Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Signed, Sealed, But Not Yet Delivered

    Years ago, one of the first authors Booknotes ever had over for a book signing put us on the mailing list for a newsletter.  At first, I thought it was all a mistake, since we never paid for the subscription, but later my mother informed me of this much later.  Perhaps a year later.  Anyway, last Monday, July 29, the latest copy arrived in the mail.  Since it was rather late in the day and I was busy, I didn't look at it immediately.  To be honest, I barely give it more than a casual one-over as it really isn't the type of thing I like reading.  The next day, Tuesday, July 30, a postcard arrived at the store.  It was from an author who wanted to see if he could appear at the store early in the day before his book signing (at a location he didn't mention) that afternoon.  I first thought the day he mentioned was the twenty-seventh, which had been the past Saturday.  However, the "7" was actually a "2" and his event had been on June 22 not July 27.  The postcard had arrived well after a month from the original event.  Furthermore, when I finally got a chance to look at the newsletter, I discovered that it too had been delivered well after its intended date.  The newsletter featured upcoming events from mid-June to early July, and it was dated for June 14 as well.  Even if there had been printing or distribution problems, the store would have received it well before late July or the issue would have been edited to reflect the delay.  While the postcard could have theoretically been lost or otherwise misplaced with larger mail, I cannot think of a good excuse for why something as large as the newsletter was delivered so late.  The only on that even makes halfway sense would be the USPS and the latest move for greater efficiency. Decades ago, when the store first opened, a letter carrier would hand-deliver the mail to each unit at the shopping center, six days a way.  Some days, they were the only person who would come into the store.  A few years later, that changed, and the mail would be delivered to letter boxes in one of two clusters at the center instead.  The occasional piece of mail would be sent to the wrong box, but the was mostly fixable, although I still have the haunting feeling that sometimes someone would just throw the mail away instead of checking in with the right address.  Sure, this also meant later delivery times many days, sometimes after 4:30 pm.  A few years ago, in an effort to become for efficient with the mail, the USPS decided to close some of the smaller distribution centers, and reroute mail to larger ones.  This resulted in the Pikeville center being closed, with all of its mail now coming out from Charleston, WV.  While this didn't really effect most of the mail coming from outside of Kentucky, it added a day or two to all of the mail coming from inside the state, as the mail had to travel hundreds of miles extra to reach its intended destination.  This year, there was another round of consolidations.  Mail that used to be sent out from Charleston was now going to a place in Pennsylvania instead.  This could actually cut the travel time for mail from New England or the Mid-Atlantic by at least a day.  Unfortunately, most of our mail comes from the South or Midwest.  This is an automatic extra day for those locations.  What is worse is for the Kentucky-based mail.  All the extra travel time will add at least an extra day, if not two, to the already delayed mail from in-state.  So, any mail from say Frankfort, which used to take a day or two to reach the store, will now take at least four days to make the circuitous trip.  How is this more efficient?  We actually had to have one of the store's accounts switched to email billing when a bill got lost in the mail.  And this was just within Pikeville, when such mail doesn't have to be sent out to be sorted.  In the immortal words of Muffin Cupcake Heeler, "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!" Now, I have heard about some of the 'real' reasons about all of the moves towards 'efficiency,' but not all of them have had confirmation, so I won't go into them.  However, I will say that it looks like it is more of a move towards saving money rather than time.  It might be time to look into changing the way mail is handled, including privatizing.

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