The Future of Mail Delivery: Cluster Box Units

[Mad Mac]

First, this has nothing to do with the current election cycle and mail in ballots.
Take that conversation somewhere else.

The United States Postal Service has been losing money for decades. Here are a few of the reasons why.

My daughter's mail is pushed through a slot in her front door. My son's mail is put in a holder on his front porch. A letter carrier is traveling at the speed of walking delivering mail door by door. My mail is put in a mailbox at the end of the driveway but some rural route carriers travels miles and miles of bad county dirt roads to deliver a few pieces of mail. Those things will soon end up in a museum.

When the second half of our subdivision was built in the late 1980's, the USPS or maybe it was the home owners association and builders, opted for cluster mailboxes (CMB) or Cluster Box Units (CBU).



These are great. Your mail is locked in. No one can steal your mail or open your mailbox to put in a flyer (and look for checks). Parcels are locked in a separate parcel box, frustrating porch pirates. The mail you send goes into a locked compartment.

The letter carrier only has to stop once to serve 16 customers or more. On rural routes with no shoulder and fast traffic, a CBU can be setback in a safe spot making it safer for the customers to stop, too.

It would take an investment by the USPS to put these up initially, but they should pay for themselves in reduced delivery cost in a couple of years. They will be able to compete with UPS, Fedex and the like for that final mile delivery. Combine that with higher postage rates and the USPS might be able to make money. But I could be wrong. I often am.

[Mad Mac]

The concept is not a new one.



In the '50s and '60s I used to see these out in the country. Not now.

[Doc Dan]

First, this has nothing to do with the current election cycle and mail in ballots.
Take that conversation somewhere else.

The United States Postal Service has been losing money for decades. Here are a few of the reasons why.

My daughter's mail is pushed through a slot in her front door. My son's mail is put in a holder on his front porch. A letter carrier is traveling at the speed of walking delivering mail door by door. My mail is put in a mailbox at the end of the driveway but some rural route carriers travels miles and miles of bad county dirt roads to deliver a few pieces of mail. Those things will soon end up in a museum.

When the second half of our subdivision was built in the late 1980's, the USPS or maybe it was the home owners association and builders, opted for cluster mailboxes (CMB) or Cluster Box Units (CBU).



These are great. Your mail is locked in. No one can steal your mail or open your mailbox to put in a flyer (and look for checks). Parcels are locked in a separate parcel box, frustrating porch pirates. The mail you send goes into a locked compartment.

The letter carrier only has to stop once to serve 16 customers or more. On rural routes with no shoulder and fast traffic, a CBU can be setback in a safe spot making it safer for the customers to stop, too.

It would take an investment by the USPS to put these up initially, but they should pay for themselves in reduced delivery cost in a couple of years. They will be able to compete with UPS, Fedex and the like for that final mile delivery. Combine that with higher postage rates and the USPS might be able to make money. But I could be wrong. I often am.

This is the way y mother’s neighborhood has been for decades.

[bearfacedkiller]

The concept is not a new one.



In the '50s and '60s I used to see these out in the country. Not now.

I live on a private road off of another private road. The USPS won’t drive to my house so we all have a row of mailboxes just like that down on the main road. It is very common here because there are so many private roads around. I have to go to the post office to pick up any packages that don’t fit in my mailbox though.

[odomandr]

No other government mandated program is profitable. While not a right in the constitution it is pretty explicit that it is the responsibility of the government, who we pay taxes to, to maintain the program. I can see the cbu being a possible solution, having lived in places with them I can speak from experience that things were still lost, stolen or damaged due to restrictions the cbu has by design. I think it's high time we stop giving corporations breaks within this program. Limits... The classifications need to be refined possibly and rates as well. With the increase in online shipping maybe a new logistics team needs to come in for shipping Amazon or other high volume users

[Naperville]

Cluster Box Units? Maybe. Also, drones for delivery and local 3D Printing for many items. Technology and common sense are going to solve most problems. We need to patiently wait for the right team to implement the changes or drive the change ourselves.

[soc_monki]

No other government mandated program is profitable. While not a right in the constitution it is pretty explicit that it is the responsibility of the government, who we pay taxes to, to maintain the program. I can see the cbu being a possible solution, having lived in places with them I can speak from experience that things were still lost, stolen or damaged due to restrictions the cbu has by design. I think it's high time we stop giving corporations breaks within this program. Limits... The classifications need to be refined possibly and rates as well. With the increase in online shipping maybe a new logistics team needs to come in for shipping Amazon or other high volume users

This... The postal service is not a business, it is a government service that we partially fund through taxes. It does not need to be profitable, because it's not meant to turn a profit. However it was turning a profit before a bill was passed forcing the usps to pay 75 years of pensions in the present.

Cluster boxes are a good idea for apartments or maybe a grouping of houses (like a gated community). In fact, I believe every apartment complex or gated community I've seen has them. So good there. It would not work for most of the people in my city or surrounding cities. Most houses are too spread out in rural communities.

I wish people would quit trying to make the usps a business.

[Cambertree]

The concept is not a new one.



In the '50s and '60s I used to see these out in the country. Not now.

You still see those at crossroads quite often in rural Australia.

[TomAiello]

No other government mandated program is profitable. While not a right in the constitution it is pretty explicit that it is the responsibility of the government, who we pay taxes to, to maintain the program.

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7 of the constitution gives congress the authority to establish post offices and post roads. It does not require congress to do so. Many enumerated powers have either not been used, or only used intermittently during US history. Having the authority to establish post roads and post offices is a very far cry from having a duty to deliver mail door to door on any specific schedule. Many other countries lack door to door delivery altogether (requiring both sending and receiving to be done at local post offices). There is no requirement in the constitution to have a post office at all, and there is certainly no requirement for any specific type of postal system, or any particular service requirements.

It seems like technology (like email, on line bill pay, etc) and private sector innovations (like fedex, UPS, etc) have made it pretty unnecessary to maintain an 1800s style paper postal service at taxpayer expense. Even less so to maintain door-to-door service (which is quite unusual even within the USA, historically).

[odomandr]

Establish the office then leave it empty and unburdened by the people who fund it's existence..... Doubtful that's the intention. We will have to agree to disagree on what establishing an office and the routes by which it's supposed to operate means, but even as a libertarian (leaning towards a small govt) I'd say it's laid out to be operated as a delivery service....

[JD Spydo]

The Post Office here in the town I live in ( Blue Springs, MO USA Earth) is making more enemies each passing day. They are losing business and making people angry at a very high rate in the past two to three years. I'm wondering if we are even going to have a Post Office in another year or two. The arrogance with the Postal employees is just off the charts. I have to use the Post Office at least once or twice a month and I don't look forward to going there either.

I hope to GOD above we don't lose our Post Office because if they go by way of the dinosaur I can only imagine how UPS and Fed Ex are going to rape us financially :rolleyes:

With everything going on as it is lately I feel like I'm in a bad episode of the "Twilight Zone" :eek:

[Mad Mac]

Well done, TomAeillo. I'm on the naughty list so I have be quiet.

[Sumdumguy]

Thats how most mailboxes are in the suburbs of AZ.

My mailbox is at the end of my driveway and I'm fine with that. No shoulder rubbing with potential annoyances and no HOA.

[SG89]

Isn't the postal service older than the USA itself? As a former rural carrier, those rows of mailboxes and the official cluster box units are the norm in this part of the state. I don't see the USPS going anywhere.

[TomAiello]

The current agency we know as the US Postal Service was established on July 1, 1971. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... al_Service).

The USPS has a long history with a lot of different periods. Various postal services have existed as government agencies throughout the history of the USA, but in it's present form it's largely a 20th century creation.

There is an interesting history here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hist ... val/#close. (you may have to sign up for a free account to read it).

There are some super high cost postal routes (example: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html ; https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-toda ... 180964754/ ) that are probably not particularly good uses of public money in the modern era. The question really is how much benefit the country sees per dollar spent on the postal service, and that's a political decision that people can argue about all day. Subsidiary to that is the decision making of the postal service on how best to spend those dollars (to maximize public benefit at any particular funding level).

[The Deacon]

Subdivision where I've lived for the past nine years has a mix of town houses and single family homes. The 12 town house units are served by a single cluster box. My house and the other 199 single family homes have individual "rural" mailboxes at the curb. The apartment I lived for ten years in prior to that had 3 cluster boxes each serving one 12 unit building. In my experience, there are pros and cons to both, possibly influenced by the local postal staff. As an example, while the locked cluster mailboxes were more secure from theft, in the 9 years I've lived here I've had maybe 3 pieces of mail that were not mine wind up in my mailbox and equally few pieces of mine have wound up in neighbor's boxes. Back in the apartment in Rensselaer, one or both of those things happened at least once a month. And, while the large communal parcel lockboxes protect your stuff better than having it dropped on your porch, they also caused a lot of visits to the post office because there were only two in each cluster and not everyone picked up their mail every day, so there were days when both were in use and you package went back to the PO. Also, for anything requiring a signature it didn't matter that you were home at the time, you just got a card in your box saying pick it up at the PO. Wouldn't want to think how overwhelmed those parcel boxes are now that the Wuhan virus has so many people doing more of their shopping online.

That said, I'm fairly certain that cluster boxes are not only the future of mail delivery for existing suburban subdivisions, but its present in most of the new ones being built.

[TomAiello]

Establish the office then leave it empty and unburdened by the people who fund it's existence..

The Constitution gives Congress the authority to create a system. It does not require that Congress do so. Congress would be fully within it's constitutional authority to simply discontinue the postal service. The fact that the Constitution enumerates a power does not mean that it requires that power to be exercised.

[James Y]

Cluster box units may work better for some places, but not necessarily everywhere. In my neighborhood, the majority of houses have a front porch mail slot maybe 20 feet from the sidewalk. It takes the mail lady perhaps 2 or 3 minutes at the most to cover our block. I realize our block will be multiplied by several times on her route, but I don’t see any advantages to cluster boxes in our immediate area.

Jim

[PineyBoy]

I grew up in the farm country of the mid west. There was no mail delivery to a residence, period. You hoped on your bike, horse, what have you and went to your post office. That (in my case) was 6 miles away and my job to visit 6 days a week for 10 years.

[Mad Mac]

In my small hometown, my grandfather had a PO Box 216 at the Post Office. He was retired and enjoyed getting out of the house to go check the mail. He would usually run into other people he knew and make a side trip for coffee across the street. After my grandmother passed, he also checked on about five other PO boxes of widow ladies or shut-ins in town. He would take them their mail and visit for a while.