The stunning thought process of the USPS

[Kevy Baby]

This is from a (printed) industry newsletter, so I cannot provide a link, but...

We understand that the USPS, in a planned "retail standardization program," intends to remove the clocks from public portions of all 37,000 post offices. An official admitted that the objective was to have customers become less conscious of the time spent waiting in line.

Now that took some real brain power to figure out!

[Alex]

What's so stunning about that? It's the same reason casinos don't have them. And a lot of banks. Or my dentist's waiting room. It is reasonably common in retail environments to not have visible clocks where people will be required to wait.

It may be stupid but it is an idea that bled from the commercial world into the USPS.

[wendybeth]

I could be wrong, but I think KB was being sarcastic. As in: Duh.

[alphabassettgrrl]

I hate it when there's no clock on the wall.

[innerSpaceman]

But while we're on the subject, I think it was brilliant of the USPS to combat the trend of less people using mail by raising rates.

(The hike to 41 cents per envelope resulted in me switching all my bill-paying to the internet)

[Capt Jack]

yeah, I think I converted all mine at .37

[wendybeth]

I'm doing the vast majority of bill paying online- I hate the USPS.

[Alex]

Of course he is being sarcastic. But I think he is also holding it up as an example of how uniquely stupid the USPS (and government agencies are).

Or at least the was the common tone back in March when this came out in the press. I'm just saying that if it is particularly stupid then the post office isn't alone in it.

[wendybeth]

Well, given the association between the USPS and bad tempered behavior, one would have thought some bright bulb would have thought of this, say...thirty years ago?

[Kevy Baby]

I send out about 45 million pieces of mail per year (well, not me personally, but the company I work for on behalf of our clients - and I typically have my hand in most every job). I deal with the USPS on a regular basis. I regularly deal with massive incompetence. Yes, there are a few bright spots in the organization, but the complete lack of caring is astounding. It is not uncommon to call 10 different post offices and get 11 different answers to the same question.

Yes, this was a sarcastic post. This is a typical USPS way to fix things: since we cannot fix the problem (of slow lines), we'll just mask it (by taking away one way that the the client knows how incompetent they are). I know that other retail locations also don't have clocks, the painful truth is that the USPS was just (at least in part) trying to cover up a problem rather than fix it.

A while back (unfortunately on another board that crashed), I posted some other interesting details about the USPS. I do not have the time to research the facts again, but one thing that always stuck with me was the extremely high workers comp claim rates of the USPS - they were four or five times as high as the national average, and MUCH higher than any company.