- five of the thirty-two years I’ve been alive. I worked in said shop my whole life with a brief reprieve when I went to college. I then ran said mail house for eight years . I have a very deep and intricate understanding of how the USPS works. I’ve spent more time as USPS facilities than anyone in there right mind would want to. I made a good living profiting off the USPS and making sure junk mail was delivered to your house every day.
With that out of the the way, there is a lot more that goes into delivering mail than the carrier bringing it to our house. That’s probably the cheapest part of the puzzle. Also, there is a limited amount of space in a Grumman LLV, so the mail that is brought to you every day is usually not all the mail that was sorted and ready for delivery to your domiciled .
Most of the mail you receive is “bulk mail”. T his means a mail house sorts is to USPS regs and delivers it to a Bulk Mail Unit (BMU). T he BMU verifies weights and the mail pieces before processing the mail. This takes quite a bit of time. I’ve spent an entire day at a BMU processing one job, and we were a small mailer. There are mailers who have multiple drivers, who are at BMU literally 24/7. If you’re a big enough mailer, you can have a USPS employee stationed at you shop, and they’ll verify the mail before you even get to the BMU.
Once the mai l is verified it gets sorted. Depending on the type of mail (mail is classified based on size/weight/shape/contents) and your BMU, each job will either be sorted at the BMU or brought to another facility for sorting. If it has to be brought to another facility, it has to be loaded into a trailer and hauled over. The more mail there is, the more tractors have to be loaded up. Sortation facilities are not small operations. They are the size of city blocks and involve a whole series of belts and scanners that sort mail into the proper location. The mail is then transported to several other locations until it finally ma kes it to your local PO, where is is sorted again and given to your mail carrier.
Keep in mind that the mail doesn’t magically transport itself from the trucks into the sort facilities every time it changes location. It’s transported in large steel cages, which are not automated. It takes people to both load the mail into and out of the cages, and it takes people to move the cages into trucks. As mail volume increases, so does personnel required to move said mail, and trucks required to transport said mail. The more people and trucks you have working, the more costs you have.
Huge mailers like Amazon are able to cut deals with the USPS. They get to skip a lot of the verification requirements, but their mail is dumped into the same process as everyone else’s. The USPS does this in order to stay busy and to ensure they stay a step ahead of private delivery services. They make a lot of decisions that aren’t economically beneficial to them. During the great recession, mail volume dropped dramatically, and the USPS was fucked. They had a hard time keeping facilities open and paying pensions (the USPS is sup posed to be self sustaining, they aren’t normally sup ported by the federal budget).
This model ultimately unsustainable, and given a few more Trump-like presidencies, I predict the USPS will be privatized. I had a friend who worked for Amazon corporate and they’ve been discussing this with the USPS for a while.
In my experience, the USPS has some of the worst management I’ve ever seen. There regulations make very little sense, and management is generally clueless. I knew more about their regs than the actual employees (my wife’s uncle was a BMU manager in Detroit, and I taught him how a new class of mail was supposed to be processed). Don’t try an rationalize decisions made by the USPS, as they are rarely rational decisions.
Sorry for the rant, it’s been a while since I talked mail.
I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
> DipodomysDeserti
09/15/2019 at 15:35 | 1 |
That was.... a lot.
But yeah, the man hours of processing and sorting the mail, not to mention the true fact that USPS doesn't walk to every doorstep every delivery day (man hours are not free) means they indeed can lose money on deliveries.
I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker
> DipodomysDeserti
09/15/2019 at 15:38 | 1 |
I like it because they invariably do a better job (in my experience) delivering on time and without damaging packages.
I also like the USPS because it’s a successful* example of a government-owned corporation.
*contingent upon your definition of success
gmporschenut also a fan of hondas
> Chinny Raccoon
09/15/2019 at 17:40 | 0 |
I always find it interesting when amazon or mcmaster-carr, put the single token air pillow thing in the box. Like WTF do you expect that to do?
facw
> DipodomysDeserti
09/18/2019 at 12:53 | 0 |
Thanks for the detailed response. I’m pretty sure Amazon is doing the most pre-processing of these packages that they can, so USPS is mostly responsible for last mile (with Amazon’s volume and massive logistics network , they can easily ship stuff from their DCs to the USPS delivery facility, so there’s much less processing burden for USPS (obviously still some ) ).
You’re right that if the fill an LLV, so USPS has to make more runs, that greatly adds to the incremental cost, but my understanding is that that is usually not an issue (though USPS clearly believes it will be more of one going forward, which is why they are looking at full-sized delivery vans like UPS and Fedex use for next mail truck rather than a minivan sized LLV replacement).
Regarding USPS in general I think they are in tough situation, there are never-ending calls for them to be “run like a business”, but there’s no way they can actually do that when they can’t set their own rates, can’t pick where they want to operate post offices, and can’t charge more for mail that’s more expensive to deliver (for regular first class mail, they have a bit more flexibility for priority mail and parcel services I think). Given those constraints, there’s no way they are going to be able to run a profitable, customer-centric business. Congress needs to either decide to let USPS run it’s own show, or to decide that a subsidized postal service is a public good worth supporting.
DipodomysDeserti
> facw
09/18/2019 at 14:31 | 1 |
You hit the nail on the head with them not being able to set their own rates. The reality is that postage is too cheap, especially when you consider the size of the US, plus all the pensions they have to pay out.
With Amazon’s prep, it all comes down to the economics of it. The more you sort, the cheaper the postage. However, sometimes the price break doesn’t outweigh the cost of the labor required to sort more. I would have lots of big companies pay a higher postage rate, as it was still cheaper than the increased labor required for a cheaper rate. Plus there was a lesser chance of your mail being rejected.