Part of what seems wrong to me--and I've thought about this before, not just Re:OP--is that packages, even if they're not heavy, are inherently bulky. Granted, rural route workers aren't walking around with boxes in their bags, but the step-counting the commenter describes seems like would be much less efficient. IOW, one of those corrugated plastic bins can hold, I dunno, a couple hundred pieces of 1st class mail, but no more than a dozen packages.
And for urban carriers, who do carry boxes in their bags, it's got to have a huge effect, returning to their trucks after every single block instead of being able to do 2-3 blocks per load of mostly-mail.
I think that's why we seem to get mail three or four times a week now.
AIMHBALO, my grandmother drove into a rural post office. She was always supporting workers.
Except for the workers who are vulnerable to damage from a Pontiac Catalina.
I have a friend who is a rural carrier, and at the last count (maybe also 4 years ago?) she was on edge, very worried/convinced that things were not fair, that in fact the efficiency people in charge of the count were holding back mail (so it didn't get into the count) and then dropping it back in once the count was over. I don't know whether that was justified fear or just paranoia, but it's a high-stress time for mail carriers for sure.
I would want to know the overall effects, though. This one worker's pay got downgraded 25%. Did a peer have theirs raised 33%? [edit: not according to the reddit post] Overall is this algorithm going to cut costs for the USPS? Or is it fair in some broader sense but very tough for this person specifically, which is still important but a different issue. OK, having read the rest of the post, it sounds like it's cramming pay down for everyone she knows. Still I'd like to see the overall changes in payroll due this arbitration decision.
The fundamental problem here is treating rural mail delivery like it's supposed to be a profitable enterprise. It's not, which is why postal service is directly provided by the federal government going all the way back to the constitution! But Republicans don't actually care about their constituents and are happy to make rural life worse and worse (or if you're more cynical, they know that this will make their constituents more angry).
I've been working with a rural carrier on various issues for a few years. He's a contractor, not an employee, so I'm not sure whether this affects him.
The postal service is essential and has a proud tradition. That doesn't prevent it from being infested with petty authoritarians, and other forms of dysfunctionality.
The fundamental problem here is treating rural mail delivery like it's supposed to be a profitable enterprise. It's not, which is why postal service is directly provided by the federal government going all the way back to the constitution!
Yeah, it's the same problem as with Amtrak, which is run the same way. Conservatives want service to rural areas but they don't want to have to pay for it, and they think (or claim to think) that the private sector has some secret method for making things work better than government so they make these agencies try to run like businesses while maintaining universal coverage and it doesn't really work. (The way the actual private sector handles problems like this is to either not serve rural areas at all or charge a fortune in fees to do so.)
Yeah, with some very important exceptions (Walmart, McDonalds) big businesses just ignore anything that's not a major city, and at best let you do stuff through the mail. We have a major hospital here, but we don't have an Apple store or a Trader Joe's. Indiana has exactly two Apple stores (one for Notre Dame students and one in our one posh suburb). Downstate Illinois has zero Apple Stores! Wall Street likes that Apple has high profits per store, and this means just not opening stores in anywhere but the richest places.
44 states and DC have Apple stores. Montana isn't one of them. Spokane is only 200 miles away though . . .
I'm slightly surprised that Jackson WY doesn't have one.
It seems wrong that they would do the same amount of effort and labor but be paid less for something outside their control when they are in effect offering a service. They are not manufacturing. Even then, piecework is a very exploitative type of labor.
This seems incredibly arbitrary, and designed to disadvantage the workers but prevent them from marshaling arguments against it because it is not transparent.
[I]t's a high-stress time for mail carriers for sure.
I still remember this London Review Of Books piece about mail sorting, which makes it seem high stress everywhere.
But the regime put in place by New Labour in 2000 to expose Royal Mail to competition had a curious effect. Whereas other European countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, protected their old postal firms by giving them complete commercial freedom long before they had to compete with rivals - privatisation first, to prepare for liberalisation - Britain did it the other way round: liberalisation first, privatisation eventually, perhaps. What this meant was that Britain's rules for who could deliver what mail, and for how much - rules that were supposed to protect plucky, nimble entrepreneurs from the pampered monopolistic dinosaur that was Royal Mail - were of most benefit to the only marginally less pampered private monopolies of the Continent. By trying to prevent the small mammals of the postal world getting squashed by the Royal Mail brontosaurus, Labour and their advisers exposed Royal Mail to the raptors of TNT and Deutsche Post, aka DHL.
...
Lower-level union officials and individual postmen, such as Roy Mayall (LRB, 24 September 2009), complain that Royal Mail is fiddling the figures and mail volume is going up, not down; that the software used to calculate optimum routes for walks doesn't take reality into account; that postmen are being loaded with ever heavier bags and being bullied into doing ever longer walks. In a barbed inter-postmen discussion on the bulletin board royalmailchat, postmen talk of daily loads from 120 kg (heavy) to 25 kg (light), though a postman who claims to have weighed a load of 130 kg is regarded with scepticism. On another thread, a part-timer asks whether other postmen think it is possible for him to walk eight and a half miles on his round, delivering mail, in two and three-quarter hours, as he is expected to do. The consensus is that it isn't.
'If a postman says to me, "Don't tell me about falling mail volumes, I'm carrying more than ever," a lot of the time he'll be correct,' Simpson said. 'But the round is designed to take three and a half hours, with the last letter delivered at the end of the round, not the way it would have been five or ten years ago, an hour after the round started. I think most postmen are working harder and being paid the same ... They've been used to working 80 per cent of their time, but now they're working 100 per cent.' Working 100 per cent, as those who have tried it know, involves shooting for 90 per cent and ending up with 110. The more precisely Royal Mail management tries to make the mailbag fit the time and distance allotted, the more likely it is that some postmen will be pressured into carrying too much too far. Times are tougher for Britain's postmen. But in the opinion of Royal Mail's competitors, not tough enough.
A typical Royal Mail postman outside London earns about £375 before tax - just shy of £20,000 a year - for a 40-hour week, with diminishing prospects for overtime. 'That's a lot of money in current terms,' said Guy Buswell, the chief executive of UK Mail, Royal Mail's only big British competitor alongside Deutsche Post and TNT. 'My drivers who deliver parcels have to struggle to get £300 in their pay packets before tax and they work a lot longer hours than postmen do.' Denise Goldfinch is not only better paid than the private postmen of Sandd and Selekt in the Netherlands: she gets five weeks a year paid holiday for long service. She gets a uniform and service footwear provided free. In the savage ice and snow of last winter, she was given spikes for her shoes. When she retires, it will be with a decent pension.
Not that Berlin is remotely rural, but for a long time the metro Berlin area -- population more than 6 million, capital of the fourth-largest economy in the world -- had one Apple store. There may be geniuses in the bar, but not in the retail HQ.
Now there are two.
Yeah, Germany in general seems a bit short on Apple stores. Some other fun ones: one in all of Belgium, none in all of Korea outside of Seoul proper (which has five). One in Wales. Two in all of South America (one each in Rio and Sao Paulo) Zero in the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal. None in Europe east of Vienna and north of Istanbul.
Zero on the continent of Africa. Zero in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia (but 3 is Singapore naturally).
"Roy Mayall" is a pretty great pseudonym. Much better than "Wry Mailer".
none in all of Korea outside of Seoul proper (which has five)
I was curious if this really was Seoul proper, since the greater metro area has half of Korea's population. They were indeed all in one of the twenty-five districts, but in the process I street-viewed one of them and found on the ground it's actually an authorized reseller called Frisbee. There's an Apple logo on the front (suitably qualified with "Premium Reseller" below) but "Frisbee" is much bigger. So there may be some overstatement in this list.
HAVE TWO COUNTRIES WITH APPLE STORES EVER GONE TO WAR WITH EACH OTHER
17: Asien fängt an der Landstraße an.
I think the bustling metropolis of New Haven, CT has an Apple store.
20: I don't think I agree?
https://goo.gl/maps/9dqXw4ENytPmzus26
https://goo.gl/maps/4M3DEvsdEUpHJgcRA
https://goo.gl/maps/sjqxxQneebihJ3uw8
https://goo.gl/maps/18d3XyLmZy3vkCvP9
https://goo.gl/maps/7Vkw4ccocNnajHSz9
I suspect you maybe got confused on the third one (the Myeongdong location) where there is a very nearby licensed dealer owned by Frisbee? Google maps is annoyingly unhelpful at distinguishing official Apple Stores (maybe I should have been using Apple Maps instead...).
Does Apple Maps still steer people into lakes?
You learn all about the Apple stores of foreign parts when you travel with a kid who's prone to lose her AirPods. lurid spent some time in the Kyoto store and reports that the Kyoto geniuses have a confusing routing system.
HAVE TWO COUNTRIES WITH APPLE STORES EVER GONE TO WAR WITH EACH OTHER
APPLES ARE OF COURSE FAMOUSLY UNLIKELY TO CAUSE MASSIVE DESTRUCTIVE WARS
HUSH AND GO LAUNCH THOSE SHIPS
24: Oh, interesting. I could have sworn searching on the Myeongdong address from this list got me to Frisbee. But now I can't recreate it, and I see if I click the link for Myeongdong it shows that Apple storefront that you do.
Yeah, google maps is really to blame here not you, I ended up at the same place as you at first. The trick here is googling "Apple Myeongdong" which I only realized because that's what the pattern was from the first two.
So, WaPo just did an expose of Clarence Thomas for disclosing income from a company under an out-of-date company name and I guess honestly I was hoping for some stronger sauce.
Don't start having a fascinating conversation on this yet. This is upcoming post topic.