One of the things that Americans take for granted is the USPS (United States Postal Service). It has always worked pretty reliably for me and is affordable. For an organization that handles over 160 billion pieces of mail a year to only have occasional delays is pretty amazing. In South Africa, the Postal Service is only reliable for its unreliability.
Our home doesn’t even have a mailbox. We’ve occasionally arrived home to see a letter stuck in the door. These letters have been addressed to a different house number or been for a person no longer living at the address.
Since we’ve been in SA a few friends have gotten married. When asked for our address, we provided P’s work address hoping that the SAPO (South African Post Office) would complete delivery to a business more timely than to a residence. In both cases, the invitations took over 3 months to arrive and arrived after the actual wedding date. Thankfully our friends let us know via other means.
Most folks recommend paying a little extra to use a courier service like UPS for any international shipments. This can get pretty expensive for day to day mail, so we just avoid using it all together.
I don’t know the causes for the delays. It could be underfunding, lack of skilled labor, poor training, or just not caring. It does appear that this is a long-term issue that everyone just accepts.
The moral of the story is: don’t trust that the SAPO will complete a delivery in a timely fashion.
Ciao for now
Just a bunch of Newmans working there!
haha, That could very well be true.
You will be amused to know we were discussing this post at EVP on Saturday in reference to the USPS. Someone read an article about how the fact that Amazon uses the USPS for delivery is mucking up delivery of regular mail. We personally have not had any recent problems but others at the table had been getting a lot of mail that wasn’t theirs etc. Rainy and chilly here and most of the leaves are down. Very November feeling.
Happy to provide a topic for a lively conversation.
We are in full spring here. Today is a little cool, but we’ll soon return to normal spring/ summer weather. It’ll be back to upper 80s/20s later this week.
It’s been known for a long time that UPS and FedEx have wanted to privatize the USPS to grab the cash cow of postage income. With the Congressional requirement to prefund the pension plan out 50yrs within 10yrs; a fiscal constraint that grossly crimps operation costs was consiously imposed to force a negative change in performance (which thru it’s history has been exemplary – delivering error free to ALL postal addresses; which UPS and FedEx don’t and can’t economically do) – creating the wimdow to argue for privitization. Hence, the oportopport for Amazon gluttony. Not a good outcome for the public at large.
Privatization of USPS is nothing new, I recall hearing rumblings about it in the 80s and 90s. I’m sure there are valid arguments on both sides.
I’m just amazed at the difference between USPS and SAPO. Both are government run and are (arguably) underfunded, yet one has a statistically perfect record while the other…