This is what I mean when I say that NerdyKeppie will REALLY struggle to remain viable if the USPS goes under.
For all of our patch orders shipped within the US, NerdyKeppie charges a flat $5 shipping fee. This covers the cost of the envelope, the label, and the actual postage, which ranges between $3.18 and $3.80. Sometimes what a customer pays doesn’t quite cover all our shipping costs, sometimes there are a few pennies left over. It all comes out in the wash.
This is a screenshot that I took of the shipping costs on an active order on NerdyKeppie.com – if I wanted to ship this tonight, it would cost me $3.18 in postage to send five of our embroidered patches literally three thousand miles: they’d go from Portland, OR to a suburb of Philadelphia in three business days, for THREE DOLLARS AND EIGHTEEN CENTS.
In this time of ‘free shipping’, when companies roll costs in to their pricing, customers often don’t realize how much shipping costs, so I’m pulling back the veil on this, and on how much of a difference it would make to small businesses like mine if the USPS went away.
Look at the difference between USPS First Class and UPS Ground. Not only does it cost almost THREE TIMES AS MUCH, but it takes an extra two business days.
And this? This is a cheap package. This is patches.
You want to talk about how much more it would cost to ship our microwaveable heating pads via UPS Ground?
Honestly, we’d have to just discontinue them. No one’s going to pay $30 in shipping to get a heating pad shipped to them domestically. What makes the heating pads viable are the Priority Mail flat rate boxes. We can fit two mediums or one XXL heating pad in a medium flat rate box and ship it anywhere in the US for under $10, and those things weigh multiple pounds. The “if it fits, it ships” boxes make an entire section of our business viable.
I don’t think people truly understand what will happen to little businesses like NerdyKeppie if the USPS goes away, or how much more it will cost y'all to get items shipped to you from the small businesses which are already struggling in this current situation.
That’s not even going into the fact that my girlfriend’s medication is delivered to us by USPS, and that many people in remote and rural portions of the country absolutely rely on the United States Postal Service for delivery of food, medication, and other essentials, especially during this current crisis.
Call your representative. Don’t just email, don’t just ResistBot, get on the phone and call if you are physically capable of doing so. Please. I know, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, it sucks to make phone calls, it truly does. But we NEED the USPS.
It’s in the damn Constitution, people. That’s how much the Framers understood that the USPS was a necessity for democracy.
Without the free movement of ideas, of written words, of documents, of goods, we cannot have a functioning society.
So, for anyone (like op) who doesn’t know, those exorbitant prices that UPS and FedEx charge are BECAUSE of the post office.
In 1792 a set of laws called the Private Express Statutes were passed that made it ILLEGAL for private
couriers to compete with the USPS. In fact, the USPS sent literal ARMED ENFORCERS to a company in 1993 because they dared to ship their mail through a 3rd party.
The only person to ever, temporarily, succeed in competing with the USPS was a man named Lysander Spooner in 1844. He managed to ship the same mail to the same people for .5$ instead of the .12$ the USPS charged. Thats right.
THE SAME MAIL TO THE SAME ADDRESSES.
Despite the government doing all it could to stop him, including infringing on several other services including rail and boat travel, Spooner still managed to force the USPS to reduce its price to a nickle. He wasn’t satisfied, though. He cut his price even more, down to .3$, and STILL got mail to those hard to reach addresses faster than the USPS.
The government was forced to enact EVEN MORE regulations in 1851 to force Spooner out of business because he was going to force the USPS to cut their rates even more.
The USPS is not required to get mail to you. Hell, they AREN’T actually required to get mail to “hard to reach places” at all (or at least they dont comply with that requirment). I know plenty of farmers and other rural people who have to drive several miles to get their mail. Some even have to go directly to the post office because they WONT deliver to such an out of the way place.
The USPS is “cheaper” because it is a government mandated monopoly. If its power was cut and other companies could actually compete, its likely that most local mail would be delivered for next to nothing and further mail would be even LESS than that 3 dollars. All mail may even have flat rates of almost nothing if private business could compete with the USPS.
LET the USPS die.
Its unnecessary and private business is more likely to do a better and cheaper job without the government monopoly on postage.
All the government needs for a Postal Office is a department that makes sure all state governors and city mayors are putting the right numbers on addresses and making sure that private shipping companies are obeying the law. The US Postal Office should get OUT of the shipping business and stop dragging us down.
Y’all are seriously barking up the wrong tree if you think that arguing for the privatization of necessary services is a conversation I’m interested in having.
It worked for shit in health care, it’ll work for shit in postal services.
Now fuck off.
“nd private business is more likely to do a better and cheaper job without the government monopoly on postage.”
jesus christ those two there are a couple of right fucking dickheads…private business is not ever going to be “better and cheaper” holy fucking shit
Do…. y'all think that these private companies will actually REDUCE their prices when usps goes under??? Man some of you are fucking idiots.
The
universe is full of mysteries, and we continue to search for answers. How can
we study matter and energy that we can’t see directly? What’s it like inside the crushed core
of a massive dead star? And how do some of the most
powerful explosions in the universe evolve and interact with their surrounding
environment?
Luckily
for us, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is watching the skies and helping
astronomers answer that last question and more! As we celebrate its 15-year
anniversary, let’s get you up to speed about Swift.
What are gamma-ray bursts and why
are they interesting?
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in
the universe. When they occur, they are about a million trillion times as
bright as the Sun. But these bursts don’t last long — from a few milliseconds
(we call those short duration bursts) to a few minutes (long duration). In the
1960s, spacecraft were watching for gamma rays from Earth — a sign of nuclear
testing. What scientists discovered, however, were bursts of gamma rays coming
from space!
Gamma-ray
bursts eventually became one of the biggest mysteries in science. Scientists
wanted to know: What events sparked these fleeting but powerful occurrences?
So how do gamma-ray bursts and Swift
connect?
When
it roared into space on a
rocket,
Swift’s main goals included understanding the origin of gamma-ray bursts,
discovering if there were additional classes of bursts (besides the short and
long ones), and figuring out what these events could tell us about the early
universe.
With
Swift as our eyes on the sky, we now know that gamma-ray bursts can be some of
the farthest objects we’ve ever detected and lie in faraway galaxies. In fact,
the closest known gamma-ray burst occurred more than 100 million light-years
from us. We also know that these explosions are associated with some of the
most dramatic events in our universe, like the collapse of a massive
star or the merger of two
neutron stars — the dense cores of collapsed stars.
How
do we study events that happen so fast? Swift is first on the scene because of
its ability to automatically and quickly turn to investigate sudden and
fascinating events in the cosmos. These qualities are particularly helpful in
pinpointing and studying short-lived events.
The
Burst Alert Telescope, which is one of Swift’s three instruments, leads the
hunt for these explosions. It can see one-sixth of the entire sky at one time.
Within 20 to 75 seconds of detecting a gamma-ray burst, Swift automatically
rotates so that its X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes can view the burst.
Because
of the “swiftness” of the satellite, it can look at a lot in 24 hours — between
50 and 100 targets each day! Swift has new “targets-of-opportunity” to look at
every day and can also look at objects for follow up observations. By doing so,
it can see how events in our cosmos change over time.
How did Swift get its name?
You
may have noticed that lots of spacecraft have long names that we shorten to
acronyms. However, this isn’t the case for Swift. It’s named after the bird of
the same name, and because of the satellite’s ability to move quickly and
re-point its science instruments.
When
it launched, Swift was called NASA’s Swift Observatory. But in January 2018,
Swift was renamed the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in memory of the mission’s
original principal investigator, Neil Gehrels.
Follow along with Swift to see a typical day in the life of the satellite:
