Comments on: Ignorance Begets Arrogance

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:36:10 +0000

We had the 911 renumbering down here, but it never happened in the villages of New York.

My brother mails packages all the time from his living room. He has his letter carrier pick them up. Before they opened a UPS Store franchise down here, you needed someone to ride shotgun to drop off packages at UPS. It was not exactly in a great neighborhood.

Most of the things they want to cut are services for small towns and rural areas. They keep saying that these are ‘the real America’, and they want to crush it.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:49:25 +0000

When I lived in rural Louisiana we had street addresses thanks to E911 (basically, every road got a name, and our street number was how many yards from the end of the road we were with evens on one side and odds on the other, which made for some mighty big numbers towards the end of the road but so it goes!), and the brown UPS truck *would* deliver to it. But that was over a decade ago. I have no idea what UPS would do now.

The opposite however was a problem. UPS would *NOT* pick up packages from out there. No way, no how. Given that the nearest UPS facility was 90 miles away, that was a problem. Lucky there was a post office in town, eh?

Anyhow, the best mail-order parts vendor for KLR-650 motorcycles is located in Moab, Utah. Every single package that leaves his stores goes via USPS because he can just carry the package across the road and ship it. To ship any other way, he’d have to drive two hours to the nearest small city, then drive back. It’d kill his business.

But none of this matters to the nabobs in Washington, who think nothing of dialing up a courier to carry a package from point A to point B inside the Beltway, and think everybody has that option…

– Badtux the Sometimes-rural Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:06:43 +0000

A fair number of my relatives in New York live in small towns without home delivery. You get a PO Box and have to pick up your mail. The only way to send them a package is through the Post Office, because no one else will deliver to a Box address.

People in cities assume that everyone has the same kind of services they do, and that just isn’t the reality.

By: oldwhitelady

oldwhitelady — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:49:55 +0000

That’s for sure. I can’t imagine what we would do without the postal service. I certainly use it for a lot of things. The older people still need it. Not everyone is plugged into the internet.