I'm not sure that that is decisive evidence of the USPS being undermined by its union. Maybe you had no mail today. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe the truck broke down. Maybe it will be delivered later. Maybe...

Did you call them? Our rural carriers go out in really bad weather and do try their best. I really would call to make sure no one took the mail. There seems to be a lot of that going on.

No. Our mail finally came - a little after 2PM.
I live on a suburban street - hardly rural.

Our postal service is so horrible. We get late mail, mis-delivered mail to other addressed to homes on the next street, etc.

"I guess with the union, their motto has been trashed. "

That appears to NOT be the case.

In my neck of the woods, today was the start of many school district's spring break. So maybe there were some carriers who were on vacation and the ones who did work had to pick up additional routes? (Even if you had the same carrier today.)

(Just a possibility!)

I'm on a rural mail route and the mail gets delivered anytime between 11:30a and 2pm. year round. You never know for sure, depends upon how much mail he has to put in mailboxes and road conditions.

and you have to remember kansas city airport was shut down due to the heavy snow last night and that always messes up everything...

It doesn't bother me not getting for a day or two. Mostly junk mail anyway!! I would rather my carrier be safe.

Who knows why your mail is late; it may have nothing to do with the weather. For all you know your mailman was run over two streets before yours, or kidnapped by aliens, or anything. You're rushing to a conclusion based on little or no evidence.
One swallow does not make a summer and one day's late mail hardly means the postal service has trashed its motto, or that it is the fault of the union.

We are lucky on a good day to have mail delivered by 4pm which is usually very rare as our normal time is after 6PM and one day recently it didn't come till almost 8:30pm. We never put our mail in the mailbox but instead take it to the post office. We have no snow just overcast skies.

Wow grandmamary, that's the latest I have ever heard of mail being delivered!

Ours is about the same everyday. But I wouldn't really know, I don't even check it everyday. It's just not a big problem, for us, if it's late.

Our mail was delivered @ 3-4 every day for years; it just depends upon the delivery route of each particular carrier.

Colleen, Monica does not care for unions, to put it mildly, as evidenced by her posts in Hot Topics.

We had nine years of excellent service from two different carriers. They both retired. Then it was sporadic delivery.

Last summer our mail often came after the sun was down -- or we got our neighbors' and they got ours -- or there was *nothing* in our box for two days and then we had a glut of mail (some of it our own).

This month we are getting our own mail, and getting it in the early afternoon.

We had changed our address while we were on Maui in January and February. It took two weeks to get our forwarded mail and another two weeks for them to stop sending it to Maui after we'd come home. (The problem was on the Illinois end, not the Maui end.) I missed a deadline for RE taxes on the condo because I *never* got that bill. (I should have thought of that on my own, but I was sick in early Jan.)

We need to change the laws to let the Post Office off its' too tight budgetary leash. Can't imagine why anyone would even take the job of Postmaster General; it's an impossible situation.

Even though I have my own complaints about some of the errors the Post Office makes (as far as I know Tufts University still hasn't received my DD's college application which was mailed certified, return receipt requested in 2001) - I honestly think we have one of the better mail systems in the world. And our price is fairly low too.

I think they need to raise the price of postage for junk mail and the first class stamp.

I live one block from the PO. I never get my mail before 4 pm. I am more annoyed by what's in the mail than when I get it. Most days the entire pile goes directly into the recycling. I still look forward to getting it each day, I don't know why.

Rural mail comes 5 weekdays, used to be about noon or slightly after, recently closer to ten a.m., very seldom get the wrong mail - once for the family next door, I just took it over to them.

Drivers seldom miss - run in poorer weather than do school buses!

Unions are losing their capability ... and it'll get worse as we have more workers than there are jobs, which has been occurring in recent years.

When you have approximately 35% unemployment, as Korean refugees faced near the end of and after the Korean War (no one knew for sure) ...

... if you tried to get a union going, and threatened to withdraw labour if you didn't get better pay/working conditions ...

... you were told, "Go ahead ... all we have to do is start a rumour that we're hiring ... and we'll have to have a dozen desks just inside the gate, to take the names of hundreds/thousands of folks looking for work".

Wait'll you find out what fun it is being without 'em.

In some parts of our economy, they are crying the blues because they lack skilled workers ... so are poaching them from other countries, including some where the school system is very slim, and they need their own skilled workers.

And when people with some skills get here, often their credentials are not accepted, so they can only get crummy jobs.

Local people used to leave school early to get a decently-paying but semi-skilled job in a factory ... but many of them have evaporated around here (the jobs - not the people), having been shipped overseas.

Corporations find borders a darned nuisance ... much simpler to have free trade, so one can have stuff made in a low-wage area, then shipped into a wealthier area, where the workers want more money, without the nuisances of tariffs in between.

We need to wake up - the U.S. was once the world's largest banker/creditor. Plus made a lot of stuff to sell elsewhere ... and owned a lot of patents, that if people elsewhere wanted to use, they had to pay fees (well, most did).

Also, they owned a lot of the means of production.

Now, they're the world's largest debtor (or near it) and consumer stuff is coming in from China and other low-wage areas ... and the ships are returning empty.

Along with buying the consumer stuff ... we need to be investing in the means of production, buying into the factories and businesses, so that those dollars go on paying us, over the long term.

Living in recent years better than any people in the world ever did, we weren't content with that, our governments ran up huge debts (that out grandkids'll have to pay).

And now are printing money, hand over fist, nor just to pay off the debt (with dollars that are worth less), but to pay current bills.

The days of the U.S. Dollar being the wrold's reserve currency are numbered. Other countries are setting up different trading systems, not dealing with U.S. Dollars. Soon, when we take them to other countries, instead of people almost fighting to get them ... they'll look at them and say they don't want them ... that there's little that they can do with them.

Like the folks who spent as they went, without making provision for their future, when they became disabled or retired. And with fewer pensions, and less generous ones, many are going to be hurting, down the road, when they don't have enough to live on.

When there's talk of moving the normal age of retirement up a couple of years ... there's all kind of screaming. But once we retired at 65 ... and lived to about 70. Now, if we retire at 65, many of us will live to 80 ... or even 90 - maybe 100?.

Big difference.

Better to run out of life, before you run out of money...

...than the other way around.

When I can buy a pair of reading glasses in the Dollar store for $1.00 (and 13 cents fed and prov. tax) ... there's gotta be some slave labour involved somewhere!

ole joyful