(These are not the actual culprits.)
DETROIT — There were jokes and snickers at a Michigan post office when customers learned that an overwhelmed carrier had rented a storage unit to hide thousands of pieces of mail. “I heard a couple of people come in and say, ‘Can I pick up my mail — or is it in storage?”‘ said Annette Koss, the postmaster in Howell, 50 miles northwest of Detroit. “We just didn’t understand it. It’s such a stupid thing to do.”
Jill Hull pleaded guilty Tuesday to deserting the mail, a misdemeanor. The case is rare but it happens: From North Carolina to North Dakota, carriers in recent months have been hauled to court for failing to fulfill their routes. Mail has been found in basements, garages and, in Hull’s case, a self-storage unit in Michigan’s Livingston County. In North Carolina, a mail carrier admitted to keeping junk mail buried in his backyard. In September, after she had failed to pay her bill, managers opened Hull’s unit and discovered thousands of pieces of unopened mail, including 988 first-class letters. Some had postmarks from 2005.
“I was unable to deliver all the mail,” Hull, 34, said during a brief hearing in federal court in Detroit.
In a court filing, postal investigator Douglas Mills said Hull had planned to catch up with late payments and apparently keep the mail under lock and key until she died. No one on the rural route had complained about missing any mail.
The Postal Service says there were 333 cases of theft, delay or destruction of mail by employees or contractors filed in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. A California postal manager was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing thousands of DVDs.
As long it’s bills and junk mail, in my book she’s a hero, promote her.
This happened on Seinfeld.
Newman!
A easy fix would be to implement a tracking system as all other parcel companies use.
The Postal service has been very slow to accept tracking. This would address most of the problems that is happening with mail never being delivered. I personally lose 6 or more pieces of mail each year. All of it first class important mail like statements and bills. Its one reason I have gone to online bill payment. If you talk to your local postmaster they can do little but fill out a form detailing the lost mail. It never helps resolve the matter because they cannot track it.
Isn’t that a man’s kilt she is wearing?
The crime should be a felony. That might encourage the clowns to deliver.
At least no one got shot.
He’s lucky he was only charged with a misdemeanor. That could easily have been called theft of mail which is a pretty hefty felony.
jescott418
The USPS is designed to get the mail done quickly and cheaply (and you’d be surprised how much it is generally true, though of course there are dumb screw ups like this). A tracking system would add steps to that process slowing the system and adding costs. The number of individual pieces of mail the post office handles is an order of magnitude higher than the parcel companies. For example, when a parcel company’s delivery person delivers a package, it is scanned into a hand held reader; each and every package is scanned. If your mailman had to stop and individually scan each and every letter he delivers… you can see how the costs would quickly add up.
A number of bulk-mailing advertisers will include specific addresses that are used to make sure that their bulk mail is being delivered.
So the advertisers would know that mail is not being delivered, and could tell the post office which region is affected.
My question is: why bother storing it? Get a shredder.
That’s it. I am canceling my mail.
Q. What about letters?
A. E-mail
Q. What about bills?
A. On-line bill paying
Q. Catalogs?
A. The Internet
Q. Packages?
A. UPS or FedEx
Q. What about newsletters and credit card offers?
A. I will just manage and maybe I will only have to empty my trash every other week.
I’m sure the ones that get caught are the ones that are hoarding it. The ones you’ll never hear of likely burn it. Shredding is not a solution unless the carrier has an industrial shredder.
I have enough trouble keeping up with the shredding of my own mail as cheap office shredders won’t handle unopened letters for long.
Can someone explain to me why 4 class bulk mail is what makes the money for the post office? I don’t need catalogs, credit card offers, or those stupid grocery store newspapers that I have to read to make sure my regular mail didn’t get stuck in between the pages.
I am sure they could cut expenses and have fewer workers and sorters if they eliminated junk mail and concentrated on bills, letters, and small packages. Or would that just snowball into job cuts for garbage men and wastepaper basket manufacturers?
Does anyone remember getting a personal letter or a postcard?
#4 & #5 – Agreed on both counts.
I got a lot fewer Christmas cards this year, but I think that had more to do with the economy than the Post Office.
Bulk mail makes money for the PO because it is sent on an “available space” basis. In other words, it stays put at the origin until there’s enough room for it and therefore gets most of its distance covered at little additional cost to the PO.
As far as it goes, I much prefer to get bills by snail mail. Though I pay them online, the arrival of a bill in the mail gets it noticed, where as the vast, vast majority of email I receive is ignored and it can too easily get lost in the shuffle.
And, finally, parcel post (or priority mail) or whatever they call it these days. Ask anyone who buys/sells fragile things on say Ebay. They will tell you that the PO is far, far less likely to destroy things, and is generally cheaper than UPS or FedEx. Things in factory shipping packing, with form molded styrofoam can go by nearly any shipper, but something like an antique radio (my specialty) without the form fitting factory box, does best with the PO. And, yes, even the PO loses some and destroys some, but they are much gentler overall. UPS in particular seems to use each and every package for field goal practice before delivery.
#10 Because of volume and the fact that much of the work is already done for the USPO by the sender. The incremental cost of moving a catalog from A to B is damn near nothing. Where the cost comes in is the sorting at the various facilities. With bulk mail the more that it is presorted by the mailer the bigger the discount.
If bulk mail were to go away the USPO would probably not operate.
I personally think that there should be delivery on a revolving M-W-F and Tu-Th scehdule and of course get rid on Saturday delivery. If you are a business and really need your mail everyday get a PO box.
#2… The USPO dosn’t even track things that have a tracking number about 9 times out of 10. I had a package shipped to me going from Atlanta to Arkansas about 2 months ago via USPO express or what ever they call their trackable ground service. The same day in the same batch of mail an invoice was sent 1st class. I got the companies automated e-mail with the tracking for the package but every time I checked it the USPO had no information other than the original scan. The 1st class letter beat it here by a day and there was never a track scan even after it was delivered.
I had several parcels go missing last year. Since they were send via a registered service with tracking numbers I was able to confirm that they all reached my local post office before seemingly vanishing into thin air.
Several other people must have had the same problem as the cops (and then federal police) were involved and all of the missing items were discovered in the garage of one of the delivery contractors.
Why the hell he though he could steal registered parcels and they wouldn’t be noticed is quite beyond me. People pay extra for the registered service, thus will certainly notice when the items don’t show up.
The guy is now behind bars but I don’t know for how long (not long enough would be my guess).
My biggest PO (as well as UPS, Fedex etc.) bitch is paying for insurance. If I pay to have a package delivered, it just irks the hell out of me when they try to sell me insurance. Do your job, or don’t do your job, but don’t ask me to pay more just in case you fuck it up. I cant imagine telling my clients, I can fix your computer for you, but for a little bit extra, I’ll make sure its fixed.
Sheesh
Some a-holes keep parking in front our our mailboxes, so the mailman won’t deliver mail on those days. The post office said they can’t deliver the mail if there’s a car in the way, and we should call the police and have them remove the car, but the police said that there’s nothing they can do, and that we should talk to the post office. Ain’t bureaucracy great?
Back in the mid-90’s, I worked in a Federal building in Miami’s financial district. Early in the morning and coming out of a night shift while it was still dark, I caught a U.S. postal worker dumping boxes in a dumpster behind the building. She looked at me and giggled in a “you caught me” kind of way.
This is typical crap reporting that John is always complaining about.
“Jill Hull pleaded guilty Tuesday to deserting the mail, a misdemeanor”………….”In a court filing, postal investigator Douglas Mills said Hull had planned to catch up with late payments and apparently keep the mail under lock and key until she died.”
So which one is it ? or did she plead guilty from ????
The Post Office caused their own problem. Giving a cheaper rate for bulk mailers. What’s up with that. Is the P.O. so hard up for business that they need to encourage bulk mailing, but making it cheaper for them. This is just another example of tax payers subsidizing big business. Doubtless they lobbied for and got the cheaper mailing rate. So they can over burden the delivery system with tons of junk mail, at very little cost to them. But the cost gets passed on to the rest of us. And we still have to pay full rate, for the few letters we send out. Then, when more people start using email instead. The P.O. raises the rates, because its not making as much money for us, by giving big business such breaks.
Wanna cut down on the spam? Get rid of the damn bulk rate! My elderly father gets mail six days a week without fail. And +90% of the time its junk. Contests and political concerns wanting money to fix the world’s problems. All of them bogus, too. But they can afford to do this because they get a special cheap bulk rate to exploit senior citizens’ naivety.
If the postal carriers are overworked, it’s because of this long outdated federal subsidy, the bulk rate. It’s like that 150 year old bankruptcy loophole that Florida has to encourage people to move there. They don’t need such encouragement anymore. But they keep the loophole, primarily for the super rich to exploit. As O.J. Simpson did, after he lost that earlier civil case against him. There are too many breaks in the tax, banking, postal, medical billing, system for the well connected to exploit, and leave the rest of us to pick up the balance. I’m still waiting for any such think as “a level playing field” to actually exist in our so-called Free Market system.
Bulk mail is not going away until the USPS does, which I hope never happens. This country had subsidized mail delivery before it was even a country. Every civilized country has a postal service. If the USPS goes away, I can just imagine some “private contractor” asking me just how much my important mail is worth to me, and gouging a little more every week.
And what the hell are “contractors” doing delivering out mail anyway?
#3, it was the only one that suited her….as s/he is a man
Long before “Seinfeld,” “Barney Miller” featured an episode in which a postal worker stashed bulk mail in his apartment rather than deliver it.
While the character did admit wrong-doing, his reasoning what that he wasn’t throwing out anything that people wanted and that he was being more efficient.
Sometimes, I look at my pile of junk mail and think, “yeah, he just may have been right.”
I just got a check that I paid and te USPS postmarked in October 2008 returned to me today. It had a Jan 23 postmark on it, and a yellow lable indicating that the addressee was unknown. The address is exactly correct. Now, I knew back in november that the check never made it to its destination, since I got a call from the addressee wondering where his payment was. So what happened to this, and why did it have a postmark of January 23, only 5 days ago, and why it was returned with a bad address sticker. My theory is that the post office must have found it either alone, or in a large stack of other “missing” mail, noticed how late it now is, and rather than send it, potentially causing all sorts of problems with the ramifications that come from delivering 5 month old mail, and just returned it to the sender to make his/her own decision on how to procede. I believe this, not because I have that much faith in the post office, but because it seems like the prgmatic thing to do, rather than cause a bunch of cascading problems that can come from delivering “stale” mail – duplicate cashed checks, overdrawn accounts, etc. etc.
Any thoughts about my theory??