Progress...

[alexpgp]

At this past Friday's amateur radio breakfast, I was informed that the post office downtown no longer has a separate "local" slot to collect mail destined for, typically, a box or cluster box sorting rack located within 20 yards of said slot.

There is now just one common mail drop.

So now, all mail—local and out-of-town—gets sent to Alamosa, where it is sorted and then returned, the next day, to Pagosa. Why? I was told the official explanation was that Alamosa had been equipped with a shiny new mail sorting machine, and that consequently any mail sorted locally represents an inefficient use of labor.

Of course, once the mail returns from Alamosa, it pretty much represents a pile of Pagosa-only mail that still has to be sorted into post office boxes and for distribution into cluster boxes.

The major improvement to the system appears to be that it now takes an additional day for local mail to arrive, except when Alamosa gets socked in with snow, in which case it takes longer.

Believe it or not, this post was prompted by yet another ignorant (in my opinion) rant against the existence of pennies. It's bad enough the post office spends money it barely has on "improvements" like this when it hikes rates by one or two cents every couple of years.

Imagine if the minimum increment in the price of postage were a nickel? Just think of all the shiny new toys and programs that would buy!

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

It's been like that here for years - everything goes to San Jose for sorting. The sorting doesn't result in bags of mail coming back, though. The mail is sorted by delivery, so boxes are in order, street addresses are in order, etc. Which, of course, doesn't explain how mail addressed to me ends up in the wrong case and delivered to someone miles away, or why mail addressed to me (Los Gatos) gets delivered to the main Santa Cruz PO, where it sits for days before being sent back to San Jose. Or why mail addressed to me arrives at Sacramento and sits there for days before being sent to San Jose for sorting. I assume it's for "efficiency"...

However. I did ask a Scotts Valley PO clerk about mail for local boxes, and he said that if you handed him the mail and mentioned that it was addressed to a PO box there, it'd get put in the box directly. You might try that.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, it could just be that mail returning from Alamosa arrives the same way, sorted to the point where it's merely a matter of transferring packets of mail into boxes, in which case, the idea is not wholly and entirely stupid, just not very swift.

Personally, I don't really send a whole lot of local mail. In fact, I would venture to say that I go through less than a book of stamps per year, and more often than not, require something else (e.g., certification) in addition to plain postage.

The tip is useful, though. I'll have to file it away.

Cheers...