It sounds like an item from the Lake Wobegon Herald Star: “Post offices dump ticket system in favor of stand-in-line system“. But it’s apparently for real- one of the “Top News” stories in the Yuma Sun actually reports on a postal service announcement that “from now on, customers should simply form a line when visiting the post office to ship a package or pick up some stamps”.

Prior to this, apparently, they’d been using one of those numbered ticket machines you see in delis or bakeries.

The postmaster seems excited but cautious about this daring innovation: “I haven’t heard any comments yet. It’s pretty fresh,” he said, adding that this is the local post office’s slowest season without the winter visitors. “Plus, it’s only August. October and November might be a truer test of the new and improved system. I think it’s going to be pretty dramatic in the winter months.”

Yuma- on the cutting edge!

That’s the accusation made by a reader at Postalmag.com.

I don’t know about fishiness, but one thing I’ve always been curious about is the correlation between Mystery Shopper scores and retail sales. Do we have numbers that prove that the program actually gets us more revenue? Exactly what is the level of increased retail revenue at offices with high scores?

PostalMag.com: From Our Readers

The Postal Service has a ton of rules, some of them painfully complicated yet necessary, some of them just a pain. A story in a Wisconsin newspaper, linked to on the Postcom web site illustrates one of the latter.

A man successfully unloaded a pile of old farming magazines from the 1940’s on eBay, estimating media mail shipping costs at $8.00. When he got to the post office, however, he was surprised to discover that because the magazines contained advertising, they couldn’t be shipped media mail, and it was going to cost closer to $20 to mail them.

The advertising rule makes sense when applied to current periodicals, but it’s hard to see why it should apply to what are obviously not active advertisements.

A mindless adherence to the letter of the regulation when it so clearly violates the intent isn’t particularly smart. I realize that it’s not in the postal service’s financial interest to encourage the use of low revenue services like media mail. But as long as they’re in the rate structure, they should be made available openly and reasonably.

Collector trying to change letter of the law regarding advertising postal regulation: Provision interferes with man’s plans to sell artifacts on eBay