postalnews blog

A couple of weeks ago we linked to a column in the Reading, Pennsylvania Eagle entitled “The claim is in the mail“, which told the story of how the writer, Beth Nauss, had trudged down to the PO to file an insurance claim, only to be thwarted by lazy postal workers. Beth is billed as the Eagle’s “humor” columnist- here’s an example of the “humor” from that column:

The system works like this. Buy a wonderful gift that’s worth more than 10 cents for someone who lives far away from you. Wrap it carefully in a crush-proof container. Then, while under the influence of prescribed medications, decide sending the gift through the U.S. mail is a better idea then soaking it in meat juice before tossing it to a pack of hungry lions.

You get the idea.

After the column was linked to by this and other web sites frequented by postal workers, Beth apparently started getting comments that were less than appreciative of her sense of humor. She responded on Sunday with more of her trademark wit:

I stand corrected on several key points. First, the USPS does not soak packages in meat juice. Then they do not throw them to a pack of hungry lions. The USPS, in fact, does not really have any lions at your local post office. The lions are at the zoo. The postal service no longer has any lions because it switched to elephants in a cost saving measure adopted in 1978. The USPS discovered that elephants are much more efficient at processing fragile packages, and besides, they’re willing to work for peanuts.

And so on. If you really feel like suffering, you can read the whole sorry mess here.

In Beth’s defense, though, I’d like to vouch for the fact that Beth can be funny: here’s the email Beth sent to our feedback address after we linked to her article:

From Beth Nauss
to feedback10@postalnews.com,
date Dec 18, 2007 1:14 AM

12/18/07

Hello!

I doscovered that you reproduced material on your website to which I hold the copyright and you did so without my permission. Please delete the link and the material immediately and contact me.

Thank you.
Beth Nauss

Apparently Beth hadn’t realized that when she clicked on the headline at postalnews.com, she was taken to the Reading Eagle web site. (You’d think the big logo and even bigger picture of herself might have been a tipoff, but apparently not.)

And then it dawned on me: Beth was just cracking another of her wonderful jokes! It was that trademark “humor”!

So I played along, “humorously” pointing out to Beth that I didn’t own the Reading Eagle web site, and that if she really didn’t want people to read her columns, she really needed to the people who kept posting them on the Reading Eagle web site!

Beth must have laughed until she cried at that one! And maybe that’s why I haven’t heard back from her?

The tension between old and new media played itself out last week in the newsroom of the Canton Repository, as it sought to cover developments in the murder of letter carrier Jennifer Milburn:

By Friday morning, when we gathered to critique the day’s paper and plan Saturday’s, a group of people in the newsroom were speaking uncharitably about our Web site. These earnest colleagues were complaining that we had given the story to Cleveland television and all other competitors by putting it on the Web. We had invited competitors to come and report the story that no one knew as well as we did for those several hours on Thursday.

Rep’s aim is to inform you quickly, on paper or online

That’s the only conclusion we can draw when a newspaper actually takes the time and effort to editorialize about this:

Postal Service should reinstate tickets for waits

The Editor’s Blog at the Reading (PA) Eagle says that a local school district “is in a pickle” because of tax bills that have gone missing. The editor’s ’significant other’, a letter carrier, tells him that the likely reason is “that the tax bills lacked a specific apartment number, just the street address … If so, the Postal Service’s policy is to return them to sender, but if there is no return postage guaranteed by the district…well, there is the dead letter bin. Of course, not many folks know about this policy.”

Of course they don’t- because as any postal employee should know, there is no such policy. Tax bills are first class mail. First class mail doesn’t require “return postage”- if a piece is undeliverable, it’s returned to sender without any additional charge.

The check’s not in the mail

When I saw the headline, “USPS uses child’s ploy to ask for more and more”, I naturally assumed it was another Sam Ryan hatchet job. But I was mistaken- the editorial in the Marshfield, MO Mail was actually written by the publisher, Dave Berry. (You can tell he’s the publisher, and not the editor, by his style: “But nothing can make me like anything about the USPS asking for a 30 percent rate increase while counting on me to feel as if I’ve won if they eventually get half or even only a third of what they requested.” Can someone diagram that sentence?)

Dave’s problem with the USPS is twofold- he doesn’t like the new rates, and he doesn’t like the idea that the USPS wants to charge more for items that need to be sorted by hand- like, well, newspapers.

Dave specifically finds fault with the increase in rates for “In-County” periodicals, which he says will go up as much as thirty percent under the proposed rates. What Dave doesn’t mention is exactly what the current price is. If you take a look at the most recent USPS RPW report, you’ll find that so far this year the US Postal Service has handled 373 million pieces of In-County Periodical mail. For the same period, the USPS has taken in 34.8 million dollars in revenue for that mail. Do the math- the average postage on an In County paper is 9.3 cents! A thirty percent increase would boost that to a positively astronomical twelve cents!!

Not only that, but Dave contends that the new rate structure would “force our local papers to leave the local post office to be sorted elsewhere before coming back to the local post office for delivery. Gone would be same-day local delivery.”

Can you believe that? Not only will it cost twelve cents, but it might not be delivered the same day?

According to Dave, this is crazy, because he is positive the USPS is making a profit delivering his papers for nine cents apiece. Now at this point, you would think that Dave would just take his business elsewhere. After all, if it’s so obviously profitable to distribute newspapers for nine cents each, there must be tons of folks clamoring to get into the business. But no- Dave seems slavishly loyal to the good old post office. He says that “It’s going to cost our industry a lot of money to prove to postal officials that they are making a profit on the business we do with them”.

Hunh? If it’s obvious, it shouldn’t take much cash to prove it, right?

Unless of course, “proving it” means greasing enough lobbyist’s palms to get continued subsidies for in county papers written into postal reform legislation. But Dave couldn’t possibly mean that, could he?

Ozarks Newsstand - USPS uses child’s ploy to ask for more and more

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