Re: [OT] Time to close down the Post Office?

The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:

Tue, 3 Dec 2024 06:41:20 -0000 (UTC), Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

I can't argue that he's wrong. I think we've been trending this way for
a long time. Many years ago, the government, presumably in an attempt to
placate the postal unions, made it law that ONLY the Post Office could
carry letters and they also enacted in law that for package delivery,
couriers had to charge at least 3 times what Canada Post charged.

Wow. The United States postal monopoly is for First-Class Mail only. The
post office wasn't even delivering parcel post till AFTER UPS was
created, which was founded by former postal executives frustrated that
they couldn't convince the Post Office Department to deliver parcels.

Wow! I didn't even know that USPS didn't deliver parcel post until
relatively recently. Whatever happened to "Neither snow nor rain nor
heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds" which I always knew as "The mail must go
through"?

It never occured to me that parcels wouldn't be part of that.

"relatively recently" being 1913. UPS began in 1907 but wasn't a common
carrier till later. In the beginning it delivered Special Delivery for
the post office.

Most parcels were handled as express before parcel post.