#postoffice #usps #economy #employment #bankruptcy
So the Post Office is looking at axing 28k-35k jobs by March 2012 to get their 14billion dollar deficit under control.
post-office-to-cut-services-jobs
As a small business owner who relies on them for the bulk of my shipping I have to say I am disappointed. I print my shipping labels and pay for my postage through their free online application. I'm currently working having a new Prestashop website that will automate the copying and pasting of address information from my ecommerce site to the USPS site. So generally I am pretty happy. For many parts of the country their priority mail comes close to Fedex delivery times to my customers. I only have to deal with the terrible wait times at my local post office when I'm clearing returns. It's a strong motivation to make sure I have happy customers who don't want to return anything!
Anyway during those long waits to clear my box I've often wondered why it seems so hard for the post office to get the customer facing part of their business right.
I have some suggestions for them.
1. Invest more in their automated kiosks and their online tools. They obviously aren't user friendly enough because way too many people end up waiting in line for stuff they could be doing at home.
2. Double the cost of a stamp and invest in better quality service. Maybe not everyone will agree but I would happily pay more for letter or card rates for a better quality of service for all postal services in general. You would still be looking at under a dollar for most postage. Online alternatives are already eating away at that business and many of them are free. So people aren't posting something because it is necessarily the cheapest option. The post office loses a lot more business from their bad post office experiences than they do from the cost of a stamp.
3. Change your employee policies. Treat them better and demand they treat the post office customers better.
4. Make your trucks into limited functionality mobile postal outlets. Empower your delivery vehicles to offer those postal services that can be quick and to sell products. Some drivers will take my labelled and paid for packages and some won't. Being able to pay for a package right there would help as well.
5. Install more consolidated mailboxes. So people collect the last of the neighborhood leg from a centralized point in the neighborhood thereby freeing up the drivers time for more of option 4 above and 6 below.
6. Offer additional paid services that make sense for location based value add. For example the postal delivery vehicle could be modified for electronic meter reading for energy and other utility companies. It could deliver newspapers at the same time it delivered the mail. It might collect certain types of non hazardous recycling for a small fee. It could have a mobile redbox kiosk on the back for DVD rental (not sure how keen netflix would be on that one since they toss a ton of business the post offices way). Anyway there are many possibilities they could be and should be looking into.
The post always gets through but in the future it probably won't be in any rush.
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