by James A. Bacon
If you’ve got something more important to mail than a greeting card, you might consider an alternative to the U.S. Postal Service. Come to think of it, if you live in Central Virginia and don’t want people thinking you’ve forgotten their birthday, graduation, or anniversary, you might not even entrust greeting cards to the U.S. mail.
Everyone knows the mail is frequently late. But it turns out that postal carriers sometimes dump the mail rather than deliver it. An internal USPS investigation, initiated by widespread complaints of late or nondelivered mail, has documented that three mail carriers, in the words of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “ditched the mail rather than deliver it last year.” Reports the RT-D:
In one case, a mail carrier in Fredericksburg on April 22 asked to use a resident’s bathroom and then use his recycling trash can. Four days later, the resident found 400 pieces of bundled mail in the can. The mail was recovered and the carrier, who admitted to dumping his cargo, was later fired.
That same day, a mail carrier in Smithfield threw away 500 direct mailers, which were found in a Dumpster. The mail was part of a pilot program being tested by the agency. The carrier was fired.
Nobody laments the non-delivery of bulk mail. But there can be serious consequences if bills, invoices, or legal documents arrive days or weeks late. In the City of Richmond, late delivery of property-tax and meals-tax bills, compounded by the Post Office-like indifference of the city’s tax-collection bureaucracy, have created massive headaches for property owners and restaurateurs forced to contest penalties and fines.
From a cosmic perspective, Americans have on the one hand the rise of the information economy, the Web, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence from which humanity hopes to reap massive gains in productivity and quality. On the other, we have the U.S. Post Office and other unresponsive bureaucracies.
Which is the more powerful force in society today — change or inertia? Technology… or the sloth and ineptitude of government bureaucracies whose flaws are compounded by an entitled, ill-educated, social media-addled workforce?