March 14, 2013 • 43 mins
The USPS is currently teetering on the edge of going under and there are a lot of plans to save it, from cutting Saturday service to creating federally-protected email addresses linked to individuals at birth. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the history and future of the postal service.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know front House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Uh,
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm Amy Goodman to the
Democracy Now the warrant Peace Report, Warrant Peace dot or, etcetera.
I'm Stephen. Jerry just said let's do this old school
(00:23):
right before she recorded, and I had no idea what
she meant. Yeah, yeah, you know, she's back. I thought
she meant, let's make it crappy in five minutes long,
and we need like little empty tin cans to speak. Dude,
make it sound right. How you doing, Jerry? That's great.
Jerry gave us the thumbs up. I know in our
(00:44):
new murder room. Um, Jerry is within our eyesight again
after a long layoff where she was not within our
range of viewing. I know, as it's kind of weird
because now I'm looking at you, but I can clearly
see my peripheral vision that she's on Facebook. She's way,
she's brusting her teeth, she's rearranging the severed human heads
(01:04):
that are in jars all around the place. That's creepy. Um.
Do you want to talk post office man? You want
to give the disclaimer that we're only talking about the
post Office in the US of a thin he just did. Okay, Um,
we don't know how it works in your country. No,
And actually it's probably not nearly as interesting as what's
going on with the US Postal Service the USPS, because
(01:26):
I don't know if you know this or not chucked,
but the USPS isn't a lot of trouble there. Yeah,
there's solvency that the amount of money that they have
to keep the lights on and keep everything going is
expected to run out in October of two thousand thirteen
if they don't do something. Yeah, that's this year. Yeah.
I think they lost sixteen billion dollars last year, Yes,
(01:46):
and five billion the year before. So that's a three
times as much money in a year. That's bad news.
Here's the caveat to that sixteen billion dollar loss, though
eleven billion of that was in pain. It's to uh
the future benefits of postal workers that have not yet
retired but well and the posts serve. The Postal Service
(02:10):
is the only federal agency of any sort that is
required to prepay its employees benefits for the future. In
two thousand and six, a lame de accession of Congress said,
you know what, you guys need to make sure that
your workers are taken care of. So you guys have
to start pre paying, um and over the next ten years.
And they have been, and they've been bleeding money. I mean,
(02:31):
like a sixteen billion dollar loss, but eleven billion of
it was to these future payments. I guess that would
make sense. Then then if you took out that eleven
they would just be about the same loss as before
a year. Right. But and that's a lot of money
to live it is. But um, they're figuring out ways
to make up for that extra loss, and one of
the big ones that's on the table now is cutting
(02:53):
out Saturday delivery. They figured they can recoup two billion
dollars a year doing that, so then they're down to three.
The thing is is the post the post office, it's
a part of the executive branch. Man it's all over
the place. It's a part of the executive branch. It's
a part of the federal government. But it gets zero
dollars in tax revenue. And it's also a thrill kill
(03:16):
cult exactly. That's the horrible secret of the year, right. Um,
So they get no money besides what they can make
off of their own revenue. Right, Um, so they get no,
but they get but they're also under the purview of
the federal the federal government. It's a weird, weird thing,
(03:39):
and they can't act without asking Congress. And Congress hasn't
exactly been forthcoming lately. Yet they haven't approved the Saturday thing.
And have they Congress. Here's the thing they've been trying
to get. Congress, you approve that forever. The Senate passed
a bill that said, after two years, we'll let you
cut out Saturday service, will give you eleven billion dollars
in over payments that you guys made towards the retirement stuff.
All the stuff back into the House, and the House
(04:00):
didn't do anything with it. Right, So you know the
fiscal cliff, Well, the US Congress passed the stop gap measure,
basically a federal budget that says, within this period, we're
still able to operate, right, And the USPS says, ha ha,
you didn't include our mandate from nineteen eight one that
we have to carry out Saturday service in that stopcap.
(04:24):
So technically, under current federal law, we don't have to
carry out Saturday service. And they're arguing it legally. So
they're just saying that's the loopholes are going to use
to shut down Saturday service, saying just packages. They're going
to deliver packages on Saturday. And here's a really good reason.
Express mail their revenues from packages of increased six over
(04:46):
the last ten years, whereas first class mail you know
letters have gone down I believe. So they're making all
almost all of their money because it's only forty five
cents to mail a letter from Florida to to Hawaii. Um.
But they make, however much shipping in the shipping game,
(05:07):
which is where they make all their money, which is
ironically the one place they don't have a monopoly as
far as the mail goes. I'm glad to see medicine
mail order medicine on that list to Express mail packages
in medicine, because at first I was like, who cares,
I don't need you don't yet. I don't need my
mail on a Saturday, right, but you you're medicine on
a Saturday. Well that's why they included that as a
(05:30):
you know something, they would still deliver and post offices
that are already open on Saturdays will still be open
on Saturdays. So if you want to go to your
PO box, maybe there'll be some mail, maybe there won't
be who knows. I bet you've had a PO box.
I've been thinking about this, haven't you have? You know,
you just struck me as a kind of person that
would have had a PO box at one point. You know,
(05:51):
that's where I get all my guns in the mail. So, UM,
I'm pretty worked up about this, as you can see. Um,
it's kind of interesting. Yeah, and who would have thought
that the postal service would ever be interesting? Uh? Sure,
I think parts of this are very interesting. Um. And
we would just want to go ahead and say hello
to all of our postal carriers out there that um
(06:13):
listen to our show who Who Won us over during
the Bush Era? Because we've got an emails from you
guys and gals. Yeah, including one of our favorite people
out there is a postal worker, Very Nostrin. Oh yeah,
is this one should really be a tribute to Van Nostros.
I didn't. He's a carrier. I'm he's always been kind
(06:34):
of cryptic about what he does. But I'm under the
distinct impression that he's employed by the Postal Service. Bangalore's
Van nostrin. This is for you. Um. But okay, so
let's talk about this. Let's talk about the Postal service. Man.
I'm all jazzed about the USPS. Dude, I'm glad you are. Um. So,
for a little while, even after the advent of electronic mail,
(06:58):
the postal evers is, the amount of mail they were
delivering was still increasing. As of two thousand seven, it
was on an upward trajectory. Sorry, two thousand six, right,
two d thirteen billion, one hundred and thirty seven million
pieces of mail that year. It's down to one sixty
seven now and then uh their when was this written?
(07:20):
Do you know? I think two thousand seven two? Okay,
So then they had seven hundred thousand employees. Now they
have about five hundred and eighty thousand. So they've been
in and trim the budget mode I think for the
past few years. Well, and the reason why. In two
thousand and six they also made seventy two point eight
billion dollars. I mean those stamps they add up, you know. Um.
(07:40):
In two thousand and eleven they made sixty six billion. Wow.
Not bad, yeah, but they're still losing a lot of money.
I mean that's what seven billion dollars in difference in
just five years. It's not good. It's not good. Um So,
where the where do all this come from? Chuck? It
came from back yonder day. You know. People have always
(08:02):
need to communicate, obviously from long distances, and uh in
sixteen thirty nine, Um, they you know, colonists here in
the in the New I guess they weren't United States yet,
but in the New World needed to get word back
to England occasionally and say things like, hey, quit bugging us,
or hey, sind it's more t and crumpets and um.
(08:23):
So the first official postal service was established in sixteen
thirty nine. UM. Richard Fairbank's tavern in Boston was the
official mail drop for overseas there in Massachusetts, and that
was the place to go if you wanted to mail something. Yeah,
and I couldn't find what happened or where it went
on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably I would
(08:44):
imagine then you just went to that pub and said, hey,
is there any mail? And they say no, and you
turn around and traveled the five miles back to your village.
So that was step one. Step two was about uh
forty some nine years later, six three William penn established
very thing. This person obviously, um, the first official post
office in Pennsylvania. You have his name after him, that's right,
(09:08):
And uh, I love this side note. Here in the South,
private messages were just sent between plantations, so they would
probably just give it to a slave and say carry
this over to that guy. Uh. And then flash forward
a little bit more. Um, the British crown gave a
man named Thomas Neil a twenty one year grant for
the postal service in the United States and he paid
(09:31):
um like seven seven shillings a year, so that's nothing, right,
he still died in debt, did he really? With the monopoly?
So the postal service has always been kind of tricky
to call money from. Interesting. So that continued until seventeen
seventy four, and a lot of big stuff was happening
around that time, like, Hey, we don't like you anymore
(09:54):
in England controlling us over here and taxing us, so
we're gonna start and established our own constitutional post office
for for any kind of mail going from anywhere, basically
intercolonial mail. Yeah. Yeah, it was was very cutting edge
at the sure and actually, um, you know that when
(10:14):
the British were carrying out the postal service on behalf
of the colonies. In the colonies, Um, there was a
guy named Benjamin Franklin who was appointed the postmaster of
Philadelphia and he actually killed it. As postmaster did he
like totally improved the roads. He said, like, we're gonna
start working like twenty four hours a day. We're gonna
have like lots of shifts. We're going to put up
(10:34):
milestones like the The postal service helped improve the connectedness
of the colonies thanks to him. So when the Continental
Congress said, hey, we want our own postal service, ben
Franklin became the first Postmaster General. And of course he
ran it like a tight ship. And he's one of
those dudes. I get a feeling if we could like
resurrect him and bring him out today, he could fix
(10:56):
what's going on in this country. Yeah, and he'd say
something pithy and ask for a glasses Sharry exactly. Um.
So this is to me when it gets super interesting. Uh,
was in the nineteenth century when westward expansion happened California
gold Rush. All of a sudden, we needed to get
stuff from the east coast to San Francisco. Let's say
so as quick as possible, right, what's crazy? As quick
(11:19):
as possible was to go down New York around Florida, Cribbean, yes,
like a steamship, uh, through the Caribbean, and then across
like Panama and then up on the Pacific side to California.
That was the fastest way to get mail for a while. Yeah.
And how long three to four weeks to send a
(11:39):
letter from the East Coast to the West coast. And
that's you know, the best case scenario, right, And that's
how that's what, that's how the US, the East coast
um communicated with the West Coast for a while until
some stage coach routes, routes were um, we're established. There
was a southern route and there was a central route,
and the southern route you could suposedly use a year
(12:00):
round because it's lovely down here. But then the central
route it was faster, but they said you can't use
that year round their storms. Yeah, and it also killed me. Man.
The way they used to name companies back then was
so like it made perfect sense. You basically just said
what you did. Like one the Pacific Mail Steamship Company
said we're going to carry your mail to the Pacific
(12:21):
by steamship, and then the Overland Mail Company like, well,
we're gonna do it overland, right, and so that's what
we're gonna call our company. So they got the contract
the Overland Mail Company um along the Southern Route. Took
about twenty five days, and then my favorite, one of
my favorite parts of American history was born, the Pony Express. Yeah,
(12:43):
and it's just so amazing, like the the idea that
they had to do this. It was a different company
that was competing. They wanted to get that contract away
from the Overland Company, right, the CEOC and p P,
and they said, you know what, we know the Central
Route shorter. We're gonna prove that we can use it
year round, and we're gonna set up something that it's
just gonna blow of this twenty five day thing out
of the water. And they set up the Pony Express
(13:04):
and they had stations what every ten twenty miles, and
a rider would ride from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento
or be part of a line of riding. They go
about a hundred miles and then they change horses every
like ten or fifteen miles. Yes, so the same rider
would change horses because they rode. They average ten miles
an hour, which doesn't sound fast, but you got a
(13:26):
factor in like the Sierra Nevadas where they're just crawling
up these mountains. So these dudes were riding hard and
on flat ground. If they're averaging ten miles an hour, right,
and they're going twenty four hours a day, they're going
two thousand miles ten miles an hour, that's what twenty hours?
That's no, that's two hundred hours. So what is that
(13:49):
that's less than ten days. So that's that cuts that
over link company's rate by Yeah. There was always one
set of riders going east, one set going west. Yeah.
I think when you when you were relieved by another rider, Yeah,
you'd hang out at that station and wait for the
other for somebody to come the other way and then
(14:10):
relieve them. Yeah. They were paid really well at the time,
twenty five bucks a week, which at the time unskilled
labors made about a dollar a week. So um, and
did you read the first ad they ever put in.
I wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen, must
be expert riders, willing to risk death daily orphans preferred,
(14:32):
And that's maybe legend. But supposedly that's what it says.
But apparently they were young, little, light life, skinny kids,
because you know, you didn't want some big dude like
me up on a horse. The horse would be like,
I don't want to ride anymore. So they were like
these young boys, like I think the youngest one is
like fourteen. And supposedly Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider,
(14:55):
although people have disputed that. Now, Oh yeah, yeah, well
he's he's the stuff of a legend. Well he's by
far and away the most famous famous Pony Express writer,
if in fact he did. But anyway, so so think
about the amount of infrastructure built up along this central
route to have a station every ten or twenty miles.
(15:16):
You've got all these employees going. And they proved it.
They proved that the central route could be used year round,
and so they got the contract. Then right now, the
Overland Company got the contract to use it, to use
that same route that was already established, and the Pony
Express was like, you have to be kidding me. And
so the the U. S. Government said no, no, you
guys do half and then let the let the Overland
(15:37):
Company do the other half. Yeah, And they were mad
for about a year and a half and really angry.
And then the telegraph line was completed and everyone's like, oh, well,
I guess I guess we're all out of business now. Yeah,
that was it. Pony expressed the soul the Wells Fargo
and basically shut down. Yeah. I think the American Express
ended up branching out of Wells Fargo too. Like these
(15:59):
are old old companies, like these modern banks and credit
card companies. It's interesting how far they go back. But
think about that. Man. Even as far back as the
mid nineteenth century, new technology was putting mail delivery out
to pasture, and then mail delivery would evolve and like
figure out how to come back. That's pretty cool foreshadowing.
(16:21):
So this is a big jump forward to the mid
nineteen sixties. Yeah, a lot happened in between. Then it didn't. Actually,
we started to go move further and further out into
the suburbs. There's a huge population boom in the in
the post war era, and businesses started to realize the
value of direct mailing, and all these factors put together
(16:42):
meant that the postal service was totally overwhelmed completely because
it became such a big deal. Everyone was writing letters
and they were using the same old hand um, I
guess hand delivery methods, sorting methods, that's what it was.
They weren't automated at all, and they needed to be right.
(17:05):
And so there was a postal reform that that was undertaken. Yeah,
and this was in nineteen seventy one the Post Office Department.
And I didn't even know this. It was shortly after
I was born. We weren't the United States Postal Service
until nineteen one. That was when we officially became the USPS. UH,
it became an independent establishment. UM was no longer a
(17:27):
part of the cabinet of the federal government, but was
part of the executive branch and got the monopoly basically
to deliver mail, even though it was supposedly just a company.
And they and they re up the mandate from I
think seventeen ninety two that said, you, the Postal Service
is one of the most essential services of the federal government.
No person has cut off in this country. None shall
(17:49):
not get delivered exactly. Everyone's going to have a mailbox
and everyone's going to get mail to that mailbox every
day because we need to help keep intellectual freedom, UM
going and and and ideas in business and commerce going
all the time, and the Postal services, this federal agency
that carries that out, and that I'm sure that put
a financial burden on them when people started building in
(18:10):
these like especially rich people, when they started building in
these remote areas, because then all of a sudden he
had to add that to your route. Well there's it's
sixty miles up a mountain and it's the only house there's.
There's a guy who services the Grand Canyon. There's a
group of Indians that live at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon, and he has a donkey train that goes
down there every day with the mail. Really yeah, I
(18:31):
mean it's part of it's a federal mandate. You have
to be able to get mail. Everyone has a mailbox.
He's like, don't you guys use smoke signals? Come on,
they do. In fact, that actually wrote an article on
spoke singnals. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say we should
podcasts on it, but it's it's like super basic, is
there really it would be like a five minute podcast. Well,
we'll have to figure out some other way to use it. Agreed.
(18:52):
So that's interesting. Um, so do we cover going postal.
Now it was sort of just thrown in the middle
of this arm Yeah, really was. It was talking about
how packages are delivered, and all of a sudden, it says,
and then people started killing each other in nineteen six,
which is actually, um, the post office has the dubious
(19:13):
distinction of kicking off the workplace shooting trend in the
United States. Was that the first one as far as
I could tell. Alright, So nineteen six Edmond, Oklahoma, Patrick
Henry A. Cheryl killed fourteen co workers. UM. Nine Another
one happened, including a uh supervisor getting killed with a
(19:33):
samurai sword. UM. November nineteen Thomas McIlvaine shot and killed
four co workers, wounded five others, then shot himself, and
then nineteen and then in two thousand three two more
incidences of postal workers killing fellow postal workers. It was
like just between eighties six and ninety seven, forty people
(19:56):
died at postal at post offices from postal rampage and
gave birth to the term going postal, which is used
as vernacular for like just losing it basically. UM. And
if you're interested in that at all, there's a really
good documentary. I think it's on Netflix streaming right now
called um Murdered by Proxy, and it's all about the
postal shootings, like where they came from. There's a lot
(20:19):
of scrutiny at like the of the management techniques of
people at post offices, and there's got to be something
to it. I mean, oh yeah, if you watch, it's
like it was clearly how many other industries had that
many office shootings? You know, retail Actually, you're the homicide
rate is three times higher in retail than it is
at the post office. You don't say going retail, that
(20:40):
just means you're going shopping. Well, it's like drinking the
kool aid. They really drank flavor aid and it's right
kool aids someone with that distinction. Ah yeah, alright, so
that was going post Yeah, I mean we had to
mention it, but I don't want to dwell on it.
But it was weird in this article the way it
went right in the middle of this came up out
of nowhere. UM zip codes This is kind of cool. Yeah.
UM zip codes were introduced in nineteen sixty three and
(21:04):
then officially put in place in mandatory because just so
much mail going on you had to categorize it more specifically, right,
That was part of that, the post office being swamped.
This was the first step towards automation, was like a
standardized code. Well, they did have other ones, but it
was like one was New York City or something like that.
(21:28):
You know. Yeah, so ZIP this is just a nice
little cocktail party factoid stands for zone improvement plan. I
never knew that until I read this. Did you know
that I had before? But I had forgotten. Okay, so
it's his own improvement plan and it's uh here in
the United States at least, it's a five digit number
represents you know, a location obviously where you're trying to
send something and it now they have the ZIP code
(21:51):
plus four in some areas of like I guess major
urban areas have a little more specificity, right, they like
deliver it to your like they put it on your
stomach if you visit plus four. I think certain buildings
even will have their own plus four if it's a
big enough building, or if you get a lot of
mail as a person, is that what you're after is
a plus four for you? Well, it says that some
(22:11):
high volume mail receivers get in. I'm like, you know,
if it was cool mail. I'd love to get the mail. UM.
So the first digit there represents the state here in Georgia,
that's a three. UM. It increases as you move west,
and there are some states that share each digit, like two. Yeah,
it's taken up by a lot of states. There's the
(22:32):
district of Columbia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia.
Man all two's. I would be mad if I lived
in one of those states. So then you got the second,
third digits. Those are regions within the state. UM. The
first three of those create what's called the SCF code,
the sectional, center, facility, and UM. Then the fourth and
(22:54):
fifth digits are even more specific. Basically, it just hones
down as you go left to write until you've got
Josh Clark's house right, like this state, this section facility,
this UM, post office, this neighborhood. Yeah, and then this
maybe this building, this high volume mail receiver named cash Clark.
(23:15):
That's right. UM, So you've got the ZIP code that
allowed automation. And a little known fact is the US
Postal Service doesn't just handle a ton of the US's mail.
It handles of all of the mail in the world.
So before the zip code, this was really difficult. It
also went from if you're mailing something from New York
(23:35):
to San Francisco, it went through every distribution facility in
the country in between New York and San Francisco. Um
before it got there. Yes, now zip codes. Well, let's
talk about how what a letter does, and this is
all thanks to zip codes. So I write a little
love letter. I'm gonna mail it to Emily H which
(23:57):
is weird because we live together. Let's just be romantic.
That's actually a great example though, because you can mail
something from your mailbox to be delivered back to you.
I reckon, I've never done it. That's the that's the
the poor man's trademark I've heard about that is to
mail something to yourself into this. I think it depends
(24:20):
on the judge. Probably, Okay, So you put it in
your mailbox, postal carrier is gonna pick it up. They're
gonna take it to the post office. Um, they're gonna
put it on a truck, and then take that from
the post office to a processing plant where we have
our long awaited machines doing some sorting, shape and size. Yeah. Well,
first they sort everything out and make sure everything's facing
(24:42):
the right way up right, UM. And then the the
they packages, well, packages are put on one one belt
and then letters are put in another and there the
letters say, let's just stick with the letter that you wrote. Uh,
it's it goes into a slot so it's face seeing
upwards and upright if front words and upright. And then
(25:05):
they put a little barcode on the back of the
letter and uh, I think ultra violet inc. Yeah. Well,
first thing it does is it gets a postmark and
cancelation lines saying basically, you can't use the stamp again. Yeah,
don't even try it. Don't be cheap. We've seen the
white out tricks. We've seen doctoring up a stamp, which
is probably a federal offense. It is UM. And then
(25:26):
so after that the barcodes printed on the back of
the piece of mail. And then there's an optical scanner
that reads the address, which is pretty cool. And if
you if they're really really really accurate to UM, but
if your handwriting is terrible. They have a new system
now where the this UM conveyor belt takes a picture
(25:47):
of it, send emails a picture to a human being
at a computer who reads it. Is what I think.
It types it in and then it's so it stays
on the line. It doesn't have to come out any longer.
It's pretty much technology. Yeah. UM. And then so based
on this UM this address, including the zip code, it
prints a barcode at the bottom. If you look at
(26:08):
a letter, any letter you get has a little bar
code on it, and so that's what's red. That's right.
The thing on the back is invisible, I think, right,
it's fluorescent. This is just showing off we have invisible link.
Other processing machines then read those barcodes and then sort
them in their little bins according to zip code. And
it's just basically placing everything and what will eventually be
(26:33):
a trade that will be delivered back to a post
office or a sorting facility or does it go straight
to a post office? Um, it goes to another processing plant. Right,
So imagine each processing plan regional has a bunch of
mail coming in on trucks. Then it sorts and then
sends out and then based on its zip code that
(26:54):
it serves, UM it gets a bunch of flats from
other UM to atribution facilities. That's right. With that are
already according to the zip code. So let's say it's
getting a flat of mail by zip code. It then
also sorts through those, that's right, and it actually sorts
them into an individual carriers route in order, and that's
(27:19):
what's delivered to the post office. So it arrives at
the post office ready to go on the truck. Yes, okay,
And that doesn't mean that the postal worker doesn't have
much to do. They also still have like circulars, magazines,
bulk mail. They have to go through and put it
for every address where all that my recycling then basically yeah,
(27:40):
although the coupons. I'll remember our junk mail episode from
years and years back, and we've got so much from
people who are like no, no, no, you can't get
rid of junk mail, right, that's the only thing keep
in this in business. Um, So, if you're gonna address
a letter, there are a few guidelines. You know. You
gotta put your address legibly on the front. You gotta
put your little return address in upper left corner. Yeah,
(28:01):
on the front, don't put it on the back upper
left corner there. And don't use periods in commas, like
if you write p O box, it's not p period.
Oh period. Although that doesn't matter. Apparently it allows for
greater efficiency in reading your letter, maybe because I always
put like Atlanta comma g a period I do too,
and they still get there. But don't you wonder if
(28:22):
they get there like earlier? I don't know. Maybe, so
uh it is um. Supposedly you need to be able
to read the address at arms length, so don't write tiny,
and uh, don't write so big that they can't do
other things to the envelope like scan and stamp and
things like that. UM. And then you know, you gotta
(28:43):
put your return address because if something happens, you want
it to come back to you. Although I don't do
that much anymore, A lot of times I'll just put
like Atlanta, Georgia. Really you don't put your return address
on there. No, but I rarely mail things, and a
lot of times when I do, it's for work. So
I'll just put, you know, Atlanta, Georgia house to works
or something. And it's not the kind of thing that
if it doesn't come back to me, I would care
(29:03):
I've had some precious thing, I would put a Richard address.
I have a feeling that you're going to get some
email from postal carriers that are like, I hate people
like you because whether you care if it comes back
to you or not, I'm sure they have to get
it back to you. Uh. There's a lot of type
of delivery surfaces, we surfaces services. We won't go over here,
but I did want to say that media mail is
(29:24):
a great little ah trick, not a trick, but a
great tool if you're mailing things like books and door
DVDs because it's super cheap. But it takes a while.
But that's part of that mandate from that they want
to keep the intellectual juice of America flowing through the
postal service, so things like that, like creative stuff for
(29:46):
books or correspondence like and I think that's how if
you've ever ordered a book on Amazon for like two cents,
you're like, oh, how can they sell a book for
two cents, it's because they charge you like four for shipping,
and they probably pay like eight cents to mail it
with media mail. That's the greatest scam of the twenty
one century. Well not really. I mean they're making their
(30:08):
money via shipping instead of the book itself. But publishers
don't like it, of course, because they want to sell
their books new and not for two cents on Amazon.
So um, I think we said that the Postal Service
has a monopoly on delivering mail but not on delivering packages, right,
um so because they're kind of in competitive business against
(30:30):
like UPS and FedEx and DHL and all those guys. Um,
those guys have gone ahead and in and invested in
infrastructure of say like air delivery, air transportation of mail
and the U. The Postal Service has tried that before,
like they tried a guided missile in ninety three, which
they shot full of mail from a submarine to a
(30:50):
naval station in Florida. But it's just too expensive. So
the Postal Service said, hey, Ups, hey FedEx, you guys
have a bunch of plane, can we start putting our
mail on it? And they said sure for a few
billion dollars a year. And the Postal Service said great.
But at the same time they kind of, um they
(31:11):
stepped forward into the twenty first century by doing so.
And the Postal Service, having access to everyone's mailbox is
often tapped by UPS and FedEx deliver what's called in
the business the last mile. So a lot of times,
especially if you're a rural person, if you get something
from Amazon, it's it was shipped by UPS, but eventually
(31:34):
it made its way into your postal carriers route and
being delivered by the Postal service. Yeah, there's way more
mixing of package mailing than you would think. Um, it's
like a swinger party or something pretty much. Uh. And
part of that deal in two thousand one with FedEx was, Hey,
FedEx said, can we put our boxes at your post offices?
(31:55):
And they said sure for six million dollars. And they said,
you know, can we hit your ride on your plane?
They said sure for six point three billions over seven years.
But it's you know, seems like a good agreement. And
they did the same with UPS and uh, we scratch
our back, you scratch yours. We scratch your back, we'll
scratch yours. That works. Yeah, why didn't everybody scratch them back?
(32:19):
I don't know. Okay, Um, because it's hard to reach.
Uh So, if you realize that the Postal Service needs
a few billion extra dollars, you say, why are you
just up the postal rates? Yeah? Well, the federal government
keeps its thumb on that they want to make sure
that anybody who needs to mail a letter can do
(32:39):
so without great expense. Yeah, it's a big deal to
change the postal rate. Like it is, much more than
you would think, because the layman like me would just
be like, yeah, I just add a few cents. Who cares. Yeah,
it's the problem just printing those forever stamps. Genius idea.
You don't have to go back and reprint a bunch
with the amount. Great idea or the one cent. Remember
in Fargo when the Wade got the one center the ducks, Yeah,
(33:00):
and she was like, everyone needs the one sit whenever
they raise the rates. Yeah, he's like cool, Gee, I
didn't think about that. Um So, but yes, there's a
very long, protracted, difficult process of raising the postal rates.
It's not a very easy thing and it involves a
ton of bureaucracy. Should we get into that or just
leave it at that? It's up to you, man. I
think we should just leave it at that. Okay. So,
(33:22):
if you are going to mail something from your house,
you need your little mailbox, and I just installed mine
in what seemed like a sensible manner. I didn't realize
that there were actual rules. Um In fact, you were
supposed to contact the post office before installing your mailbox.
Which I had no idea. UM, to make sure it's
like the correct placement and height and so like the
(33:45):
post office person or the mail career, I don't have
to get out of the truck. Oh well they'll they'll
burn it down if it's not the specification. So you
want to contact the post office. I didn't, but I
guess I just luked out because um, they say generally
five inches from the road surface to the inside floor
of the mailbox or point of entry, and then set
(34:06):
back six to eight inches from the front face of
the curb or road edge to the mailbox door. I
guess I just got lucky then, because I get my mail,
you know, without any burning down here, or without a
post office spots box, which we talked about. They've been
around for a couple of hundred years. And that's if
you want to have a little key to your little
(34:26):
loan box in a post office and get your mail there,
you can certainly do that. It's handy if you're starting
out of business and you want to make people think
that you're not working out of your house. Um, you
can get a post office and say, look, I have
a PO box, which means I'm working out in my bedroom.
It's like code, I think, are you getting guns in
the mail? Is that what people do? I'm sure there's
(34:49):
a lot of people who try to get guns in
the mail in the p O boxes, okay. Or if
you um tend to move around a lot in the
same town and you don't want to worry about changing
your mail andfording your mail, you can always just get
a pilbox. So those are some reasons. Um, you want
to talk the future of the post office, if it's
around after October two, what is the future of the
(35:11):
post office? Well, there's a lot of stuff coming down
the pike. Um, there's the cancelation of Saturday mail this August.
They're really going hard after package delivery services now, trying
to oh with like the flat rates and stuff like that.
Just really like courting businesses to say, hey, consider us
instead of UPS or FedEx um and uh, especially with
(35:33):
prescription medicine because we have an aging population is going
to do nothing but increase in size, so you're gonna
need more prescriptions through the mail. So hey, let's get
into that. Yeah, and you can get stuff like that
certified and insured and uh signature delivery approved and stuff
like that. It's helpful. Part of the post office is
pledged that the your letter carrier won't take your medication
(35:55):
before delivering. It might hit you up for some right, um.
But there's also a line of clothing coming out postal
service line of clothing coming out, I'm not kidding, called rain,
heat or snow, and that's we almost didn't mention this.
So the postal services creed right, neither rain nor snow,
nor sleep, sleep nor hauling, rain nor sleep nor snow,
(36:19):
nor neither snow nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of
night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their
appointed rounds. And that's actually not the post Office's official model.
They don't have one, but it's been linked to them.
And it's actually an adaptation of something from Herodotus, the
Greek historian, who was making a comment about how the Persians,
(36:41):
even during their war and like five b c. They
were one of the first ones to establish a real
postal service, and even during war, the postal service didn't stop.
There were still documents being delivered, and Herodotus was commenting
on that, and that's where that came from. It should
include like or loss of limb. It did originally, like
(37:02):
that's an adaptation. It wasn't loss of limb, but it
was something like some sort of sicknesses befalling you. They
were putting the mail before themselves. The show must go on. Um.
So there's a line of clothing called the rain or
heat or snow um. And then um. They're also talking
about creating federal email addresses that you get at birth.
(37:22):
Just like you have a physical address, you would also
have an email address, but your email address is attached
to you rather than the physical location you live at.
And if you say, need to correspond with the I R.
S Or Social Security Administration something like that, you would
send like this very secure email through this Postal Services portal.
(37:43):
Everything else you could just use like you know, Gmail
or yeahoo or whatever for everyday stuff. But this is
like the big stuff, the really important stuff. And then
the postal service would also offer like a digital lock
box for um, the like like a will or your
medical records or something like that. Yeah, and listen as
every conspiracy uh person in the country now says in
(38:07):
a way, I want a federal email attached to my
name that I have to send things through. Yeah, Well
that's the number of the Beast. Obviously, I don't know
that I would want that either. I'm not a big
conspiracy guy. Oh, it's not that you have to send
it to that, it's that if you send it through that,
if somebody hijack cider reads it, they're going to be
in a lot more trouble federally speaking than they would
(38:28):
be if like they read your Gmail. Because isn't it
illegal to to open like a federal offense to get exactly?
And that's what this There's this guy who runs a
think tank for the Postal Service who's who's like, it's
not just about mailing documents, It's about protecting the connectedness
of the United States and Americans. So how do we
do that in a digital world? He's thinking about this.
(38:50):
So if you're even the least bit interested by this
episode that we just recorded, Um, there's an Esquire article called,
um doing piece do I didn't do? It's called do
We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office? And
it's by Jesse Lichtenstein, And um it is really good, man,
(39:11):
It's a really good overview of what does Jesse think, Uh,
we need he or she I think kind of leans
toward we need it and the more you start to
like read about it, the more this weird kind of
civic affection for the post office developed. And you know
where I'm like, yeah, I even't want to get rid
of the post office. Do you want the post office?
Who doesn't want the post office? It's kind of it
(39:33):
kind of develops. Yeah, I used to like, you know,
maybe it was a simpler day, or maybe the people
stuck with their routes longer. But I remember my postman
growing up. It was the same guy for years, and
we lived on We didn't live in a neighborhood. We
lived on a street in the woods with like six houses,
and so you know, I would run out and check
the mail and wave at him, and we would give
(39:54):
him like gifts at Christmas. And that's and now I
have no idea who my postal curious? Which is my fault?
I need to just go out there, I think you do. Yeah.
And also the Postal services responsible for the largest food
drive in the United States every year. Yeah, you know
that food drive where you like you just put like
canned food in your in your mailbox, in your postal
(40:16):
You can do that. Yeah, I've never heard of. It
hasn't been very well publicized. But it like at least
around here, I guess. But um, it's a huge food
drive or the very least postal carriers are taking and
eating cans of ravi for dinner like this is delicious.
I love this food drive. Yes, so don't just put
cans of food in your mailbox. Check in to when
that is supposed. That's got to be the worst day
(40:36):
of the year for letter carrier, my gosh. Yeah, can
you imagine it's a lot of weight. Yeah, Um, you
got anything else? No respect your post postal carrier. You
want everybody go out and meet their postal carry? Yeah,
why not give him a hug? Actually, don't do that.
They might make you or something. Yeah, but give him
a wave. Um. If you want to learn more about
(40:57):
the post office, you can type that word those words
into the search part house to works dot com and
be sure to check out the Esquire article too. It's
very cool. Um, and uh, I guess before we get
into that choke, you want to message from our sponsor.
Let's do that. Yeah, okay, and now it's listen to me, Josh.
I'm gonna call this uh um fan who thought we
(41:20):
were wrong and did a little research and we may
not be wrong after call. Yeah, that's a nice. We
had a bunch of filmmakers right in when we talked
about the um subliminal messages being inserted into movies in
the nineteen fifties by James Vickery, because we said it's
(41:41):
one three thousandth of a second or something, and a
bunch of filmmakers went, there's only twenty four frames per second,
so if you switched out one frame, it would only
be There's no way. There's no way, And where'd you
get this number? Would you get this number? I went
back and looked, and I was like, I mean, I
see this number in various places. But um, so we
got this email from Brian Henry that disputed this, and
(42:03):
then he wrote back with this, Hey, guys, looks like
a man spoken too soon. I was assuming that Vickery
was just changing the film itself, which would result in
the messages showing much slower in at the maximum second.
But I did some research and apparently he used something
called a uh I've never heard of this before, a
(42:24):
taches Stado scope. Catch you stop to to just the scope.
I think you got it to just the scope to
project the messages on the screen, not the movie projector.
He said, so this way he would have had a
lot more control over the speed of the messages. And um,
so to all the filmmakers out there who wrote in
(42:45):
and challenged this, I wrote back to a few that
was like, jeez, I don't know, man, I'm like, I'm
looking for it. Then they you know someone we're even
kind of snotty about, like I should research to the
more so apparently put that in your tescope and smoke it.
That's what I say. And that is from Ryan Henry. Yeah,
thanks for the research, you know, and being a good
guy saying hey, I was wrong because you were wrong.
(43:08):
He was. He was one of the nicer ones about it. Well,
thank you. Um, if you want to let us know
that you were wrong, even though you had told us
that we were wrong at first, I love those, um
you can tweet that to us at s y SK podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
(43:28):
Stuff Podcasts at Discovery dot com, and you can write
all over our website, which is called stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,
Welcome to you stuff you should know front House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Uh,
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm Amy Goodman to the
Democracy Now the warrant Peace Report, Warrant Peace dot or, etcetera.
I'm Stephen. Jerry just said let's do this old school
(00:23):
right before she recorded, and I had no idea what
she meant. Yeah, yeah, you know, she's back. I thought
she meant, let's make it crappy in five minutes long,
and we need like little empty tin cans to speak. Dude,
make it sound right. How you doing, Jerry? That's great.
Jerry gave us the thumbs up. I know in our
(00:44):
new murder room. Um, Jerry is within our eyesight again
after a long layoff where she was not within our
range of viewing. I know, as it's kind of weird
because now I'm looking at you, but I can clearly
see my peripheral vision that she's on Facebook. She's way,
she's brusting her teeth, she's rearranging the severed human heads
(01:04):
that are in jars all around the place. That's creepy. Um.
Do you want to talk post office man? You want
to give the disclaimer that we're only talking about the
post Office in the US of a thin he just did. Okay, Um,
we don't know how it works in your country. No,
And actually it's probably not nearly as interesting as what's
going on with the US Postal Service the USPS, because
(01:26):
I don't know if you know this or not chucked,
but the USPS isn't a lot of trouble there. Yeah,
there's solvency that the amount of money that they have
to keep the lights on and keep everything going is
expected to run out in October of two thousand thirteen
if they don't do something. Yeah, that's this year. Yeah.
I think they lost sixteen billion dollars last year, Yes,
(01:46):
and five billion the year before. So that's a three
times as much money in a year. That's bad news.
Here's the caveat to that sixteen billion dollar loss, though
eleven billion of that was in pain. It's to uh
the future benefits of postal workers that have not yet
retired but well and the posts serve. The Postal Service
(02:10):
is the only federal agency of any sort that is
required to prepay its employees benefits for the future. In
two thousand and six, a lame de accession of Congress said,
you know what, you guys need to make sure that
your workers are taken care of. So you guys have
to start pre paying, um and over the next ten years.
And they have been, and they've been bleeding money. I mean,
(02:31):
like a sixteen billion dollar loss, but eleven billion of
it was to these future payments. I guess that would
make sense. Then then if you took out that eleven
they would just be about the same loss as before
a year. Right. But and that's a lot of money
to live it is. But um, they're figuring out ways
to make up for that extra loss, and one of
the big ones that's on the table now is cutting
(02:53):
out Saturday delivery. They figured they can recoup two billion
dollars a year doing that, so then they're down to three.
The thing is is the post the post office, it's
a part of the executive branch. Man it's all over
the place. It's a part of the executive branch. It's
a part of the federal government. But it gets zero
dollars in tax revenue. And it's also a thrill kill
(03:16):
cult exactly. That's the horrible secret of the year, right. Um,
So they get no money besides what they can make
off of their own revenue. Right, Um, so they get no,
but they get but they're also under the purview of
the federal the federal government. It's a weird, weird thing,
(03:39):
and they can't act without asking Congress. And Congress hasn't
exactly been forthcoming lately. Yet they haven't approved the Saturday thing.
And have they Congress. Here's the thing they've been trying
to get. Congress, you approve that forever. The Senate passed
a bill that said, after two years, we'll let you
cut out Saturday service, will give you eleven billion dollars
in over payments that you guys made towards the retirement stuff.
All the stuff back into the House, and the House
(04:00):
didn't do anything with it. Right, So you know the
fiscal cliff, Well, the US Congress passed the stop gap measure,
basically a federal budget that says, within this period, we're
still able to operate, right, And the USPS says, ha ha,
you didn't include our mandate from nineteen eight one that
we have to carry out Saturday service in that stopcap.
(04:24):
So technically, under current federal law, we don't have to
carry out Saturday service. And they're arguing it legally. So
they're just saying that's the loopholes are going to use
to shut down Saturday service, saying just packages. They're going
to deliver packages on Saturday. And here's a really good reason.
Express mail their revenues from packages of increased six over
(04:46):
the last ten years, whereas first class mail you know
letters have gone down I believe. So they're making all
almost all of their money because it's only forty five
cents to mail a letter from Florida to to Hawaii. Um.
But they make, however much shipping in the shipping game,
(05:07):
which is where they make all their money, which is
ironically the one place they don't have a monopoly as
far as the mail goes. I'm glad to see medicine
mail order medicine on that list to Express mail packages
in medicine, because at first I was like, who cares,
I don't need you don't yet. I don't need my
mail on a Saturday, right, but you you're medicine on
a Saturday. Well that's why they included that as a
(05:30):
you know something, they would still deliver and post offices
that are already open on Saturdays will still be open
on Saturdays. So if you want to go to your
PO box, maybe there'll be some mail, maybe there won't
be who knows. I bet you've had a PO box.
I've been thinking about this, haven't you have? You know,
you just struck me as a kind of person that
would have had a PO box at one point. You know,
(05:51):
that's where I get all my guns in the mail. So, UM,
I'm pretty worked up about this, as you can see. Um,
it's kind of interesting. Yeah, and who would have thought
that the postal service would ever be interesting? Uh? Sure,
I think parts of this are very interesting. Um. And
we would just want to go ahead and say hello
to all of our postal carriers out there that um
(06:13):
listen to our show who Who Won us over during
the Bush Era? Because we've got an emails from you
guys and gals. Yeah, including one of our favorite people
out there is a postal worker, Very Nostrin. Oh yeah,
is this one should really be a tribute to Van Nostros.
I didn't. He's a carrier. I'm he's always been kind
(06:34):
of cryptic about what he does. But I'm under the
distinct impression that he's employed by the Postal Service. Bangalore's
Van nostrin. This is for you. Um. But okay, so
let's talk about this. Let's talk about the Postal service. Man.
I'm all jazzed about the USPS. Dude, I'm glad you are. Um. So,
for a little while, even after the advent of electronic mail,
(06:58):
the postal evers is, the amount of mail they were
delivering was still increasing. As of two thousand seven, it
was on an upward trajectory. Sorry, two thousand six, right,
two d thirteen billion, one hundred and thirty seven million
pieces of mail that year. It's down to one sixty
seven now and then uh their when was this written?
(07:20):
Do you know? I think two thousand seven two? Okay,
So then they had seven hundred thousand employees. Now they
have about five hundred and eighty thousand. So they've been
in and trim the budget mode I think for the
past few years. Well, and the reason why. In two
thousand and six they also made seventy two point eight
billion dollars. I mean those stamps they add up, you know. Um.
(07:40):
In two thousand and eleven they made sixty six billion. Wow.
Not bad, yeah, but they're still losing a lot of money.
I mean that's what seven billion dollars in difference in
just five years. It's not good. It's not good. Um So,
where the where do all this come from? Chuck? It
came from back yonder day. You know. People have always
(08:02):
need to communicate, obviously from long distances, and uh in
sixteen thirty nine, Um, they you know, colonists here in
the in the New I guess they weren't United States yet,
but in the New World needed to get word back
to England occasionally and say things like, hey, quit bugging us,
or hey, sind it's more t and crumpets and um.
(08:23):
So the first official postal service was established in sixteen
thirty nine. UM. Richard Fairbank's tavern in Boston was the
official mail drop for overseas there in Massachusetts, and that
was the place to go if you wanted to mail something. Yeah,
and I couldn't find what happened or where it went
on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably I would
(08:44):
imagine then you just went to that pub and said, hey,
is there any mail? And they say no, and you
turn around and traveled the five miles back to your village.
So that was step one. Step two was about uh
forty some nine years later, six three William penn established
very thing. This person obviously, um, the first official post
office in Pennsylvania. You have his name after him, that's right,
(09:08):
And uh, I love this side note. Here in the South,
private messages were just sent between plantations, so they would
probably just give it to a slave and say carry
this over to that guy. Uh. And then flash forward
a little bit more. Um, the British crown gave a
man named Thomas Neil a twenty one year grant for
the postal service in the United States and he paid
(09:31):
um like seven seven shillings a year, so that's nothing, right,
he still died in debt, did he really? With the monopoly?
So the postal service has always been kind of tricky
to call money from. Interesting. So that continued until seventeen
seventy four, and a lot of big stuff was happening
around that time, like, Hey, we don't like you anymore
(09:54):
in England controlling us over here and taxing us, so
we're gonna start and established our own constitutional post office
for for any kind of mail going from anywhere, basically
intercolonial mail. Yeah. Yeah, it was was very cutting edge
at the sure and actually, um, you know that when
(10:14):
the British were carrying out the postal service on behalf
of the colonies. In the colonies, Um, there was a
guy named Benjamin Franklin who was appointed the postmaster of
Philadelphia and he actually killed it. As postmaster did he
like totally improved the roads. He said, like, we're gonna
start working like twenty four hours a day. We're gonna
have like lots of shifts. We're going to put up
(10:34):
milestones like the The postal service helped improve the connectedness
of the colonies thanks to him. So when the Continental
Congress said, hey, we want our own postal service, ben
Franklin became the first Postmaster General. And of course he
ran it like a tight ship. And he's one of
those dudes. I get a feeling if we could like
resurrect him and bring him out today, he could fix
(10:56):
what's going on in this country. Yeah, and he'd say
something pithy and ask for a glasses Sharry exactly. Um.
So this is to me when it gets super interesting. Uh,
was in the nineteenth century when westward expansion happened California
gold Rush. All of a sudden, we needed to get
stuff from the east coast to San Francisco. Let's say
so as quick as possible, right, what's crazy? As quick
(11:19):
as possible was to go down New York around Florida, Cribbean, yes,
like a steamship, uh, through the Caribbean, and then across
like Panama and then up on the Pacific side to California.
That was the fastest way to get mail for a while. Yeah.
And how long three to four weeks to send a
(11:39):
letter from the East Coast to the West coast. And
that's you know, the best case scenario, right, And that's
how that's what, that's how the US, the East coast
um communicated with the West Coast for a while until
some stage coach routes, routes were um, we're established. There
was a southern route and there was a central route,
and the southern route you could suposedly use a year
(12:00):
round because it's lovely down here. But then the central
route it was faster, but they said you can't use
that year round their storms. Yeah, and it also killed me. Man.
The way they used to name companies back then was
so like it made perfect sense. You basically just said
what you did. Like one the Pacific Mail Steamship Company
said we're going to carry your mail to the Pacific
(12:21):
by steamship, and then the Overland Mail Company like, well,
we're gonna do it overland, right, and so that's what
we're gonna call our company. So they got the contract
the Overland Mail Company um along the Southern Route. Took
about twenty five days, and then my favorite, one of
my favorite parts of American history was born, the Pony Express. Yeah,
(12:43):
and it's just so amazing, like the the idea that
they had to do this. It was a different company
that was competing. They wanted to get that contract away
from the Overland Company, right, the CEOC and p P,
and they said, you know what, we know the Central
Route shorter. We're gonna prove that we can use it
year round, and we're gonna set up something that it's
just gonna blow of this twenty five day thing out
of the water. And they set up the Pony Express
(13:04):
and they had stations what every ten twenty miles, and
a rider would ride from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento
or be part of a line of riding. They go
about a hundred miles and then they change horses every
like ten or fifteen miles. Yes, so the same rider
would change horses because they rode. They average ten miles
an hour, which doesn't sound fast, but you got a
(13:26):
factor in like the Sierra Nevadas where they're just crawling
up these mountains. So these dudes were riding hard and
on flat ground. If they're averaging ten miles an hour, right,
and they're going twenty four hours a day, they're going
two thousand miles ten miles an hour, that's what twenty hours?
That's no, that's two hundred hours. So what is that
(13:49):
that's less than ten days. So that's that cuts that
over link company's rate by Yeah. There was always one
set of riders going east, one set going west. Yeah.
I think when you when you were relieved by another rider, Yeah,
you'd hang out at that station and wait for the
other for somebody to come the other way and then
(14:10):
relieve them. Yeah. They were paid really well at the time,
twenty five bucks a week, which at the time unskilled
labors made about a dollar a week. So um, and
did you read the first ad they ever put in.
I wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen, must
be expert riders, willing to risk death daily orphans preferred,
(14:32):
And that's maybe legend. But supposedly that's what it says.
But apparently they were young, little, light life, skinny kids,
because you know, you didn't want some big dude like
me up on a horse. The horse would be like,
I don't want to ride anymore. So they were like
these young boys, like I think the youngest one is
like fourteen. And supposedly Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider,
(14:55):
although people have disputed that. Now, Oh yeah, yeah, well
he's he's the stuff of a legend. Well he's by
far and away the most famous famous Pony Express writer,
if in fact he did. But anyway, so so think
about the amount of infrastructure built up along this central
route to have a station every ten or twenty miles.
(15:16):
You've got all these employees going. And they proved it.
They proved that the central route could be used year round,
and so they got the contract. Then right now, the
Overland Company got the contract to use it, to use
that same route that was already established, and the Pony
Express was like, you have to be kidding me. And
so the the U. S. Government said no, no, you
guys do half and then let the let the Overland
(15:37):
Company do the other half. Yeah, And they were mad
for about a year and a half and really angry.
And then the telegraph line was completed and everyone's like, oh, well,
I guess I guess we're all out of business now. Yeah,
that was it. Pony expressed the soul the Wells Fargo
and basically shut down. Yeah. I think the American Express
ended up branching out of Wells Fargo too. Like these
(15:59):
are old old companies, like these modern banks and credit
card companies. It's interesting how far they go back. But
think about that. Man. Even as far back as the
mid nineteenth century, new technology was putting mail delivery out
to pasture, and then mail delivery would evolve and like
figure out how to come back. That's pretty cool foreshadowing.
(16:21):
So this is a big jump forward to the mid
nineteen sixties. Yeah, a lot happened in between. Then it didn't. Actually,
we started to go move further and further out into
the suburbs. There's a huge population boom in the in
the post war era, and businesses started to realize the
value of direct mailing, and all these factors put together
(16:42):
meant that the postal service was totally overwhelmed completely because
it became such a big deal. Everyone was writing letters
and they were using the same old hand um, I
guess hand delivery methods, sorting methods, that's what it was.
They weren't automated at all, and they needed to be right.
(17:05):
And so there was a postal reform that that was undertaken. Yeah,
and this was in nineteen seventy one the Post Office Department.
And I didn't even know this. It was shortly after
I was born. We weren't the United States Postal Service
until nineteen one. That was when we officially became the USPS. UH,
it became an independent establishment. UM was no longer a
(17:27):
part of the cabinet of the federal government, but was
part of the executive branch and got the monopoly basically
to deliver mail, even though it was supposedly just a company.
And they and they re up the mandate from I
think seventeen ninety two that said, you, the Postal Service
is one of the most essential services of the federal government.
No person has cut off in this country. None shall
(17:49):
not get delivered exactly. Everyone's going to have a mailbox
and everyone's going to get mail to that mailbox every
day because we need to help keep intellectual freedom, UM
going and and and ideas in business and commerce going
all the time, and the Postal services, this federal agency
that carries that out, and that I'm sure that put
a financial burden on them when people started building in
(18:10):
these like especially rich people, when they started building in
these remote areas, because then all of a sudden he
had to add that to your route. Well there's it's
sixty miles up a mountain and it's the only house there's.
There's a guy who services the Grand Canyon. There's a
group of Indians that live at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon, and he has a donkey train that goes
down there every day with the mail. Really yeah, I
(18:31):
mean it's part of it's a federal mandate. You have
to be able to get mail. Everyone has a mailbox.
He's like, don't you guys use smoke signals? Come on,
they do. In fact, that actually wrote an article on
spoke singnals. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say we should
podcasts on it, but it's it's like super basic, is
there really it would be like a five minute podcast. Well,
we'll have to figure out some other way to use it. Agreed.
(18:52):
So that's interesting. Um, so do we cover going postal.
Now it was sort of just thrown in the middle
of this arm Yeah, really was. It was talking about
how packages are delivered, and all of a sudden, it says,
and then people started killing each other in nineteen six,
which is actually, um, the post office has the dubious
(19:13):
distinction of kicking off the workplace shooting trend in the
United States. Was that the first one as far as
I could tell. Alright, So nineteen six Edmond, Oklahoma, Patrick
Henry A. Cheryl killed fourteen co workers. UM. Nine Another
one happened, including a uh supervisor getting killed with a
(19:33):
samurai sword. UM. November nineteen Thomas McIlvaine shot and killed
four co workers, wounded five others, then shot himself, and
then nineteen and then in two thousand three two more
incidences of postal workers killing fellow postal workers. It was
like just between eighties six and ninety seven, forty people
(19:56):
died at postal at post offices from postal rampage and
gave birth to the term going postal, which is used
as vernacular for like just losing it basically. UM. And
if you're interested in that at all, there's a really
good documentary. I think it's on Netflix streaming right now
called um Murdered by Proxy, and it's all about the
postal shootings, like where they came from. There's a lot
(20:19):
of scrutiny at like the of the management techniques of
people at post offices, and there's got to be something
to it. I mean, oh yeah, if you watch, it's
like it was clearly how many other industries had that
many office shootings? You know, retail Actually, you're the homicide
rate is three times higher in retail than it is
at the post office. You don't say going retail, that
(20:40):
just means you're going shopping. Well, it's like drinking the
kool aid. They really drank flavor aid and it's right
kool aids someone with that distinction. Ah yeah, alright, so
that was going post Yeah, I mean we had to
mention it, but I don't want to dwell on it.
But it was weird in this article the way it
went right in the middle of this came up out
of nowhere. UM zip codes This is kind of cool. Yeah.
UM zip codes were introduced in nineteen sixty three and
(21:04):
then officially put in place in mandatory because just so
much mail going on you had to categorize it more specifically, right,
That was part of that, the post office being swamped.
This was the first step towards automation, was like a
standardized code. Well, they did have other ones, but it
was like one was New York City or something like that.
(21:28):
You know. Yeah, so ZIP this is just a nice
little cocktail party factoid stands for zone improvement plan. I
never knew that until I read this. Did you know
that I had before? But I had forgotten. Okay, so
it's his own improvement plan and it's uh here in
the United States at least, it's a five digit number
represents you know, a location obviously where you're trying to
send something and it now they have the ZIP code
(21:51):
plus four in some areas of like I guess major
urban areas have a little more specificity, right, they like
deliver it to your like they put it on your
stomach if you visit plus four. I think certain buildings
even will have their own plus four if it's a
big enough building, or if you get a lot of
mail as a person, is that what you're after is
a plus four for you? Well, it says that some
(22:11):
high volume mail receivers get in. I'm like, you know,
if it was cool mail. I'd love to get the mail. UM.
So the first digit there represents the state here in Georgia,
that's a three. UM. It increases as you move west,
and there are some states that share each digit, like two. Yeah,
it's taken up by a lot of states. There's the
(22:32):
district of Columbia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia.
Man all two's. I would be mad if I lived
in one of those states. So then you got the second,
third digits. Those are regions within the state. UM. The
first three of those create what's called the SCF code,
the sectional, center, facility, and UM. Then the fourth and
(22:54):
fifth digits are even more specific. Basically, it just hones
down as you go left to write until you've got
Josh Clark's house right, like this state, this section facility,
this UM, post office, this neighborhood. Yeah, and then this
maybe this building, this high volume mail receiver named cash Clark.
(23:15):
That's right. UM, So you've got the ZIP code that
allowed automation. And a little known fact is the US
Postal Service doesn't just handle a ton of the US's mail.
It handles of all of the mail in the world.
So before the zip code, this was really difficult. It
also went from if you're mailing something from New York
(23:35):
to San Francisco, it went through every distribution facility in
the country in between New York and San Francisco. Um
before it got there. Yes, now zip codes. Well, let's
talk about how what a letter does, and this is
all thanks to zip codes. So I write a little
love letter. I'm gonna mail it to Emily H which
(23:57):
is weird because we live together. Let's just be romantic.
That's actually a great example though, because you can mail
something from your mailbox to be delivered back to you.
I reckon, I've never done it. That's the that's the
the poor man's trademark I've heard about that is to
mail something to yourself into this. I think it depends
(24:20):
on the judge. Probably, Okay, So you put it in
your mailbox, postal carrier is gonna pick it up. They're
gonna take it to the post office. Um, they're gonna
put it on a truck, and then take that from
the post office to a processing plant where we have
our long awaited machines doing some sorting, shape and size. Yeah. Well,
first they sort everything out and make sure everything's facing
(24:42):
the right way up right, UM. And then the the
they packages, well, packages are put on one one belt
and then letters are put in another and there the
letters say, let's just stick with the letter that you wrote. Uh,
it's it goes into a slot so it's face seeing
upwards and upright if front words and upright. And then
(25:05):
they put a little barcode on the back of the
letter and uh, I think ultra violet inc. Yeah. Well,
first thing it does is it gets a postmark and
cancelation lines saying basically, you can't use the stamp again. Yeah,
don't even try it. Don't be cheap. We've seen the
white out tricks. We've seen doctoring up a stamp, which
is probably a federal offense. It is UM. And then
(25:26):
so after that the barcodes printed on the back of
the piece of mail. And then there's an optical scanner
that reads the address, which is pretty cool. And if
you if they're really really really accurate to UM, but
if your handwriting is terrible. They have a new system
now where the this UM conveyor belt takes a picture
(25:47):
of it, send emails a picture to a human being
at a computer who reads it. Is what I think.
It types it in and then it's so it stays
on the line. It doesn't have to come out any longer.
It's pretty much technology. Yeah. UM. And then so based
on this UM this address, including the zip code, it
prints a barcode at the bottom. If you look at
(26:08):
a letter, any letter you get has a little bar
code on it, and so that's what's red. That's right.
The thing on the back is invisible, I think, right,
it's fluorescent. This is just showing off we have invisible link.
Other processing machines then read those barcodes and then sort
them in their little bins according to zip code. And
it's just basically placing everything and what will eventually be
(26:33):
a trade that will be delivered back to a post
office or a sorting facility or does it go straight
to a post office? Um, it goes to another processing plant. Right,
So imagine each processing plan regional has a bunch of
mail coming in on trucks. Then it sorts and then
sends out and then based on its zip code that
(26:54):
it serves, UM it gets a bunch of flats from
other UM to atribution facilities. That's right. With that are
already according to the zip code. So let's say it's
getting a flat of mail by zip code. It then
also sorts through those, that's right, and it actually sorts
them into an individual carriers route in order, and that's
(27:19):
what's delivered to the post office. So it arrives at
the post office ready to go on the truck. Yes, okay,
And that doesn't mean that the postal worker doesn't have
much to do. They also still have like circulars, magazines,
bulk mail. They have to go through and put it
for every address where all that my recycling then basically yeah,
(27:40):
although the coupons. I'll remember our junk mail episode from
years and years back, and we've got so much from
people who are like no, no, no, you can't get
rid of junk mail, right, that's the only thing keep
in this in business. Um, So, if you're gonna address
a letter, there are a few guidelines. You know. You
gotta put your address legibly on the front. You gotta
put your little return address in upper left corner. Yeah,
(28:01):
on the front, don't put it on the back upper
left corner there. And don't use periods in commas, like
if you write p O box, it's not p period.
Oh period. Although that doesn't matter. Apparently it allows for
greater efficiency in reading your letter, maybe because I always
put like Atlanta comma g a period I do too,
and they still get there. But don't you wonder if
(28:22):
they get there like earlier? I don't know. Maybe, so
uh it is um. Supposedly you need to be able
to read the address at arms length, so don't write tiny,
and uh, don't write so big that they can't do
other things to the envelope like scan and stamp and
things like that. UM. And then you know, you gotta
(28:43):
put your return address because if something happens, you want
it to come back to you. Although I don't do
that much anymore, A lot of times I'll just put
like Atlanta, Georgia. Really you don't put your return address
on there. No, but I rarely mail things, and a
lot of times when I do, it's for work. So
I'll just put, you know, Atlanta, Georgia house to works
or something. And it's not the kind of thing that
if it doesn't come back to me, I would care
(29:03):
I've had some precious thing, I would put a Richard address.
I have a feeling that you're going to get some
email from postal carriers that are like, I hate people
like you because whether you care if it comes back
to you or not, I'm sure they have to get
it back to you. Uh. There's a lot of type
of delivery surfaces, we surfaces services. We won't go over here,
but I did want to say that media mail is
(29:24):
a great little ah trick, not a trick, but a
great tool if you're mailing things like books and door
DVDs because it's super cheap. But it takes a while.
But that's part of that mandate from that they want
to keep the intellectual juice of America flowing through the
postal service, so things like that, like creative stuff for
(29:46):
books or correspondence like and I think that's how if
you've ever ordered a book on Amazon for like two cents,
you're like, oh, how can they sell a book for
two cents, it's because they charge you like four for shipping,
and they probably pay like eight cents to mail it
with media mail. That's the greatest scam of the twenty
one century. Well not really. I mean they're making their
(30:08):
money via shipping instead of the book itself. But publishers
don't like it, of course, because they want to sell
their books new and not for two cents on Amazon.
So um, I think we said that the Postal Service
has a monopoly on delivering mail but not on delivering packages, right,
um so because they're kind of in competitive business against
(30:30):
like UPS and FedEx and DHL and all those guys. Um,
those guys have gone ahead and in and invested in
infrastructure of say like air delivery, air transportation of mail
and the U. The Postal Service has tried that before,
like they tried a guided missile in ninety three, which
they shot full of mail from a submarine to a
(30:50):
naval station in Florida. But it's just too expensive. So
the Postal Service said, hey, Ups, hey FedEx, you guys
have a bunch of plane, can we start putting our
mail on it? And they said sure for a few
billion dollars a year. And the Postal Service said great.
But at the same time they kind of, um they
(31:11):
stepped forward into the twenty first century by doing so.
And the Postal Service, having access to everyone's mailbox is
often tapped by UPS and FedEx deliver what's called in
the business the last mile. So a lot of times,
especially if you're a rural person, if you get something
from Amazon, it's it was shipped by UPS, but eventually
(31:34):
it made its way into your postal carriers route and
being delivered by the Postal service. Yeah, there's way more
mixing of package mailing than you would think. Um, it's
like a swinger party or something pretty much. Uh. And
part of that deal in two thousand one with FedEx was, Hey,
FedEx said, can we put our boxes at your post offices?
(31:55):
And they said sure for six million dollars. And they said,
you know, can we hit your ride on your plane?
They said sure for six point three billions over seven years.
But it's you know, seems like a good agreement. And
they did the same with UPS and uh, we scratch
our back, you scratch yours. We scratch your back, we'll
scratch yours. That works. Yeah, why didn't everybody scratch them back?
(32:19):
I don't know. Okay, Um, because it's hard to reach.
Uh So, if you realize that the Postal Service needs
a few billion extra dollars, you say, why are you
just up the postal rates? Yeah? Well, the federal government
keeps its thumb on that they want to make sure
that anybody who needs to mail a letter can do
(32:39):
so without great expense. Yeah, it's a big deal to
change the postal rate. Like it is, much more than
you would think, because the layman like me would just
be like, yeah, I just add a few cents. Who cares. Yeah,
it's the problem just printing those forever stamps. Genius idea.
You don't have to go back and reprint a bunch
with the amount. Great idea or the one cent. Remember
in Fargo when the Wade got the one center the ducks, Yeah,
(33:00):
and she was like, everyone needs the one sit whenever
they raise the rates. Yeah, he's like cool, Gee, I
didn't think about that. Um So, but yes, there's a
very long, protracted, difficult process of raising the postal rates.
It's not a very easy thing and it involves a
ton of bureaucracy. Should we get into that or just
leave it at that? It's up to you, man. I
think we should just leave it at that. Okay. So,
(33:22):
if you are going to mail something from your house,
you need your little mailbox, and I just installed mine
in what seemed like a sensible manner. I didn't realize
that there were actual rules. Um In fact, you were
supposed to contact the post office before installing your mailbox.
Which I had no idea. UM, to make sure it's
like the correct placement and height and so like the
(33:45):
post office person or the mail career, I don't have
to get out of the truck. Oh well they'll they'll
burn it down if it's not the specification. So you
want to contact the post office. I didn't, but I
guess I just luked out because um, they say generally
five inches from the road surface to the inside floor
of the mailbox or point of entry, and then set
(34:06):
back six to eight inches from the front face of
the curb or road edge to the mailbox door. I
guess I just got lucky then, because I get my mail,
you know, without any burning down here, or without a
post office spots box, which we talked about. They've been
around for a couple of hundred years. And that's if
you want to have a little key to your little
(34:26):
loan box in a post office and get your mail there,
you can certainly do that. It's handy if you're starting
out of business and you want to make people think
that you're not working out of your house. Um, you
can get a post office and say, look, I have
a PO box, which means I'm working out in my bedroom.
It's like code, I think, are you getting guns in
the mail? Is that what people do? I'm sure there's
(34:49):
a lot of people who try to get guns in
the mail in the p O boxes, okay. Or if
you um tend to move around a lot in the
same town and you don't want to worry about changing
your mail andfording your mail, you can always just get
a pilbox. So those are some reasons. Um, you want
to talk the future of the post office, if it's
around after October two, what is the future of the
(35:11):
post office? Well, there's a lot of stuff coming down
the pike. Um, there's the cancelation of Saturday mail this August.
They're really going hard after package delivery services now, trying
to oh with like the flat rates and stuff like that.
Just really like courting businesses to say, hey, consider us
instead of UPS or FedEx um and uh, especially with
(35:33):
prescription medicine because we have an aging population is going
to do nothing but increase in size, so you're gonna
need more prescriptions through the mail. So hey, let's get
into that. Yeah, and you can get stuff like that
certified and insured and uh signature delivery approved and stuff
like that. It's helpful. Part of the post office is
pledged that the your letter carrier won't take your medication
(35:55):
before delivering. It might hit you up for some right, um.
But there's also a line of clothing coming out postal
service line of clothing coming out, I'm not kidding, called rain,
heat or snow, and that's we almost didn't mention this.
So the postal services creed right, neither rain nor snow,
nor sleep, sleep nor hauling, rain nor sleep nor snow,
(36:19):
nor neither snow nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of
night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their
appointed rounds. And that's actually not the post Office's official model.
They don't have one, but it's been linked to them.
And it's actually an adaptation of something from Herodotus, the
Greek historian, who was making a comment about how the Persians,
(36:41):
even during their war and like five b c. They
were one of the first ones to establish a real
postal service, and even during war, the postal service didn't stop.
There were still documents being delivered, and Herodotus was commenting
on that, and that's where that came from. It should
include like or loss of limb. It did originally, like
(37:02):
that's an adaptation. It wasn't loss of limb, but it
was something like some sort of sicknesses befalling you. They
were putting the mail before themselves. The show must go on. Um.
So there's a line of clothing called the rain or
heat or snow um. And then um. They're also talking
about creating federal email addresses that you get at birth.
(37:22):
Just like you have a physical address, you would also
have an email address, but your email address is attached
to you rather than the physical location you live at.
And if you say, need to correspond with the I R.
S Or Social Security Administration something like that, you would
send like this very secure email through this Postal Services portal.
(37:43):
Everything else you could just use like you know, Gmail
or yeahoo or whatever for everyday stuff. But this is
like the big stuff, the really important stuff. And then
the postal service would also offer like a digital lock
box for um, the like like a will or your
medical records or something like that. Yeah, and listen as
every conspiracy uh person in the country now says in
(38:07):
a way, I want a federal email attached to my
name that I have to send things through. Yeah, Well
that's the number of the Beast. Obviously, I don't know
that I would want that either. I'm not a big
conspiracy guy. Oh, it's not that you have to send
it to that, it's that if you send it through that,
if somebody hijack cider reads it, they're going to be
in a lot more trouble federally speaking than they would
(38:28):
be if like they read your Gmail. Because isn't it
illegal to to open like a federal offense to get exactly?
And that's what this There's this guy who runs a
think tank for the Postal Service who's who's like, it's
not just about mailing documents, It's about protecting the connectedness
of the United States and Americans. So how do we
do that in a digital world? He's thinking about this.
(38:50):
So if you're even the least bit interested by this
episode that we just recorded, Um, there's an Esquire article called,
um doing piece do I didn't do? It's called do
We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office? And
it's by Jesse Lichtenstein, And um it is really good, man,
(39:11):
It's a really good overview of what does Jesse think, Uh,
we need he or she I think kind of leans
toward we need it and the more you start to
like read about it, the more this weird kind of
civic affection for the post office developed. And you know
where I'm like, yeah, I even't want to get rid
of the post office. Do you want the post office?
Who doesn't want the post office? It's kind of it
(39:33):
kind of develops. Yeah, I used to like, you know,
maybe it was a simpler day, or maybe the people
stuck with their routes longer. But I remember my postman
growing up. It was the same guy for years, and
we lived on We didn't live in a neighborhood. We
lived on a street in the woods with like six houses,
and so you know, I would run out and check
the mail and wave at him, and we would give
(39:54):
him like gifts at Christmas. And that's and now I
have no idea who my postal curious? Which is my fault?
I need to just go out there, I think you do. Yeah.
And also the Postal services responsible for the largest food
drive in the United States every year. Yeah, you know
that food drive where you like you just put like
canned food in your in your mailbox, in your postal
(40:16):
You can do that. Yeah, I've never heard of. It
hasn't been very well publicized. But it like at least
around here, I guess. But um, it's a huge food
drive or the very least postal carriers are taking and
eating cans of ravi for dinner like this is delicious.
I love this food drive. Yes, so don't just put
cans of food in your mailbox. Check in to when
that is supposed. That's got to be the worst day
(40:36):
of the year for letter carrier, my gosh. Yeah, can
you imagine it's a lot of weight. Yeah, Um, you
got anything else? No respect your post postal carrier. You
want everybody go out and meet their postal carry? Yeah,
why not give him a hug? Actually, don't do that.
They might make you or something. Yeah, but give him
a wave. Um. If you want to learn more about
(40:57):
the post office, you can type that word those words
into the search part house to works dot com and
be sure to check out the Esquire article too. It's
very cool. Um, and uh, I guess before we get
into that choke, you want to message from our sponsor.
Let's do that. Yeah, okay, and now it's listen to me, Josh.
I'm gonna call this uh um fan who thought we
(41:20):
were wrong and did a little research and we may
not be wrong after call. Yeah, that's a nice. We
had a bunch of filmmakers right in when we talked
about the um subliminal messages being inserted into movies in
the nineteen fifties by James Vickery, because we said it's
(41:41):
one three thousandth of a second or something, and a
bunch of filmmakers went, there's only twenty four frames per second,
so if you switched out one frame, it would only
be There's no way. There's no way, And where'd you
get this number? Would you get this number? I went
back and looked, and I was like, I mean, I
see this number in various places. But um, so we
got this email from Brian Henry that disputed this, and
(42:03):
then he wrote back with this, Hey, guys, looks like
a man spoken too soon. I was assuming that Vickery
was just changing the film itself, which would result in
the messages showing much slower in at the maximum second.
But I did some research and apparently he used something
called a uh I've never heard of this before, a
(42:24):
taches Stado scope. Catch you stop to to just the scope.
I think you got it to just the scope to
project the messages on the screen, not the movie projector.
He said, so this way he would have had a
lot more control over the speed of the messages. And um,
so to all the filmmakers out there who wrote in
(42:45):
and challenged this, I wrote back to a few that
was like, jeez, I don't know, man, I'm like, I'm
looking for it. Then they you know someone we're even
kind of snotty about, like I should research to the
more so apparently put that in your tescope and smoke it.
That's what I say. And that is from Ryan Henry. Yeah,
thanks for the research, you know, and being a good
guy saying hey, I was wrong because you were wrong.
(43:08):
He was. He was one of the nicer ones about it. Well,
thank you. Um, if you want to let us know
that you were wrong, even though you had told us
that we were wrong at first, I love those, um
you can tweet that to us at s y SK podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
(43:28):
Stuff Podcasts at Discovery dot com, and you can write
all over our website, which is called stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,
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