Recently in Commerce Category

In the July 2010 edition of the PCC Insider (a USPS publication) is found the following statement:

There are 26,000 Post Offices with expenses that exceed revenue. The Postal Service is asking for legislative and regulatory change that would give us the authority to close these Post Offices.

My first thought, knowing roughly how many ZIP codes there are in the US (42,073 as of June), was, “my, that seems like an awful lot of them.” As can be expected of most “statistics” that you get from most media sources, though, they didn’t bother to include that number.

So, off I go to Wikipedia, and then to the USPS site itself, to verify numbers. There are 36,400 “postal locations” nationwide, according to the USPS. It’s not clear if all of those are included in the comparison above, but it can be considered to be the high end.

In other words, reading literally, the postal service has asked for authority to close seven out of every ten post offices (possibly more). It’s possible that they meant to include “some of” in the quote above, but they didn’t, and that may very well be intentional.

It’s an interesting thought. It would certainly reduce their expenses. And how many people actually go to the post office?

Well, me, for one. A lot. But at the rate I buy stamps, whatever post office I frequent is not likely to be losing more money than it’s making. So, let’s ignore that for now.

It’s also worth noting that they shouldn’t need to close seven out of ten post offices in order to only have profitable post offices, since the ones that remain open would likely gain at least some of the sales from the closed post offices. But, let’s ignore that for now as well, and just take this at face value.

For most letters, going to the post office isn’t necessary. You can get stamps at quite a number of grocery stores and office supply stores, and that number could be increased. You can also give outgoing mail to your carrier, who is already coming to your house (or general area, at least) six days a week (soon to be five, in all likelihood). Or use one of the many dropboxes that are all over the place. We’re not talking about any change to the delivery/pick-up schedule.

For packages, it’s a little trickier, but not too hard. With flat-rate packages, you don’t need a scale. Just buy the stamp or print postage online, stick your lead bricks in the box, apply the postage, and give it to your carrier, or drop it in a mailbox. The boxes themselves could be picked up from the same place you get the stamps. Or they could be ordered online, and delivered by the carrier.

For non-flat-rate packages, you’ll do the same thing you do for UPS or FedEx — there’s usually one in your general area, or the USPS could contract with an office supply store to handle the package pickup for them (I’m pretty sure they can already legally do this, it just doesn’t make sense when they have post offices all over the place). Most people don’t send packages regularly, anyway, so it can be more inconvenient than it is without most people really noticing more than once or twice a year (mostly around Christmas). People who do send packages regularly can buy a scale (or the USPS could have a loyalty program that has a scale as a “prize” for frequent mailers, if you want to avoid that issue).

PO Boxes are the other big thing. In rural areas, they’ll probably need to keep money-losing post offices around, in order to avoid losing even more money by having delivery service to every door (ending universal delivery isn’t up for discussion, as far as I can tell, and while PO Boxes don’t really count as universal delivery, I accept it as a concession, as one living in an area where it’s frequently done).

In other areas, it may be a matter of directing people to post offices that aren’t as close, partnering with another company to provide PO Boxes in a store (no real estate costs or on-site employees needed), or just ending the service if it’s not profitable.

This may very well be an effective solution to the post office’s ongoing losses. We could have a profitable postal service, with no significant impact on postage cost and no significant inconvenience to consumers.

Oh, but there’s one problem. The post office has 596,000 full-time employees, plus an unspecified number of part-time employees. They pay over a billion dollars every week in salaries and benefits. What sort of effect do you think they’d have on the local and national economy if they were to close a majority of post offices in order to help them become profitable?

And, here’s the harder question: Is that their problem? Don’t answer too quickly.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the above. I don’t have comments turned on, but if you have a blog, write a response (I don’t care if you link to this post or not) and send me an E-Mail with a link to it, so I can read it. Or, if you’d prefer to respond in private, just send me an E-Mail (if you don’t know it, it’s my first name at this domain name).

I read the following warning label on a speaker a few days ago:

Take note that this speaker is not edible and should not be placed in your mouth.

It’s admittedly a small speaker, but still!

I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks. — Bruce Schneier

That would certainly beat the various draconian and invasive measures I’ve been reading about. And it’s not as though any of them would even work. Most of them wouldn’t even have prevented the latest attack that got prevented just fine without any of the new proposals.

Security is hard. In this case, you’ve got quite a lot of airport security people who aren’t getting paid exceptionally well trying to catch one person out of every billion or so travelers who’s willing and at least mostly able to blow himself up. And you need to do that on tight schedules with no false positives.

To make things just that much harder, everyone else in line is already annoyed with you because of the existing inconveniences of travel and airport security, often combined with long lines, making it exceptionally easy to get a false positive based on behavior (if anything, you probably need to be most concerned about anyone who looks serene through the whole process). And that’s just a couple of the issues involved.

Sigh. I’m going to be flying in less than a week, going to a mostly undisclosed location for a business-planning retreat. Hopefully some of the hysteria will have died down by then and I’ll be able to legally at least read a book during the flight. If I hadn’t already prepaid the entire trip, I’d cancel it and go find a cottage in Maine instead.

I just read the following in a brochure:

(Such and such) is optimized for label printing with the ability to print 2” per second in black and 10’ per minute with full color.

Unit conversion in comparisons can be used to make a stat seem better than it really is (or worse, if that’s your goal). Color printing is usually slower than B&W printing (on account of there being a lot more data/work involved), and I’m curious how much slower it is, but in this case, I think someone just messed up:

• 10’ = 120”
• 1 minute = 60 seconds
• 120” per 60 seconds = 2” per second

I wonder if it was supposed to be 10” per minute instead of 10’…

Vermont’s form for submitting taxes withheld has enough boxes on the “Vermont Income Tax Withheld” line for an employer to withhold $999,999,999,999.99 per quarter.

Yes, that’s one cent shy of $1 trillion in state taxes. Vermont’s overall personal income tax collections for 2008 totaled $622 million and change ($83,042 in change, but who’s counting?), a quarter of which would be $155.5 million. So, I suppose that if Vermont has one exceptionally large employer, accounting for two thirds of all salaries in Vermont, one could actually use all those boxes.

It really makes my contribution seem rather measly, though. It’ll take some growth before I’ll be contributing $100,000,000+ in state income tax on a quarterly basis, even assuming I discriminate based on geographical origin and hire all future employees from Vermont.

(“Some growth” = using loose assumptions, and ignoring scaling issues, my customer base would need to include roughly one missionary for every ten people on the planet. Give or take.)

This is a new one. I just called Verizon’s business sales line to see what Internet options there are for a property I’m considering, and after struggling through the voice-activated phone menu (it: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number. If you don’t know it, say ‘try another way’ or ‘new service.” me: “New service.” It: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number. If you don’t know it, say ‘try another way’ or ‘new service.” Me: “New service.” It: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number.” Me: “New service.” It: “You must enter a ten-digit number.” Me: [0]. It: “Please hold for the next available agent.”), got a new message — “due to unusually high call volume, no agent is currently available to take your call, and we are unable to put you in the queue” (paraphrased — the gist is that they’re out of circuits).

Do they really have that many people trying to order new service? Or are the customer service lines on the same system? And what’s this with a phone company running out of phone lines?

(This was shortly after calling Verizon to have my current office DSL upload speed fixed after they goofed the most recent change… again… and having to go through three different departments to get that done.)

I ordered 1180 prints from Wal-Mart’s photo center a couple of days ago (two different pictures, which will be going in some Christmas mailings), and paid for expedited shipping, so they were supposed to arrive today. Wal-Mart shipped them yesterday, sending me an E-Mail saying so, and that they were expected to arrive today. They didn’t. Or, at least, haven’t, and I’d be a little surprised if FedEx makes another delivery tonight given that it’s 9:45pm as I’m writing this.

The tracking number that Wal-Mart gave me in the shipping confirmation E-Mail doesn’t work at FedEx (which is the company listed as the carrier in the E-Mail). Neither does searching by reference number using the tracking number, invoice number, or order number.

So, I clicked on the online tracking link that was in the E-Mail.

Someone might want to communicate to the designers of that page that it’s not necessary to list the order status for each of the pictures individually.

Take note, all ye people who mail animals via the post.

Effective the beginning of this month, you may no longer mail an animal that is going to be used in an animal fighting venture. You also are prohibited from mailing any sharp instrument that is designed or intended to be attached to the leg of a bird for use in said venture.

And, finally, you may not print messages on a box that will be mailed (whether or not it contains a prohibited animal) that could be construed as condoning said animal fighting ventures. Unless you’re talking about birds, and the fighting would be happening in a state where it’s legal. (You still can’t mail the bird being promoted, regardless of whether or not it’s legal.)

If you’re curious, an animal in these rules refers to any live bird, live dog, or other mammal, not including humans. You’re apparently able to mail the latter.

Animal fighting specifically excludes hunting, so you can mail your hunting dogs, at least according to the new rules posted this month. Whether or not this is disallowed elsewhere in the mailing manual is outside my area of expertise.

For any of you who are planning on writing a web-based shopping cart tool, here are two basic tips to keep in mind:

1. When giving a shipping estimate, asking for state and zip code is redundant. It’s okay to have both fields, but if someone (like me) puts in the zip code, don’t give an error saying that you also need the state. Because you don’t. And be absolutely sure not to just return the user to the page without giving any sort of error at all.

2. When someone clicks “Add to Cart”, without entering a quantity, you can safely assume that the quantity is 1. An alert box saying “The following errors were found: — please enter a valid quantity before you add this item to the shopping cart” is something of a turn-off.

Bonus point:

• People considering buying something off of a web site generally want to know what the item costs. Most web sites, if they include pricing information but don’t have free shipping, don’t actually tell you what the item really costs until you get 75% of the way through the buying process. You get bonus points for having the total cost right on the page with the item’s description.

  Just ask for the shipping zip code, and provide a link for internationals or fancy shipping. Store said zip code in a cookie, and always display the ground rate on the page, giving the potential customer the option to view different rates using some sort of clickable popup.

It looks like Amazon might have opened a warehouse in New Hampshire. At least, I ordered a book from them yesterday, and it shipped today out of Nashua (and went south to UPS central in Chelmsford on its way north to Lebanon, but we’ll forgive them that — it doesn’t change the delivery date).

That means next day service at 3-5 day prices, at least for the stuff that’s stocked there. Nice!

Speaking of Amazon, if you haven’t seen my sidebar link to an article describing how Amazon does order fulfillment, it’s worth a read, and has lots of pictures.