By quoth the raven – Zerohedge
This week I landed myself smack dab in the middle of a real-life example of just how piss-poor of a capital allocator the government is compared to the free, for-profit market.
Usually, when I want to mail something, I walk a block or two to either the UPS Store or the FedEx store. Both are pretty similar: fairly busy (especially around the holidays), offering print and copy services, and staffed with employees who—while not saints—are at least competent enough to get your package labeled, shipped, and tracked with as little fuss or bullshit as possible.
The price is slightly costly, but at least the service gets the job done.
Cut to this week, however, when I had to mail something to a PO Box. Turns out you can’t do that through UPS or FedEx, which meant I was grudgingly forced to venture into the local post office. Always crowded. Always understaffed. Always a line out the door.
Within minutes of going in, I was reminded exactly why I avoid the place.
Photos source: Reddit r/USPS
FedEx? Clean, semi-modern, organized, like a regular retail store.
The USPS? A time capsule of bureaucratic rot. Dirt and grime in the lobby. Walls littered with signs upon signs upon signs. Engraved plastic relics from the 1950s. Faded printouts from the Clinton era still announcing holiday hours. Handwritten scraps of paper with notes taped over other scraps of paper—“No food or drink,” “Passport photos in back.” Torn Post-it notes with instructions on them like “USE BLACK PEN” Scotch taped to marble counter tops. Broken door handles, cracked floors, dead pens chained to counters like banks used to have in the 1980s. Everywhere you look: disarray.
This post office, which looked like it hadn’t been meaningfully updated since Eisenhower was in office, had ten clerk windows. Each station had its own dusty sign like “Window 1: Passport Photos” or “Window 2: Stamps.” Out of all ten? Just one was open. A single bored man sitting under “Window 8: All Services.”
So I joined the 30-person line, clutching my documents, and told myself: just grin and bear it.
Thirty minutes later—thirty minutes of inching forward in a queue that wound like a sluggish snake across the cracked linoleum floor in a building that smelled like old Church Parish Hall mixed with 50s elementary school—I finally reached the counter. I pasted on a cheery, let’s-not-make-this-worse smile.
“Good morning! I’d like to overnight these documents, please.”
The clerk, a man who looked like he’d been welded to his chair sometime during the Reagan administration, didn’t even glance at the papers. With one stubby finger, he poke-shoved them back toward me like they were toxic waste.
“You need an Express Mail envelope.”
I blinked, certain I’d misheard. “Great—I’m here under the ‘All Services’ window. Can you grab on from back there?”
“No.” He pointed vaguely over my shoulder, his finger describing a lazy arc as if fighting gravity itself to point was too much effort. “They’re on that table.”
Ah, yes, that table. The one just beyond the…(READ THIS FULL COLUMN, 100% FREE, HERE).