One of my pet peeves is the slow disappearance of mailboxes. I finally got around to looking at the USPS map of my neighborhood, and there is exactly one (1) mailbox left within a couple of miles of me:
I know, I know: people don't mail as much stuff as they used to; mailboxes are objects of vandalism; and there are still UPS and FedEx stores around where you can mail letters. And, of course, you can leave things in your own mailbox for the letter carrier to pick up.
But it's still annoying. I want a mailbox near me, like I used to have. Hmmph.
In some areas there seem to be more green relay boxes than blue mail boxes.
As I recall, this was a big thing that DeJoy was pushing. At least I remember his name being associated with this during the brouhaha of the 2020 election and drop-off points for mail-in ballots.
That's what I remember too.
That's exactly my impression, he had some kind of vendetta against mailboxes because it made the government look like it was valuable and doing something.
So without them it would be more plausible to privatize mail delivery.
The disappearance of public mailboxes is corruption.
I'm pretty sure that's what happened with the mailbox that was near my apartment complex. It was conveniently located to a group of people likely to vote Democratic.
And unlike the mailbox in Kevin's home, our apartment mailboxes are only for incoming mail, so the removal of the mailbox made even less sense.
DeJoy may have been a fan, but deep-sixing mailboxes predates his becoming Postmaster General. And if recollection serves, there were some non-trivial weight restrictions put on what one could mail via stamps and mailbox. Well before him.
The restrictions really should be whatever you can stuff in the slot.
That's what it used to be in the before times, but in those days you could put in parcels too.
If memory serves, a lot of these restrictions were put in after 9-11, and might also have been partly in reaction to earlier Unabomber-type events and possibly the anthrax letters. The idea was to make people send parcels from post office counters instead of dumping them unobserved in mailboxes at any hour.
Of course that says nothing about these amazing disappearing mailboxes, and it wouldn't be a surprise at all if DeJoy was pulling them out strategically. Even if there was an earlier plan, he seems like the type who might have redirected where they got pulled from.
In my town the number of daily pickups from these boxes has been going way down too these past several years, and particularly it's hard now to find boxes that get collected after maybe 2:00 in the afternoon. I have the PO's online box directory bookmarked so I can recheck it to keep up.
Bellingham, WA took a different course, and it's spreading. When we moved here from Bellevue, WA to here (in 2019), our little neighborhood had a very sturdy kiosk with a locked letter compartment for each house AND two much larger compartments for package deliveries. They also have a outbound mail slot for letters and large envelopes.
A number of neighborhoods around us also have these kiosks with variable numbers of letter slots and package compartments. Each designed to be within a 1-2 minute walk of the section of a neighborhood they service.
I started seeing last year the the BIG neighborhoods west of us had suddenly sprouted a whole bunch of these kiosks.
From Bellingham to DeJoy - "take a long walk on a short pier! We have a lot of them you can practice on!!!""
I live down the road in Tacoma and our group mailboxes have been a disaster. The druggies regularly hit them in the middle of the night and cut them open. It takes months (years?) to get them repaired, the repair crews are out of Seattle and over worked and generally clueless. We are continually in touch with our representative’s constituent services person as the only way to apply pressure to get our group mailbox repaired.
where i grew up the post office sold cigarettes, candy, pop, and ice cream and was open until 8pm
sort of a petticoat junction/green acres kinda deal
and when i was 7 or 8 my grandpa would give me money to go pick up a carton of lucky strikes for him
My dad once gave me a check and sent me to go buy stamps and when the guy at the post office said, ok, that's $100, I almost fainted and looked at the check --and it was really for $100.
pretty sure i got change back from a $5 bill (and a hershey's bar for my trouble)
That would have been a long time ago. I remember prices like that from our local post office on Maui in the mid-50's. I got a nice chunk of candied ginger the first time I did it, and other strange (to Mainlander) tastes - this was Hawaii, and the Post Office ladies were Japanese, Chinese, Samoan, Filipino, etc. This was a complex buffet...
Sometimes the other kids and I would do trades - the bazaar of the bizarre, Hawaiian style.
Slow news day….
The boxes have stayed pretty consistent in my neighborhood over the last 20 years. I know because I periodically use them to mail stuff. They actually added a tiny post office in the small grocery store as well. Maybe my neighborhood is just really fuddy duddy.
It's because people stopped using them out of an abundance of caution (re vandalism/theft) that they've been removed, don't you think?
Seems odd to me. All the mailboxes are still here. We have a local post office still open the regional distribution center about a mile away. Never use any though.
It might depend if you're in downtown or outside?
In San Francisco we still have plenty. The odd thing is they tend to move rather more frequently than you'd expect. Or, well, more than I expect, at least.
There used to be one half a block from me when I first moved here, and it vanished after a couple years. The next-closest is about a two blocks away, and there used to be 3 blue boxes there. Now there's one. Some other mailboxes that used to be near my closest grocery also vanished at some point.
I'm sure it is responding to demand, or changing routes, or sunspots, or something. I just find it vaguely amusing.
Ohhh, they move, do they? And what makes you think they're actually MAILBOXES? Haven't you heard about the mobile 5G stations that transmit the signals to the nanobots in the so-called "vaccines" that are designed to CONTROL our MINDS??! Wake UP, sheeple!!
Exactly what DeJoy was good at. De-joying things.
It always was an oddly appropriately Dickens-esque name.
Ha, well said.
I have walked to my neighborhood mailbox in my bare feet on a Midwestern winter morning. That's how close it is. It's been there for at least fifteen years. God, I hope I'm not jinxing it.
Public Service Announcement:
There are a lot of bat shit crazy people on the internet, especially where politics is involved. Posting the exact location of your home is a bad idea.
you'd *have to be bat shit crazy to expose yourself to kevin's 'iron drum' defensive perimeter
those 'felines' are actually state-of-the-art cybernetic weapons produced at lawrence livermore
I just hope you still have a lawn to tell people to get off of.
In our neighborhood they have mailboxes for multiple houses clustered together and they recently replaced the old set of boxes with a new configuration that has a slot where you can put outbound letters. Great thinking --- it a nice improvement over the traditional mailbox!
That's what the Canadian postal system did when they stopped door-to-door service. They call them "community mailboxes" like it's a public service where you can go meet your neighbors and hang out. The mailbox clusters have slots for outgoing mail and also much bigger cubbies where they leave parcels and slip the key into your mailbox if there's one for you. Curiously, the individual doors can easily get blocked by ice build-up-- and this is the second design iteration, too. Not that it ever gets that cold in Canada . . . I'm guessing the design was farmed out to a company in the Bahamas.
Our neighborhood has on street boxes for individual houses on the through streets. There are community boxes for dead end courts. The community boxes have large package boxes also. It is in a "Red" rural county so even little communities like Greenwood have a PO.
We still have a public telephone booth in our little village, along with a mail box. The latter sounds very empty on the odd occasion I have to post my absentee vote.
I noticed the other day that the public telephone lets you make free calls anywhere in Australia. I imagine the telco realised this was cheaper than repairing the thing at frequent intervals after someone smashed it up to steal the coins inside. Even so, it was a remarkably sensible move by a for-profit company that must have caused a lot of heartburn in management.
DeJoy. 'Nuff said
We use our street mailbox to send outgoing letters. Easy, peasy.
DeJoy got rid of a bunch, and a lot of the newer ones have slots that won't accept anything bigger than an envelope.
I believe the rules for picking up mail from one's home mailbox have changed, too. Our carrier leaves outgoing mail stocking out of our box unless the carpet has mail to drop off.
uh-oh, kevin, now your groupies can find you. also, yeah, they've removed boxes by me in the middle of a city and it's mildly annoying once every 2 years or so.
After problems with mail being lost or stolen, I usually drop anything I am mailing off inside my local post office, even though there is a mailbox down the street. I pay bills online whenever I can now after a check was stolen, the amount increased, and cashed. I have read that postal workers are being held up and robbed of the keys they use to open mail boxes to collect mail.
That has been a real problem in the DC suburbs, from everything I've read. It was suggested that checks be written with gel pens, rather than ballpoint (or fountain!)pens, because that ink can't be erased easily. It's obviously better to play it safe & drop payment envelopes in a P. O. if possible, if you have qualms about paying online or setting up automatic payments.
DeJoy might as well have the nearest mailbox to my place removed; it has been blocked by something stuck in the slot. After placing 2 notes about this below the slot, the notes are gone, & the USPS employee who picks up outgoing mail hasn't removed whatever is blocking it.
As much of an minor inconvenience it might be to not have one super close, first class mail volume has been falling by 2% or more a year for the last 20 years. I would rather a sender have travel an extra 50% than that it cost more to send stuff because we have to pay postal carrier to retrieve a couple of dozen letters every day from 3 or 4 lightly used mailboxes.