This morning I went to the post office to get 2 stamps for my last two letters to Nicole before she leaves her site. My post office isn’t open on Saturdays (they’ve never been open on Saturdays, but I’m sure they don’t have the budget for it), so the only time I can get stamps is first thing in the morning on my way to work, though I have to be a little late to work since the post office doesn’t open until 8:30. I went in this morning and spent 15 minutes in line, stuck behind one guy with 2 packages and then a woman signing up for a P.O. box. I was still third in line and they lady was still doing the paperwork for her P.O. box when I gave up. They only had one register open, probably because of budget cuts. I have been there before when they had more than one register open. To his credit, the guy at that register is one of the nicest people ever, but they need to open more registers or provide some kind of vending machine for basic stuff like stamps. But they did away with the vending machines years ago, no doubt to cut costs. I liked the vending machines because they were open any time and I could make a big dent in my supply of spare change buying $8 worth of stamps. But the post office has now cut their budget so much that they really are no longer effective, at least in terms of having a store front. Anyway, this is the second time out of the last few visits where the time I was spending in line made no sense relative to what I was getting and I wound up leaving. So I will just e-mail until she comes back. I can get regular stamps at the grocery store and otherwise can hopefully avoid the post office.
You have been Nicole’s most faithful, constant letter sender and I am sure she really appreciates it. You are an awesome uncle!
I shared your post with some key people at work who interact with the USPS. The challenge is they cannot make decisions like a business… close unused offices, cut back unpopular services, even make price and equipment changes easily because congressmen want to protect local jobs. So they become less competitive and in the end the jobs will disappear.
Exactly. I think they’ve already cut back to the point where they aren’t really effective. They definitely need to be able to cut back on branches that can’t be run economically, which I’m sure would include my branch. It seems like it would be easy for them to set up a system where I could buy stamps online, but the options seems to be to mail in a form (which I’m guessing requires a stamp, which theoretically I don’t have) or paying a $1 processing fee in addition to stamps (stamps are shipped from Kansas (When I order a pizza from Papa John’s, it doesn’t ship from Kansas!!!!)). They come to my house every day, but they can’t ship the stamps for free?