Have you ever gotten a piece of mail sent to you in an envelope from the Post Office with a generic "Sorry your mail got torn to pieces in our sorting machine. Here's what we could gather up of it" type message?
Or, you have a tracking number for a package and you go to their site to check on its estimated delivery and the site is down.
If this was FedEx or UPS you'd call them and complain, yet when the Post Office does it, you just accept it as "business as usual".
This past Christmas we purchased a jug of maple syrup for my husband's mother. It was sent USPS from two counties west of us. We waited and waited. Erik checked the tracking number and saw that the package was listed as "Lost". We contacted the shipper and they said they would see what they could track down for us. The next day a large box came from the Post Office. It was our missing syrup.
It had our address clearly written on the mailing label and bright orange fragile stickers on every side. But the most notable things was that the box was severely crushed. It looked as though someone had used it as a football or soccer ball.
(Fortunately for us, the syrup was undamaged.)
I keep thinking about this every time the price of stamps go up. We pay for the services the USPS gives, yet because they are a government agency we accept their mediocre service as standard, when UPS or FedEx would be put out of business for behavior like this.
Have we become so complacent that we expect our government to treat us poorly and when they do we just accept it as standard procedure? We pay for the services we receive. Don't you think it's time that we expect the same kind of service from government agencies as we do from private companies?
Of course, the Postal Service is entirely self-funded, just as are UPS and FedEx. And, of course, both FedEx and UPS are impossible to deal with if you have a job and can't take a day or two off to spend at home waiting for a package.
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