Rob Sherman News

News about social injustice and what Rob Sherman Advocacy is doing to stop it.
Serious Journalism, Professionally Written.

 
Click on any picture for a larger image.  Photo credits:  WBBM-TV Channel 2, Journal and Topics Newspapers,
Hooters Girls fund-raiser, ChicagoNow coin logo, Rob's airplane, the Sherman-ator, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald.

         Saturday, December 31, 2011        

Sherman presents cost savings plan
at meeting of Postal Service officials

Rob Sherman presented to the financially desperate United States Postal Service a plan, this week, to save millions, perhaps even billions, of dollars.  I made the presentation to Postal Service officials at their public hearing in Aurora, Illinois, on Wednesday evening.

Translate this page and entire website to languages spoken by many families in the Buffalo Grove area:
French Français    Hebrew עברית     Polish Polski           Italian Italiano         Japanese 日本       Chinese  中文
Spanish Español   Yiddish ייִדיש       Russian Россию     German Deutsch     Korean 한국어            More ???

The two main ingredients of my plan are to replace residential front door delivery and curb box delivery with cluster box unit (Example 1 Example 2) delivery, and to change Saturday delivery from a free service to a subscription service.

The standard for delivery to newly built and recently built residential neighborhoods is to cluster box units.  Instead of having letter carriers wander around, at great expense to the Postal Service, in a hugely time-consuming process of walking from the front door of one house to the front door of the next house, a letter carrier could drive up to a cluster box unit, quickly and accurately throw all of the day's mail into the appropriate slots and then move on to the next neighborhood cluster box.

Similarly, instead of having letter carriers drive very slowly from one curb mailbox to the next, the letter carriers could go directly to a cluster box unit and throw in the mail for an entire block in the time it now takes to drive to two or three curb boxes.  Besides, curb boxes have zero security, while each compartment of a cluster box unit has its own high-security lock.

Ken Christy, President of the Illinois State Association of the National Association of Letter Carriers, responded to my presentation by asking what an 85-year-old senior citizen is supposed to do under my plan, and suggested that the burden to such a person would be too great.

I replied that individuals like that would surely have a neighbor, or somebody else, who would be willing to fetch her mail for her from the cluster box unit, but I also said that it is a tradition in this country to accommodate the needs of the handicapped and the frail in any government proposal, so a remedy to deal with that situation surely would be a part of any plan.

In addition, new neighborhoods are all built with cluster box units, so changing older neighborhoods wouldn't be doing anything that we're not already doing in newer neighborhoods.  Besides, in order to live, seniors and the frail already have somebody helping them out with such things as meals, laundry, transportation and grocery shopping, so this would be just one more very minor task to add to what the helper is already doing.

When I've spoken to my hometown postmaster about my proposal to convert older neighborhoods to cluster box unit delivery, the postmaster has told me that residential neighborhoods with either front door delivery or curb box delivery have those services grandfathered in.  It would take an Act of Congress to get that changed.

Congress is now acutely aware of the urgent and dramatic fiscal crisis that the Postal Service is facing, so I encourage Congress to adopt legislation that would allow for the replacement of grossly inefficient front door and unsecured curb box mail delivery with the much more modern, much more efficient and much more secure system of cluster box unit delivery, wherever it is feasible to do so.

As for Saturday delivery:  When I first moved into Buffalo Grove in 1984, we had garbage pick-up two days a week.  It was great!  Then, around the end of the 1980's, Buffalo Grove decided that they could save residents a lot of money by reducing service to one day per week, yet still maintain a safe and healthy village.  Anybody who wanted to retain service on two days per week could subscribe to such a service, at their own expense.

I've found that I don't need service twice per week.  Once per week is perfectly adequate.  By my estimate, about one in ten Buffalo Grove residents subscribes to the additional pick-up each week.  That's fine for them, and it's a nice cost savings for the rest of us.

Similarly, for all of those people who say that they can't live without Saturday postal delivery, let them subscribe to it.  Service Monday through Friday would still be free, so nobody would be forced to pay for delivery.  Five days-per-week service would certainly be very adequate for the vast majority of Americans.

The savings to the Postal Service, and to those of us who pay for the Postal Service through the purchase of postage, would have to be enormous if they would convert Saturday delivery from being a major expense to being a source of revenue.  I encourage Congress to adopt legislation that would allow the Postal Service to convert free Saturday delivery to a paid subscription system.

Terry Mallory, the Consumer and Industry Contact Manger for the US Postal Service Central Illinois District, promised me at the meeting that he would forward my ideas to postal officials up the chain, whether that be in Washington, D.C., or wherever else he thought would be appropriate.

Mr. Mallory did not take a position on the merits of my proposals.  That's not his job.  He's merely a conduit of information, so I will be mailing to him, with a stamp on it, a printed version of my proposals.

If you'd like to let the US Postal Service know of your support for my proposals, or have proposals of your own, send your comments to him.  His address is 6801 W. 73rd St., Bedford Park, IL  60499-9631.  I could have given you his e-mail address, but you should demonstrate your support for the Postal Service by sticking a stamp on it, too, just like I did.

The Aurora Beacon News, a Chicago Sun-Times publication, featured my proposal as a part of its story in yesterday's paper, entitled Postal workers, manager speak out on possible closing of center.  Rob Sherman Advocacy thanks the Sun-Times for including my perspective in their story.

Please tell your friends about Rob Sherman News through your social media networks and word of mouth.

E-mail comments about my stories to me at rob@robsherman.com to let me know what you think.  Send personal comments, comments unrelated to this story or notification of typos that you see in any of my posts to the same e-mail address.

Thanks for visiting Rob Sherman News.

Your voluntary subscription to Rob Sherman News is appreciated to help offset the substantial cost of my work.  Thanks, in advance, for your participation in this manner.

Help support my work by purchasing a Rob Sherman News Mini-Crank Flashlight for $20.  It never needs batteries.  You just wind it up a few times and it works.  Remember, you're not paying twenty bucks just for a flashlight.  You are helping me to shine a light on and stop unconstitutional government policies and other catastrophically bad ideas by government and the private sector.

That's the value of what you are purchasing, and that's the difference between Rob Sherman Advocacy and most of the other groups.  They talk about the problems of state/church separation.  I do something about it and get the violations of your constitutional rights stopped.  Besides, there aren't that many of the Rob Sherman News Mini-Crank Flashlights, so you might be able to make a lot of money selling this rare collector's item in a few years.