Friday, April 15, 2011

the US Postal Service

Dear United States Postal Service,

Not only did you lose $8 and half billion dollars last year, you lost some of my mail. I'm not even upset, though. You are all about delivering letters and this blog is all about writing letters -- we're a great match.

That said, some of the letters you don't lose confuse me. If I send a letter to an incorrect address in upstate Maine, you will take that letter all the way to Maine and then, realizing it's incorrect, send it all the way back across the country to my return address. A piece of paper just traveled an extra 3,000 miles at no cost -- you should have thrown that thing away in Maine. If I don't know where I'm sending my mail, I don't deserve to get it back. These are the types of financial decisions you are messing up. Look -- I could drop a letter in a post office box without a stamp, and you will send it to my return address to tell me I forgot the stamp. Did you ever consider that I could put the address where I want something delivered as the return address and trick you into delivering a letter for me at absolutely no cost? I could.

You have a monopoly on people's mail boxes, literally. Yet, you are losing money. What kind of monopoly loses money? You don't seem to understand how monopolies work. If you were playing the board game, you'd think Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue were the keys to success.


Sincerely,

A Mailer

5 comments:

  1. Another way they're losing money? I saw three mail men delivering mail in the same neighborhood yesterday. Does it really take that many for one block? And the mail man for our complex without fail takes over an hour to put the mail into the 70 mail slots that are all conveniently located right next to each other. He doesn't even have to go door to door.

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  2. But I appreciate any time I can watch a good Seinfeld clip.

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  3. Grahangela, I agree completely. Southern California has seemed to master the 'lets employ one postal worker for each block' strategy nicely.

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  4. In Canada we have something called a Postal ombudsman. If necessary, one can complain to the ombudsman online. Huh. You'd think you'd have a mail it, eh?

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  5. Did you notice Seinfeld (almost) laughing during that clip? What a terrible actor.

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