On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Martin C. Tangora wrote, quoting me:

> > We often forget that we have the best and cheapest postal service in
> > the world.  (Granted, Chicago is a big exception.)  ...
>
> Speaking as a Chicagoan, granted, where a week never goes by without
> some mail, correctly addressed to me, returned to sender or received
> several days late with an inked notation "wrong address,"

I did say that Chicago is a notorious exception, the Black Hole of the
postal service.  It is not clear to me how it can be that even first-class
mail in Chicago can take five days to arrive (even under the supposed "new
management"), whereas in Detroit even bulk-rate mail is routinely
delivered everywhere the next day.  (That is from ample direct personal
experience on both counts.)

> the above statement strikes me as provincial.

Okay, I have not gone around the world comparing postal systems with one
another.  But it is a truism in policy circles, among the folks who *do*
organize comparisons between countries.

I've loaned out my copy of James Q. Wilson's fine book "Bureaucracy," but
I recall that he has some interesting things to say about the postal
service.  The book opens, incidentally, with a fascinating comparison
between OSHA in the U.S. and the comparable agency in Sweden.

I did take some time to search online for an authoritative cite for the
"best and cheapest in the world" line.  The closest I could come was a
U.S. Postmaster General in 1990, and that could be dismissed as
self-serving.

I have come to say it myself (1) because I have heard it so many times in
debate, and never heard anyone, even the most severe critics of the USPS,
bring up an effective rebuttal or counterexample, and (2) because it makes
intuitive sense from what I do know about the infrastructure of other
countries, and my experience corresponding by letter with friends
overseas, and comparing post office experiences with people from other
countries.

The statement is also taken as being a bit ironic, something like
"democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others".
Something like, "The U.S. Postal Service is awful, but would you really
want to trade it for Brazil's or Italy's postal system?"

Your anecdotes about incompletely addressed letters successfully reaching
their destination are interesting, but not really a relevant measure of
postal service quality.  What we really want from the post office is
cheap, fast, reliable, accurate delivery for billions of average letters,
not so much loving attention and brilliant insight for special handling of
a relative handful of oddball cases.

Nor do I mean to suggest that all is well with the USPS.  There are ways
in which its unusual hiring and promotion process and its divided command
structure make it a psychotic organization, and sometimes a hellish place
in which to work.  There is also a lot of weird randomness associated with
the way mail is handled, forwarded, returned, etc., which is obvious to
anyone who has ever filed a change of address or used "address correction
requested" on a mailing.  And, of course, there is Chicago, and presumably
other places that have Chicago-style problems on a smaller scale.

As I understand it, the other countries (at a *national* level) have some
combination of:

   - postage rates higher than ours, in comparison with the local
     income level and/or huge tax-paid subsidies for the postal system

   - much worse problems with lost and stolen mail than we have

   - significantly slower delivery of first-class letters, especially
     outside of the local area, compared to the U.S.

   - labor problems that result in long strikes during which the
     mail moves slowly if at all

Not every country has all of those problems, of course.  Canada, for
example, has slightly *cheaper* rates than we do (due to a long-term stamp
price freeze and the fall of the Canadian dollar) but much slower
delivery, and a two-week strike last year.

Perhaps it's the strong U.S. dollar, but I was surprised to see that most
of the other industrialized countries charge only about double what the
USPS does for the equivalent of first-class letters.  I thought the
difference was a lot bigger than that.  France charges 3 francs (54 cents
U.S.) for domestic letters up to 20 grams, and 4.5 francs (81 cents U.S.)
for letters from 20 to 50 grams.  In Japan, it's 80 yen (69 cents U.S.)
for up to 25 grams.  The U.S. rate is 32 cents for up to one ounce (28
grams).

Indeed, it appears that Australia and New Zealand postal rates are similar
to Canada's, a few cents less than ours according to current exchange
rates.  Perhaps someone from there could comment on the quality of
service.

Incidentally, while looking for this stuff, I found a wonderful web site
for currency exchange quotations:
http://www.rubicon.com/passport/currency/currency.html

> Postal service has declined everywhere since the days when I lived in
> Paris and there were several deliveries a day plus the pneumatique.

Multiple deliveries a day is something which has been sacrificed to
efficiency almost everywhere.

Aside from multiple deliveries, I can think of a lot of ways in which
postal service has "declined," but most of them are associated with the
romantic image of the old-time small-town post office with lots of
personal service, handwritten letters from Aunt Sophie, beautifully
engraved monochromatic stamps, lovely round postmarks hand-stamped in
every small town in America, letters being sorted on board railroad mail
cars, the friendly local mailman stopping for coffee, etc.  Today's
reality has more to do with automatic mail handling equipment with OCR's
to read addresses, bar codes, and the efficient handling and delivery of
gigantic quantities of mostly commercial mail.

Your bank statement, say, is computer printed and bar-coded and comes to
you without any human ever having to read and decipher your address.  (The
letter carriers are not happy about how this is handled at the delivery
end, and I agree with them -- see the discussions of this in the Usenet
newsgroup alt.snail-mail.)  I describe this reality without admiration,
but rather in recognition that the old ways don't scale up very well to
today's mail volume.

> Can anyone tell us:  is there any country where there is still more than
> one delivery per day?  Is there any country where the postmark still
> shows the time stamped and not just the day?  Is there any country
> where mail can normally be received the same day if posted before noon?

If there is such a country, you can bet that stamps there cost more than
double what we pay, particularly if you take into account the local per
capita income.  The one possible exception is Andorra, which is tiny,
where local mail is free (at least as of about 1980).

> Well, actually, I'm way off topic, hmm.  But I want to believe in
> some standard of factual accuracy on this list, even if the
> anecdotes and opinions are entertaining.  Aside from chewing-gum
> hoaxes, don't we want to believe that facts and opinions stated
> or expressed on the list have some basis in real experience?

Agreed.  But some perfectly valid generalizations are outside one person's
specific experience to make.  When I mention that California has the
largest population of any state, that doesn't mean I went out there and
counted them.

                               Larry Kestenbaum