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This is very close to your mail example but can we please move on from delivering items directly to houses? Just give me a destribution center or box at a 10-15 min walking distance and I'll gladly pick up everything from there when it's actually convenient. We can still keep the other model for special cases.
What if we work backwards on this?
Introduce community boxes at junction points where USPS already delivers, and/or next to a parks so you can say hi to your neighbors and stuff. Ensure any box is within a tolerable walking distance for the average community member served. (Best figure five minutes here folks.)
Allow residents with mail being delivered to their physical addresses to opt in to delivery at their associated neighborhood box.
Market the boxes as happy medium between visiting a staffed post office at the center of a city and risky doorstep delivery. Locked boxes large enough to accommodate everyday parcels basically nix those pesky pilfering porch pirates.
Continue regularly scheduled deliveries to individual addresses because the route will continue to exist at some level of specificity anyway no matter how many or how few community boxes materialize. Carriers essentially keep the same routes but get to drop mad loads of ~~male~~ mail into a bunch of ready and willing local slots near you, driving efficiency up and logistics strategists wild.
Promoting additional box patronage by offering a slight discount whenever postage/shipping is purchased for a specific physical address utilizing delivery to a community box. Immediate and total coverage of community boxes across America is neither expected nor necessary, but hell, reward those who lighten that load for others.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk!
sincerely, louise dajoy
Edit: got high while writing and it took a turn for the weird
But doesn't this already exist? For most packages I get, I can choose to either have them delivered to my door or to a package station, where I put my delivery number in and it unlocks the compartment my package is in. Same for sending packages.
Here's an example:
.
I'm in Europe though, not sure if it's a thing in the US.
That's pretty much the idea, you put it in much better words than me. Let's make community boxes the default and if you want home delivery you can have that.
Side comment, I don't get how the US deals with porch pirates. Here someone needs to be at home and sign to receive the delivery because literally leave a brick outside and it will have been picked up by someone within the next couple of hours.
"special cases" being everyone who doesn't live in a town? I'm lucky in that my village post office hasn't been shut down, but I'd still have to drive to collect my post every day. It's much more efficient that a single vehicle delivers post to hundreds of houses.
Maybe it makes sense in urban areas for able-bodied people. Still a drag to have to walk there every day when you don't even know if you've got post because something important might have arrived.
Sorry, I didn't mean to poop on your idea so much, it is a genuinely interesting idea, I just don't think it works with the way society is currently set up in my country
Or disabled.
So they just need to build a post office closer to you
Sorry yes this assumes you live in a place where you can walk to something like a post office or a supermarket. Rural US may not have this but that's already kind of a problem. You don't have to go every day though. You can just get a notification when your delivery is actually there. This is already done in some places by companies but in a smaller scale where the available boxes are very limited and only for smaller items. With special cases I meant people who have trouble leaving the house for whatever reason.
Rural Japan here. It would take me more than an hour each way to get to the post office (75-80mins). Ain't no way when I generally get time-sensitive documents at least a few weeks each year. Also, especially rural but even suburban and urban Japan is generally elderly and has less mobility.
We do have to go to a post box to drop our outgoing mail, though, and I think that's much easier (that's a 10-15 minute walk) especially since that's generally a rarer action.
So why not have an ingoing box next to the outgoing box? My initial comment was for packages but it works for mail too.
Honestly If I could just get the part when they notify me when there's something to pick up and make junk mail illegal that would be great. As it is I hate checking my mail box every day just to dump literally all of it directly into the trash. I would love to just be notified when there is actually something I need to pay attention to.
Usps has "informed delivery ", where they send you pictures of all of your mail before you get it, so you do know if you are getting something important.
I could see delivery drivers really appreciating this. They deserve a break.