In the ongoing debate about health care, right-wingers who don’t want the government involved consistently point to the post office as an example of how terribly the government runs things.
Now, I’m not gonna pretend that I like lining up with my package to France, the week before Christmas, when there are only two clerks on duty. Nobody does. But in general I’ve had an okay time with the post office. And it’s like night and day — or rather, like my socialized medicine surgery in Ireland versus my private appendectomy here — when compared with the Postal Service’s most prominent private competitor…UPS.
I live in an eight-unit apartment building that has no call-box, and a curiously useless doorbell stuck behind a metal door such that it cannot be accessed by anyone. When the delivery guy, public or private, comes by, I have to be able to hear the knock if I want to catch him. If it’s in the midst of a heatwave and my loud bedroom fan is on, this will not happen. Naturally, I get a lot of sticky notices pasted to my door, and this is going to become far more common as movie-awards season begins.
If I miss the mailman…I can walk a few blocks to my nearest post office. If it’s after 6pm that day, or any time thereafter, I wait in whatever line there is, turn in my card, show ID, and get the package.
If it’s UPS…well, today it was UPS. Let me tell you how that went.
I called UPS once I got the notice. UPS does not like you talk to either an actual human being or your local UPS office. You can fool them on the former by saying “customer service” into the phone, even though the robot voice doesn’t tell you that’s an option. Anyway, via the robot, I tell UPS to hold my package for pick-up, sort-of assuming that in a major city like this, they must have an office near me (I know FedEx does). The robot tells me I can expect a call back within an hour to confirm.
Over an hour later, nothing. called again. Said “customer service,” and I actually got a human. Hooray! But a human who was powerless to do anything for me except put in ANOTHER request for UPS to call me within the hour.
A little over an hour later, they did. I could pick up my package at their warehouse in downtown LA. But only between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.
I set out around 8. And made the mistake of assuming that the directions on the UPS website were accurate and up to date. They’re not. There are medians that keep you from driving straight when you are — according to UPS — supposed to. After a couple miles in the wrong direction, I figured this out.
The UPS warehouse is a whole city block in the ass-end of downtown. And the customer service area feels a lot like a hospital waiting room. It’s dingy, and people look poor and unhappy.
You’d imagine that turning in your slip with its tracking number would be next. But no. They give you a yellow post-it and make you hand-write your name and address. Then they take it, and don’t necessarily help people in the order received.
Ten minutes after it looked like they were doing nothing, my name was called. I responded.
“We’re looking for the car,” the guy said. “We don’t know where he parked it.”
So they know what van my package is in. What they don’t know is where inside their block-sized building said van has been left. Shouldn’t there be some sort of system, ya think?
Twenty minutes later I had my package.
Now, under capitalism, the idea is that companies that don’t work well or deliver good service will not make money, and fail. Here’s the problem with that in UPS’ case: Big companies like to use UPS. It’s convenient for them. I don’t know the nuts and bolts of why, but it seems to be so. That it is not so convenient for us recipients matters not one whit, because we don’t spend near as much money on UPS services as corporate clients.
Is it maybe possible that the same is true when it comes to health services?
Post offices have their issues, at times. UPS, however, is an issue almost all the time.
Victory: government.
Luke I’ve had the exact same thing happen to me with UPS. But when I finally found the downtown L.A. UPS, they did not have my package because the driver was still stuck in traffic. I waited 2 hours.
On one side note, one big reason the post office is partially broke is because it was highly mismanaged once the internet took off. Many republicans in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, holding strong on anti-government stance, and many too-old-to-care lawmakers, did nothing to compete with the new wave of tracking packages, internet service, at home postage etc. And they’ve been trying to play catch-up ever since.
Because of their lack of new technology, they lost almost every big business in the country. Amazon immediately latched on to UPS because they were really the first to do daily tracking updates via their website, downloadable packing slips and much more that businesses need for themselves and their customers. And finally once the post office got into the mix, their software was lame and expensive, partly because most of our government is a bunch of old hacks that just bitch and moan when government gets involved.
What’s cool though, is that when government fucks up, I, as a citizen, can fire them. Fema/Katrina – Bush/Cheney, etc – I vote for smart people that will manage my services correctly. And science, technology, healthcare, police chiefs, etc all matter and all need to run by smart fucking people And when we vote for people based on emotional morality tales, religious ideology and similar distorted views of Hilter’s policies, the government always breaks down. Go figure.
It seems as many of the right-wing are simply emotional at the idea of governmental healthcare because they think it’s slippery slope into a fairytale world of socialism. Such debates bore me. Especially since socialism is incorrectly linked with Hitler. It’s just emotions or religion or an incorrect interpretation of the constitution.
By the way, I buy stamps just about anyplace. I can buy them at the liquor store.
In this country we currently have an ongoing battle over the “Royal Mail” our equivalent, and whilst it has had problems with union defence of silly practices it is now out there doing the daily deliveries in a hard world –
all the competitors have exactly the same issues as yours re distant collection offices in terrible industrial parks. The govenrment are wanting to sell off the post office to one of these free market competitors in the name of efficiency – but all these so called cheaper services do not currently deliver to the whole of mainland Britain – only the major cities and towns…
that is always going to be cheaper. The usually silly boys toys car TV programme “Top gear” recently filmed a race between a car and a packet posted on the isles of Scilly, west of Cornwall, sent to the northern Hebridean islands, off the coast of Scotland. The post office won, using standard delivery vans, train, helicopter and other vehicles – all part of the national comprehensive network…
the drive to end national services that work with free market alternatives that don’t is a worldwide conspiracy by the rich moneyed (delivery company share owning) classes to get richer at the expense of the general public…
Stand up and fight you guys! – remember “The Postman” but, on second thoughts, not that movie…
I honestly don’t know why big businesses use UPS. We used to use them back in the day for loan documents, but they lost or misrouted them on a such a regular basis we switched to FedEx and stayed with them until we closed up shop. I try to avoid using them as a shipping option whenever possible. The last time I ordered something from a company that only used UPS, I figured I was safe because the package only had to go from Northern California to Southern California. It was misrouted to NEW JERSEY, and I didn’t get the package for a week.
So… I went back to avoiding them. I wish others would do the same.
We use Fedex exclusively on laemmle.com and oddly about 50% of our packages get routed to Memphis, TN first. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the package was going to the East Coast, but 98% of our orders are sent within California! So by the time a customer, who is no more than 40 miles away, gets our package, it has traveled over 1500 miles!
But like I mentioned before, USPS dropped the ball on this whole internet thing, mostly due to a complete mis-management from the do-nothings in the Republican congress for the last decade+.
It makes more sense to elect good, smart, forward-thinking people into our government to handle shit like USPS, health care, etc. Shit, if we elected the same hacks to run the military, armored-humvees would be the least of our worries.
Whevener we elect do-nothings, war-mongers or dip-shits, this country fails.