USPS (U.S. Postal Service/Office)

I rarely have occasion to visit one of our Government run Post offices, one of those Government run operations going bankrupt or losing money hand over fist. Today I needed to mail a package and decided to use the US Postal service rather than UPS, FEDEX, DHL or one of the other privately run businesses making a profit year in and year out.

I walked into one of the busiest branches here in Phoenix and as usual when I walked in even at 3:15 pm and with what seemed to be only a handful of cars in the lot there were 20 folks in line. The place had 4 station to serve patrons and as I walk through the door noticed 3 of those 4 stations were maned and thought 20 people wouldn't take that long. No sooner than I stepped to the end of the line a gal at the second station got up and left......must have been a 3:15 break time or something because she never returned while I was in the joint. So now there are two postal workers to serve us and in a minute I was like 18th in line but at the same time a couple more had joined the line. From the time I entered the line of 20 persons the line never got any shorter but in fact at times counted up to 22 and 23 folks waiting on those 2 postal workers!

Well believe it or not I have become more patient at times with age and understand there are times we must wait and hey, just do it and before long the wait is over, but it does leave one with some time to think. In this particular case I began thinking about our Government run Postal service and the fact that it continually loses money and should eventually be shut down, close it's doors like any other business that continually operates in the red and why this might be happening. Why can UPS or FedEx make profits and our postal service can't, well here are a few of my thoughts on the issue and number one might be the man in charge. The Postmaster General is a political appointee and not a business savvy CEO who knows how to run a company and show a profit, probably the last really good Postmaster General was our first one in Benjamin Franklin but not much since. Next would be the employees themselves, what the hell their government employees for Christ sake what more do we expect? Everyone knows the cushy jobs are government jobs and there is plenty of job security even more so that a union job where in it takes an act of Congress to fire one of them. They get more time off than anyone in the working world, more holidays with pay and sick days with pay and raises like clock work. We all know from the latest finding in these days of budget cuts that government workers are paid ungodly amounts compared to the private sector for doing the same thing and it's damn hard to get fired or lose your job! Let's not even go into retirement and pension plans because you all will end up fired up to rehash those numbers and then most of them end up "double dipping and living like kings for working like lazy bums for 20 to 30 years. Am I jealous you bet I am, why didn't I stick with my government jobs of which I had two different ones, the USAF and FAA, hell when I hired on the FAA just for being in the Air Force I got a jump of two pay grades...sweet huh? Back to my point of this postal visit, two folks with a line of a constant 20 patrons and not giving a damn if they all got taken care of before break or not...........hell were did that third gal go? After 25 minutes her break should have been over but we never seen her again...............I'm just saying maybe running this operation like this with some of the poorest customer service you can imagine witnessing and I even checked out the displays of point of sale etc. and that was just thrown up and not much attention given to customer appeal as if no one cares if they sold anything off those rack or not and they probably don't care with little or no incentive to do much better because rain or shine they'll all be back tomorrow doing the same half ass job!