Consolidated and combined a few things
This is what I want to share. What do you think?
We’ve all seen the stories about how Trump is sabotaging the Post Office. But if you’re like me, you haven’t seen much detail of what the impact is. These are not changes that can be reversed quickly or cheaply when he leaves office. The changes he’s making, while not permanent, are going to take a long time to undo.
The following is from a friend of mine who used to work with a high-volume Postal customer. They don’t want to get involved in the public debate, but if you want to dispute any of the facts, cite a source and not just “It doesn’t sound right.”
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This article is a good launch point for the variety of issues.
https://spokesman-recorder.com/2020/08/15/dismantling-the-u-s-postal-service/
3 weeks backlog in Philadelphia. People are not getting their social security checks of which many are mailed, or their medication. And this is for the stuff that's arriving in the local PO for the local people. Due to the variety of rules he implemented before the mail sorting machines were yanked.
I used to code software to produce labels. The rules are very exact for placement and quality of address. Those machines are finicky to start off with. When they are set up they are set up exactly. Every scanner they yanked (and there are many on a single line as they kick out the mail to each chute) has to be re-calibrated. And these are not just barcode scanners. They are high-speed real-time OCR scanners.
What kind of manpower does each one replace?
There are two kinds of sorters (for letters). The first stage is where optical character recognition [OCR] reads the address and prints additional information as a barcode onto the envelope based on the full address as now figured out to the zip plus four level.
The second stage are the Delivery Bar Code Sorters. I’ll address these first.
Vice reported (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyv4k/internal-usps-documents-outline-plans-to-hobble-mail-sorting):
In May, the USPS planned to remove a total of 969 sorting machines out of the 4,926 it had in operation as of February for all types of letters and flat mail. The vast majority of them—746 out of 3,765 in use—were delivery bar code sorters (DBCS), the type that sort letters, postcards, ballots, marketing mail and other similarly sized pieces. But a subsequent document distributed to union officials in mid-June said 502 of those machines would be removed from facilities.
On these, envelopes are flying by far faster than any human could read and push a direction. So number one you have to slow the line to probably a hundredth of what it currently runs. At that point you'd have to multiply the size of the line to 100 times that line to even fit the people on.
Capacity is almost 10 pieces/second. Plus these run 24/7 so you're looking at about 300 new people total - minus the 2 it currently takes to run the sorter.
Taking the 502 number, that means it would take roughly 150,000 employees to replace the capacity of these machines. Plus the space to house all those people and the new equipment. Because yes, even if you pull out the automated sorter, you’ll still need all the bins and tracks for the people to use to do the work.
Now back to that first stage. They do the OCR and print the bar code so they can use less OCR machines at the later stages of SCF and then local post office distribution. Much cheaper more accurate laser barcode scanners at this point in the process.
Multiplying manpower by thousands and slow down by thousands to actually have humans read and type this information into a database lookup, and then press a button to print something on an envelope.
We have reached the collapse of the postal system if anyone ever tries to revert to manpower for these machines.
