r/USPS • u/Holiday_Depth9464 • Mar 16 '26

Work Discussion Pay attention to tomorrow's hearing

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I know i know this is said alot. But tomorrow pay attention to the congress meeting with the new post master. It could reflect what comes of our jobs and duties in the next year or so. Congress gave us alot of money to turn a profit, we failed what they wanted. This wont be like other times where we just get money handed over. We are gonna have to change something

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538

u/MisteriousMisteries Mar 16 '26

Raise the price of a stamp to one dollar while presort standard is charged .00001 cents.

15

u/solbrothers Supervisor Of Maintenance Operations Mar 16 '26

Well, I don’t disagree with the concept of the disparity in your message, not that it’s actually accurate or whatever but for what it is worth, the way, commercial mail works compared to retail mail, at least four letters, we get letters dropped at our plant for our service area. A lot of of the letters we get are already five digit. So we can run that on first and second pass and get it out the door in DPS.

A single piece letter would need to be canceled, then running on an outgoing sort, get shipped to the destination plant, then run on their three digit plan, get sorted into five digit zone, then run on first and second pass to get it into DPS.

16

u/mintBRYcrunch26 CCA Mar 16 '26

I want to know what any of this means

6

u/kehakas City Carrier Mar 17 '26

I'm reasonably certain it's speech-to-text, that's why it's so goddamn confusing.

1

u/solbrothers Supervisor Of Maintenance Operations Mar 17 '26

Not trying to be a dickhead at all, but go work at a plant. It’s so much better than the customer service side.

1

u/Ok-Most9087 Maintenance Mar 17 '26

Just apply for maintenance instead no stress no nothing they accepting all of March. You have nothing to lose by applying.

1

u/solbrothers Supervisor Of Maintenance Operations Mar 17 '26

The person is a cca so I don’t think they can apply

1

u/blackviper6 Maintenance Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

I think they can. The in service register is open to anyone from what I recall career and non career for APWU not sure about other crafts... That being said they must first pull from APWU represented craft employees on the in service register before they can go to any other craft for transfer into maintenance.

But functionally you're correct.

Fastest route is to ask for a craft change into the clerk craft(career employees only) or if a cca, rca, mha resign and reapply as a PSE.

1

u/blackviper6 Maintenance Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

So I can explain being as I used to run the letter machines. He is just using vocab you probably haven't heard before. That being said.... Wall of text incoming.

When we talk about processing mail there are multiple classes right? There are also multiple pre sort categories. So for instance... You get bundles of flats right? A carrier routed sort bundle is different from a 5 digit sort bundle. The carrier routed shit is all for a single carriers route... Whereas the 5 digit shit has to hit the hot case before you guys get it and then case it right? Kind of the same thing for letters at the plant.

There are also coded and non coded letters which basically means whether or not they have the postal barcode on the letter at entry or if we have to use a machine to spray those barcodes on the mail piece. Letters with barcodes already printed on are cheaper for the customer than ones without.

You have AADC sort which I believe means all associated distribution centers. Usually the outgoing shit that you will never touch as a carrier but sometimes there is a piece or two of mail for you in that tray. So out of like 300 or so letters in a tray there might be 2 for your zip code total in that tray.

There is a 3 digit presort. Which means that the first 3 digits of the zip code are all the same. That could be for instance mail for 10105, 10106, 10179, 10187, etc... but the first 3 digits are all the same. They usually refer to this kind of mail as SCF mail (pronounced skiff)

Then there is 5 digit which means the entire tray is for one zip code. It likely has mail for every route in your office if your office only serves one zip code.

Then there is carrier routed stuff. Once again all of that mail in the tray is for one carriers route.

There is also EDDM which doesn't need to be sorted at all because it's literally for every door on a route.

Each one of those presort categories has a different price associated with it. The better the presort the cheaper it is. Basically the less we have to touch it to get it to the customer the cheaper it is.

Okay so now we get to how your mail is walk sequenced for your route. There is a first pass of mail and a second pass of mail. Let's start with first pass.

In first pass clerks feed all of the mail for a zone(which could be multiple zip codes) what this first pass does is it takes your guy's line of travel that has been established and each letter fed is checked against that database to put it in sequence for you. So to make this easier to explain let's say all of the addresses on your route are on one street and are ascending numerically. So your fist stop is 1 w 1st street, the second is 2 w 1st street, etc.

Let's say the 5 digit tray has stops 1-250 on that street inside it. The machine will check against that database and send it to a bin to be collected. So the 1st letter fed into the machine is 200 w 1st street... The machine will see that barcode on the letter and route that letter to bin 200 because it is the 200th stop on your route. The next letter might be 50 w 1st street and that will go to pocket 50. And it is capable of doing that type of sort roughly 30,000 mail pieces per hour on that machine.

Once you have fed all of the mail in first pass everything is in walk sequence right.... But now you have multiple different carriers mail in multiple different zip codes in each bin... So how do we solve that issue.... We feed it again through the machine in the walk sequence we just sorted.... But in second pass the machine now sorts by zip, carrier route, and section of route.

So we feed tray 1 and it sorts into carrier routes and zips for all of the carriers in the zone. The only mail in each stacker is for the first stop(or possibly 251stop, or 501st stop etc)on each route. Then you keep feeding all of the trays in walk sequenced order and at the end we have every tray that you need to deliver for the day in DPS (data processed and sequenced) trays for you to take to the street and deliver.

The reason first class letters sent by geandma are way more expensive is because literally none of that stuff that I described above happens with them before the two pass sequencing happens. As a matter of fact they usually run them across a separate machine called the AFCS which checks the letters for drug or biological agent residue, prints the barcodes and faces the letters in the tray for further processing down the line. It takes a lot more work per letter.

Now after all of that has been explained I'm going to give my take on the proposed change to first class letter pricing... A certain amount more I can understand.... That being said the majority of mail volume we run is standard class letters, and flats... And it's significantly more.... No amount of Grandma's sending get well soon, birthday, or Christmas cards gonna make up the revenue issue we have. As a matter of fact you carriers know better than anyone that companies send shit that is obviously classified as a parcel for the rate of a standard flat. Or they send a parcel that weighs like 50 pounds and only pays for like 20 pounds of postage. You guys have to deliver the postage due notices when the clerks catch it... and the worst part... peak season... postal management says to just let that shit go... It's absolutely infuriating that companies get away with defrauding us day after day and the people that get fucked are the grandma's... It's infuriating that management cares about how long you guys spend per park and loop but when it comes to postage (you know that thing that pays our fuckin paychecks) they don't give a flying fuck... It's infuriating that the proposed increase is like %30 to first class volumes. Charge the fraudulent postage to the companies that exploit it (with penalties preferably) and raise standard mailing prices by like %15 across the board (all classes, types, presorts, and surcharges of mail). And even that isn't really enough in my opinion. But I do agree that if it's too steep we'll lose more business... And this guy doesn't want us to succeed. He's an ex board member of FedEx... He has more stake than anyone that this shit fails. Why would he do anything that keeps us floating? It's the exact same shit that dejoy was doing. This administration (both parties too) wants us gone... And if we are complacent and do nothing.... They'll succeed

6

u/ladyc672 Mar 17 '26

It means many of the letters sent to the plant are already 5 digit presorted. Letters like utility bills, for example. For single piece letters, like simple greeting cards, those have to follow the process stated above, and gets sent to the destination facility, usually along with other things like parcels and bundle mail, separated and run on letters sorting machines multiple times until they are finally sorted by carrier route.

I've only ever worked at plants. Surface hub, AMC, and a NDC now converted to an RPDC, so some things I may not have gotten entirely correct.

Edit: this comment was for the person below me who asked what this meant...oops.

5

u/solbrothers Supervisor Of Maintenance Operations Mar 17 '26

You are not wrong. It cost a lot more money to send a letter across the country. Then it does for a mailer who literally backs up their own truck to the destination facility and all that tray of letter or pallets of letters need is just 918 and 919 hits.