Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How the U.S. Postal Service Works

Episode Date: April 25, 2020

Back when this episode aired, the USPS was teetering on the edge of going under and there were a lot of plans on the table to save it. With the USPS again at risk now for different reasons, join Chuck and Josh as they explore the history and future of the postal service in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey friends and family, it's me, Josh, your pal, your buddy, Avenging Angel, all that jazz. For this week's SYS Case Selects, I've chosen how the US Postal Service works because as you may know, the Postal Service is under threat

of being closed and going under yet again. And we don't want that. For some reason, we can't quite put our finger on. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode and it rouses you to do something, like save the post office. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now, the War on Peace Report, War on Peace.org, et cetera. I'm Stevens Key. How you doing? Good, Jerry just said, let's do this old school

right before she record and I have no idea what she meant. Does that mean it's gonna be five minutes long? She meant like, the three of us back in like, yeah. Yeah, you know. She's back in the kitchen. Where's his back? I thought she meant, let's make it crappy in five minutes long.

Right, and we need like little empty tin cans to speak in, dude, make it sound right. How you doing, Jerry? That's great. Jerry gave us a thumbs up. I know in our new murder room, Jerry is within our eyesight again, after a long layoff where she was not within our range of viewing capabilities.

I know, and it's kind of weird because now I'm looking at you but I can clearly see my peripheral vision then. She's on Facebook, she's waving, she's brushing her teeth. She's rearranging the severed human heads that are in jars all around the place. That is creepy. Yeah. You wanna talk post office, man?

Yeah. You wanna give the disclaimer that we're only talking about the post office in the US of A? I think you just did. Okay. We don't know how it works in your country. No, and actually it's probably not nearly as interesting as what's going on with the US Postal Service, the USPS.

Cause I don't know if you know this or not, Chuck, but the USPS is in a lot of trouble. They're, yeah. Their solvency that the amount of money that they have to keep the lights on and keep everything going is expected to run out in October of 2013 if they don't do something. Yeah, that's this year.

Yeah. I think they lost $16 billion last year. Yes. They lost $5 billion the year before. So that's three times as much money in a year. That's bad news. Here's the caveat to that $16 billion loss, though. 11 billion of that was in payments to the future

benefits of postal workers that have not yet retired, but will. Yeah. And the Postal Service is the only federal agency of any sort that is required to prepay its employees' benefits for the future. In 2006, a lame-deck session of Congress said, you know what, you guys need to make sure

that your workers are taken care of. Right. So you guys have to start prepaying and over the next 10 years. And they have been, and they've been bleeding money. I mean, like a $16 billion loss. Yeah. But 11 billion of it was to these future payments.

Oh, I guess that would make sense then. Then if you took out that 11, they would just be at about the same losses before. Right. Just a mere $5 billion a year. Right, but, and that's a lot of money to lose. Yeah, it is. But they're figuring out ways to make up

for that extra loss. And one of the big ones that's on the table now is cutting out Saturday delivery. Yeah, August 1st, I think, for sure. They figure they can recoup $2 billion a year by doing that. So then they're down to three. The thing is, is the Post Office, it's a part of the executive branch.

Man, it's all over the place. It's a part of the executive branch. It's a part of the federal government, but it gets $0 in tax revenue. And it's also a thrill-kill cult. Right, exactly. That's the horrible secret of the US Post Office. Yeah, they're all over it.

Right, so they get no money besides what they can make off of their own revenue. Yeah, they're essentially a corporation. Right, so they get no, but they get, but they're also under the purview of the federal government. Yeah, it's a weird, weird thing. And they can't act without asking Congress, and Congress hasn't exactly been forthcoming lately.

But they haven't approved the Saturday thing yet. Have they, Congress? Here's the thing. Isn't that still up? They've been trying to get Congress to approve that forever. The Senate passed a bill that said, after two years, we'll let you cut out Saturday service. We'll give you $11 billion in overpayments

that you guys made toward the retirement stuff, all this stuff back. It went to the House, and the House didn't do anything with it, right? Yeah. So, you know, the fiscal cliff? Oh, yeah. Well, the US Congress passed a stopgap measure,

basically a federal budget that says, within this period, we're still able to operate, right? Right. And the USPS says, ha-ha, you didn't include our mandate from 1981 that we have to carry out Saturday service in that stopgap. So, technically, under current federal law,

we don't have to carry out Saturday service, and they're arguing it legally. So, they're just saying that's the loophole they're gonna use to shut down Saturday service? Yes. Except for packages, medicines. Just packages.

They're gonna deliver packages on Saturday, and here's a really good reason why. An express mail. Their revenues from packages have increased 16% over the last 10 years, whereas first class mail in letters have gone down 32%, I believe. So, they're making almost all of their money,

because it's only 45 cents to mail a letter from Florida to Hawaii. 46. Is it 46 now? Yeah. But they make however much shipping in the shipping game, which is where they make all their money, which is ironically the one place they don't have

a monopoly as far as the mail goes. I'm glad to see mail order medicine on that list too. Express mail packages and medicine, because at first I was like, who cares? I don't need, I can't. You don't yet. I don't need my mail on a Saturday. Right.

But you need your medicine on a Saturday, or else you go blind. Well, that's why they included that as something they would still deliver. Right. And post offices that are already open on Saturdays, they'll still be open on Saturdays. Yeah.

If you want to go to your PO box, maybe there'll be some mail. Maybe there won't be. Who knows? I bet you've had a PO box. I've been thinking about this, haven't you? No. Really?

Yeah, have you? No, you just struck me as a kind of person that would have had a PO box at one point, you know. That's where I get all my guns in the mail. So I'm pretty worked up about this, as you can see. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Who'd have thought that the postal service

would ever be interesting? Sure, I think parts of this are very interesting. And we would just want to go ahead and say hello to all of our postal carriers out there. Yeah. That listen to our show. Who won us over during the Bush era. Because we've gotten emails from you guys and gals.

Yeah, including one of our favorite people out there is a postal worker. Who? Van Nostrand. Oh, yeah. Is he? This one should really be a tribute to Van Nostrand. He's a carrier?

He's always been kind of cryptic about what he does, but I'm under the distinct impression that he's employed by the postal service. All right, so Bangalore's Van Nostrand, this is for you. Yeah, but okay, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about the postal service. Man, I'm all jazzed about the USPS, dude. I'm glad you are.

So for a little while, even after the advent of electronic mail, the postal services, the amount of mail they were delivering was still increasing. As of 2007, it was on an upward trajectory. Sorry, 2006, right? Yeah. 213 billion, 137 million pieces of mail that year.

Yeah, it's down to 167 now. Yeah. And then when was this written? Do you know? I think 2007, 2008. Okay, so then they had 700,000 employees, now they have about 580,000. So they've been and trim the budget mode, I think,

for the past few years. Well, and the reason why in 2006, they also made $72.8 billion. I mean, those stamps add up, you know? In 2011, they made 66 billion. Wow, not bad. Yeah, but they're still losing a lot of money. I mean, that's what, $7 billion in difference

in just five years? Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. So where'd all this come from, Chuck? It came from back yonder day, you know, people have always needed to communicate, obviously, from long distances.

And in 1639, they, you know, colonists here in the new, I guess they weren't in the United States yet, but in the new world, needed to get word back to England occasionally and say things like, hey, quit bugging us, or hey, send us more tea and crumpets. Right. And so the first official postal service

was established in 1639. Richard Fairbanks Tavern in Boston was the official mail drop for overseas there in Massachusetts. Yep. And that was the place to go if you wanted to mail something. Yeah, and I couldn't find what happened or where it went on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably to another pub.

I would imagine that you just went to that pub and said, hey, is there any mail? And they say, no. And you turned around and traveled 500 miles back to your village. So that was step one. Step two was about 40 some odd years later, 1683 William Penn established very famous person,

obviously, the first official post office in Penn, Sylvania. Gave his name after him. That's right. And I love the side note here. In the South, private messages were just sent between plantations. Yeah.

So they would probably just give it to a slave and say, carry this over to that guy. Right. And then flash forward a little bit more to 1691. The British crown gave to a man named Thomas Neal a 21 year grant for the postal service in the United States. And he paid like seven shillings a year. So that's nothing, right?

He still died in debt. Did he really? With a monopoly. So the postal service has always been kind of tricky to call money from. Interesting. So that continued till 1774. And a lot of big stuff was happening around that time.

Like, hey, we don't like you anymore in England controlling us over here and taxing us. So we're going to start and establish our own constitutional post office for any kind of mail going from anywhere, basically. Intercolonial mail. Yeah. It was very cutting edge at the time.

I'm sure. And actually, when the British were carrying out the postal service on behalf of the colonies, in the colonies, there was a guy named Benjamin Franklin who was appointed the postmaster of Philadelphia. And he actually killed it as postmaster. Of course he did. He totally improved the roads.

He said, we're going to start working 24 hours a day. We're going to have lots of shifts. We're going to put up milestones. Like, the postal service helped improve the connectedness of the colonies, thanks to him. So when the Continental Congress said, hey, we want our own postal service, Ben Franklin became the first postmaster general.

Sure. And of course, he ran it like a tight ship. And he's one of those dudes. I get a feeling, if we could resurrect him and bring him out today, he could fix what's going on in this country. Yeah, and he'd say something pithy and ask for a glass of sherry.

Exactly. So this is, to me, when it gets super interesting, was in the 19th century, when Westward expansion happened, California gold rush, all of a sudden we needed to get stuff from the East Coast to San Francisco, let's say. Right. As quick as possible.

What's crazy is as quick as possible was to go down New York, around Florida, through the Caribbean, yes, on a steam ship, through the Caribbean, and then across Panama, and then up on the Pacific side to California. That was the fastest way to get mail for a while. Yeah, and how long, three to four weeks to send a letter from the East Coast to the West Coast,

and that's the best case scenario. Right, and that's how the U.S., the East Coast communicated with the West Coast for a while, until some stagecoach routes were established. There was a Southern route and there was a Central route, and the Southern route you could supposedly use year round. Sure, because it's lovely down here. But then the Central route, it was faster,

but they said you can't use that year round, there's storms. Yeah, and it also killed me, man. The way they used to name companies back then was so, like it made perfect sense. You basically just said what you did, like one, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, said we're gonna carry your mail to the Pacific by Steamship,

and then the Overland Mail Company, like well, we're gonna do it over land. So that's what we're gonna call our company. So they got the contract, the Overland Mail Company, along the Southern route, took about 25 days, and then my favorite, one of my favorite parts of American history was born, the Pony Express. Yeah, and it's just so amazing,

like the idea that they had to do this. It was a different company that was competing, that wanted to get that contract away from the Overland Company, right? The COC and PP. And they said, you know what? We know the Central route's shorter, we're gonna prove that we can use it year round,

and we're gonna set up something that it's just gonna blow this 25 day thing out of the water. And they set up the Pony Express. And they had stations, what, every 10, 20 miles, and a rider would ride from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, or be part of a line of riders. Well, yeah, that's the key. They'd go about 100 miles,

and then they'd change horses every 10 or 15 miles. Yeah, so the same rider would change horses, because they rode, they averaged 10 miles an hour, which doesn't sound fast, but you gotta factor in, like the Sierra Nevadas, where they're just crawling up these mountains. So these dudes were riding hard on flat ground. If they're averaging 10 miles an hour, right,

and they're going 24 hours a day, they're going 2,000 miles, 10 miles an hour, that's what, 20 hours? Yeah. That's, no, that's 200 hours? So what is that? That's less than 10 days. So that cuts that overlink companies rate by 150%.

Yeah, there was always one set of riders going east, one set going west. Yeah, I think when you were relieved by another rider, you'd hang out at that station, and wait for somebody to come the other way, and then relieve them. Yeah, they were paid really well at the time, 25 bucks a week, which at the time,

unskilled laborers made about a dollar a week. So, and did you read the first ad they ever put in? No. Wanted, young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18, must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily, orphans preferred. And that's maybe legend, but supposedly that's what it says. But apparently they were young, little, light,

skinny kids because you didn't want some big dude like me up on a horse. The horse would be like, oh, I don't wanna ride anymore. So they were like these young boys. I think the youngest one was like 14. Oh, wow. And supposedly Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider, although people have disputed that now.

Oh yeah? Yeah. Well, he's the stuff of legend. Well, he's by far and away the most famous pony express rider, if in fact he did. Gotcha. But anyway. So think about the amount of infrastructure

built up along this central route to have a station every 10 or 20 miles. You've got all these employees going and they proved it. They proved that the central route could be used year round. And so they got the contract then, right? No, the Overland Company got the contract to use it.

To use that same route that was already established. And the pony express was like, you have to be kidding me. And so the US government said, no, no, you guys do half and then let the Overland Company do the other half. Yeah. And they were mad for about a year and a half and really angry. And then the telegraph line was completed

and everyone was like, oh, well, I guess, I guess we're all out of business now. Yeah, that was it. Pony Express has sold to Wells Fargo and basically shut down. Yeah, I think American Express ended up branching out of Wells Fargo too. Yeah.

Like these are old, old companies, like these modern banks and credit card companies. It's interesting how far they go back. But think about that, man. Even as far back as the mid 19th century, new technology was putting mail delivery out to pasture. Yeah. And then mail delivery would evolve

and like figure out how to come back. Yeah. That's... It's pretty cool. ... foreshadowing. It is. So this is a big jump forward to the mid 1960s. Yeah.

A lot happened in between then. It did. And actually we started to go move further and further out into the suburbs. There's a huge population boom in the post war era. Oh yeah. And businesses started to realize the value of direct mailing and all of these factors put together

meant that the postal service was totally overwhelmed. Yeah. Completely. Because it became such a big deal. Everyone was writing letters. And they were using the same old hand, I guess hand delivery methods, sorting methods.

Yeah. So what it was, they weren't automated at all and they needed to be. Right. And so there was a postal reform that was undertaken. Yeah. And this was in 1971, the post office department. And I didn't even know this.

This was shortly after I was born. We weren't... The United States Postal Service until 1971. Yeah. That was when we officially became the USPS. It became an independent establishment, was no longer a part of the cabinet of the federal government, but was part of the executive branch

and got the monopoly basically to deliver mail, even though it was supposedly just a company. And they re-upped the mandate from, I think, 1792 that said the postal service is one of the most essential services of the federal government. Yeah. No person is cut off in this country. None shall not get deliveries.

Exactly. Yeah. Everyone's going to have a mailbox and everyone's going to get mail to that mailbox every day because we need to help keep intellectual freedom going. And ideas and business and commerce going all the time. And the postal service is this federal agency that carries that out.

And I'm sure that put a financial burden on them when people started building in these, like especially rich people, when they started building in these remote areas. Yeah. Because then all of a sudden, you had to add that to your route, even if it's 60 miles up a mountain and it's the only house.

There's a guy who services the Grand Canyon. There's a group of Indians that live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He has a donkey train that goes down there every day with the mail. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's part of it's a federal mandate.

You have to be able to get mail. Everyone has a mailbox. He's like, don't you guys use smoke signals? Come on. They do. In fact, I actually wrote an article on smoke signals. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say we should podcast on it,

but it's like super basic. Is it really? It would be like a five minute podcast. Well, we'll have to figure out some other way to use it. Agreed. Because that's interesting. So do we cover going postal now? It was sort of just thrown in the middle of this article.

Yeah, it really was. It was talking about how packages are delivered. And all of a sudden it says, and then people started killing each other in 1986. Yeah, which is actually the post office has the dubious distinction of kicking off the workplace shooting trend in the United States. Was that the first one?

As far as I could tell. Wow. All right, so 1986, Edmond, Oklahoma. Patrick Henry, Cheryl killed 14 coworkers. 1991, another one happened, including a supervisor getting killed with a samurai sword. Yeah. November 1991, Thomas McElvane shot and killed four

coworkers, wounded five others, then shot himself. And then 1993, and then in 2003, two more incidences of postal workers killing fellow postal workers. It was like just between 86 and 97, 40 people died at post offices from postal rampages. Yeah, and gave birth to the term going postal, which is used as a vernacular for just losing it, basically. And if you're interested in that at all,

there's a really good documentary. I think it's on Netflix streaming right now called Murder by Proxy. Oh, yeah. And it's all about the postal shootings, like where they came from. There's a lot of scrutiny of the management techniques of people at post offices.

There's got to be something to it. Oh, yeah. If you watch this, it's like it was clearly supervised. Like how many other industries had that many office shootings? Retail, actually, the homicide rate is three times higher in retail than it is at the post office. But you don't say go and retail. Right.

That just means you're going shopping. Well, it's like drinking the Kool-Aid. They really drank flavor aid, but Kool-Aid's the one with that distinction. Oh, yeah. All right. So that was going postal. Yeah.

I mean, we had to mention it, but I don't want to dwell on it. But it was weird in this article, the way it went. Right in the middle of the section. It just came up out of nowhere. Zip codes. This is kind of cool. Yeah. Zip codes were introduced in 1963 and then officially put

in place in mandatory in 1967 because just so much mail going on, you had to categorize it more specifically. Right. That was part of the post office being swamped. This was the first step toward automation. It was like a standardized coding system. Yes, it took them long. Well, they did have other ones, but it was like one.

Oh. Was New York City or something like that, you know? Yeah. So zip, this is just a nice little cocktail party factoid. Stands for zone improvement plan. I never knew that until I read this. Did you know that? I had before, but I'd forgotten.

OK, so it's a zone improvement plan, and it's here in the United States at least. It's a five-digit number. Represents a location, obviously, where you're trying to send something. And now they have the zip code plus four in some areas of, I guess, major urban areas, have a little more specificity.

Right, they deliver it to your, like, they put it on your stomach if you put the zip plus four on it. I think certain buildings even will have their own plus four if it's a big enough building. Right. Or if you get a lot of mail as a person. Is that what you're after? Is it plus four for your house?

Well, it says that some high-volume mail receivers get it. I'm like, you know, if it was cool mail, I'd love to get the mail. So the first digit there represents the state. Here in Georgia, that's a three. It increases as you move west. And there are some states that share each digit. Yeah, like two is taken up by a lot of states.

There's the District of Columbia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia. West Virginia. Man, all twos. I'd be mad if I lived in one of those states. So then you got the second, third digits. Those are regions within the state. The first three of those create what's called the SCF code,

the sectional center facility. And then the fourth and fifth digits are even more specific. Basically, it just hones down as you go left to right until you've got Josh Clark's house. Right, like this state, this section facility, this post office. Yeah, this neighborhood.

Yeah, and then maybe this building, this high-volume mail receiver named Josh Clark. That's right. So you've got the zip code that allowed automation. And a little known fact is that US Postal Service doesn't just handle a ton of the US's mail. It handles 40% of all of the mail in the world. Oh, really? Yeah.

Wow. So before the zip code, this was really difficult. It also went from, if you were mailing something from New York to San Francisco, it went through every distribution facility in the country in between New York and San Francisco before it got there. Really?

Yes, now, zip codes. Well, let's talk about what a letter does. Okay. And this is all thanks to zip codes. So I write a little love letter. I'm gonna mail it to Emily, which is weird because we live together. Right, why did it just be romantic?

That's actually a great example though because you can mail something from your mailbox to be delivered back to you, I reckon. I've never done it. That's the poor man's trademark, or copyright. Oh, yeah, I've heard about that. Is to mail something to yourself and leave it sealed. Did that hold up?

I think it depends on the judge, probably. Okay. So you put it in your mailbox, postal carrier's gonna pick it up, they're gonna take it to the post office. They're gonna put it on a truck and then take that from the post office to a processing plant where we have

our long-awaited machines doing some sorting, shape and size. Yeah, well, first they sort everything out and make sure everything's facing the right way up, right? Yeah. And then the packages, well, packages are put on one belt and then letters are put on another, and the letters say, let's just stick with the letter

that you wrote. Okay. It goes into a slot, so it's facing upwards and upright. Yeah. Or frontwards and upright. Yep. And then they put a little barcode on the back of the letter in, I think, ultraviolet ink.

Yeah, well, first thing it does is it gets a postmark and cancellation lines saying, basically, you can't use the stamp again. Yeah. Don't even try it. Don't be cheap. We've seen the wide-out checks, we've seen doctoring up a stamp.

Which is probably a federal offense. It probably is. And then so after that, the barcode's printed on the back of the piece of mail, and then there's an optical scanner that reads the address, which is pretty cool. And they're really, really, really accurate, too. Yeah.

But if your handwriting is terrible, they have a new system now where this conveyor belt takes a picture of it, sends emails a picture to a human being at a computer who reads it. It wakes up. So this is what I think it is. It reads it. Types it in, and then so it stays on the line.

It doesn't have to come out any longer. That's good. That's pretty new technology, yeah. And then so based on this address, including the zip code, it prints a barcode at the bottom. If you look at a letter, any letter you get has a little barcode on it. And so that's what's read.

That's right. The thing on the back is invisible, I think, right? Yeah. It's fluorescent. It's just showing off. We have invisible ink. Other processing machines then read those barcodes and then sort them in their little bins according to zip code.

And it's just basically placing everything in what will eventually be a tray that will be delivered back to a post office or a sorting facility. Or does it go straight to a post office? It goes to another processing plant. Right. So imagine each processing plant. They're like regional, I guess.

Has a bunch of mail coming in on trucks that it sorts and then sends out. And then based on this zip code that it serves, it gets a bunch of flats from other distribution facilities that are already according to the zip code. So let's say it's getting a flat of mail by zip code, then also sorts through those. That's right.

And it actually sorts them into an individual carrier's route in order. And that's what's delivered to the post office? So it arrives at the post office ready to go on the truck? Yes. OK. And that doesn't mean that the postal worker doesn't have much to do.

They still have circulars, magazines, bulk mail. They have to go through and put it for every address. All that crap that ends up in my recycling bin, basically. Although the coupons. Oh, remember our junk mail episode from years and years back? We got so much grief from people who are like, no, no, no. You can't get rid of junk mail.

That's the only thing keeping us in business. Yeah. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So if you're going to address a letter, there are a few guidelines.

You know, you got to put your address legibly in the front. You got to put your little return address in the upper left corner. Yeah, on the front. Don't put it on the back. No, upper left corner there. And don't use periods in commas. Like if you write P-O box, it's not P-Period,

O-Period box. Although, that doesn't matter. Apparently, it allows for greater efficiency in reading your letter. Maybe, because I always put like Atlanta, G-A period. I do too, and they still get there. But don't you wonder if they get there like, earlier? I don't know, maybe so.

It is, supposedly, you need to be able to read the address at arm's length. So don't write tiny, and don't write so big that they can't do other things to the envelope, like scan and stamp, and things like that. And then, you got to put your return address, because if something happens, you want it to come back to you. Although, I don't do that much anymore.

A lot of times, I'll just put like Atlanta, Georgia. Really, you don't put your return address on there? No, but I rarely mail things. And a lot of times, when I do, it's for work. So I'll just put Atlanta, Georgia, House to Forks, or something. Oh, gotcha. And it's not the kind of thing that, if it doesn't come back

to me, I would care. I gotcha. If I had some precious thing, I would put a return address. I have a feeling that you're going to get some email from postal carriers that are like, I hate people like you. Because whether you care if it comes back to you or not, I'm sure they have to get it back to you. There's a lot of type of delivery services.

Services, we won't go over here. But I did want to say that Media Mail is a great little trick, not a trick, but a great tool if you're mailing things like books or DVDs, because it's super cheap, but it takes a while. But that's part of that mandate from 1792, that they want to keep the intellectual juice of America flowing through the postal service.

So things like that, like creative stuff or books or correspondence like that. And I think that's how, if you've ever ordered a book on Amazon for like $0.02, you're like, oh, how can they sell a book for $0.02? It's because they charge you like $4.95 for shipping. And they probably pay like $0.08 to mail it with Media Mail. That's the greatest scam of the 21st century.

Well, not really. I mean, they're making their money via shipping instead of the book itself. But publishers don't like it, of course, because they want to sell their books new and not for $0.02 on Amazon. So I think we said that the postal service has a monopoly on delivering mail, but not on delivering packages.

So because they're kind of in competitive business against like UPS and FedEx and DHL and all those guys, those guys have gone ahead and invested in infrastructure of, say, like air delivery, air transportation of mail. And the postal service has tried that before. Like they tried a guided missile in 1953, which they shot full of mail from a submarine

to a naval station in Florida. But it was just too expensive. So the postal service said, hey, UPS, hey, FedEx, you guys have a bunch of planes. Can we start putting our mail on it? And they said, sure, for a few billion dollars a year. And the postal service said, great. But at the same time, they kind of,

they stepped forward into the 21st century by doing so. Yeah. And the postal service having access to everyone's mailbox is often tapped by UPS and FedEx, deliver what's called in the business the last mile. So a lot of times, especially if you're a rural person, if you get something from Amazon, it was shipped by UPS, but eventually it made its way

into your postal carrier's route and is being delivered by the postal service. Yeah, there's way more mixing of package mailing than you would think. It's like a swinger party or something. Pretty much. And part of that deal in 2001 with FedEx was, hey, FedEx said, can we put our boxes at your post offices?

And they said, sure, for $126 million. And they said, can we hitch a ride on your plane? And they said, sure, for $6.3 billion over seven years. But it seems like a good agreement. And they did the same with UPS. And we scratch our back, you scratch yours, we scratch your back, we'll scratch yours. Yeah.

That all works? Yeah. Why didn't everybody just scratch their own back? I don't know. Because it's hard to reach. Yeah, I guess so. And so if you realize that the postal service needs a few billion extra dollars,

you say, why don't you just up the postal rates? Yeah. Well, the federal government keeps its thumb on that. They want to make sure that anybody who needs to mail a letter can do so without great expense. Yeah, it's a big deal to change the postal rate. Like, it is much more than you would think. Because a layman like me would just be like,

I just add a few cents, who cares? Yeah, what's the problem? Just print it. That's forever stamps, genius idea. You don't have to go back and reprint a bunch with the amount. Great idea. Or the one cent, remember in Fargo?

Yeah. When Wade got the one cent. Yeah, with the ducks. Yeah, and she was like, everyone needs the one cent whenever they raise the rates. Yeah, he's like, oh, gee, I didn't think about that. So, but yes, there's a very long protracted, difficult process of raising the postal rates.

It's not a very easy thing. No. And it involves a ton of bureaucracy. Should we get into that or just leave it at that? It's up to you, man. I think we should just leave it at that. Okay. So if you are going to mail something from your house,

you need your little mailbox. And I just installed mine in what seemed like a sensible manner. I didn't realize that there were actual rules. In fact, you were supposed to contact the post office before installing your mailbox, which I had no idea, to make sure it's like the correct placement and height. And so like the post office person

or the mail carrier didn't have to get out of the truck. Oh, well, they'll burn it down. If it's not the specification. So you want to contact the post office. I didn't, but I guess I just lucked out because they say generally 41 to 45 inches from the road surface to the inside floor of the mailbox or point of entry,

and then set back six to eight inches from the front face of the curb or road edge to the mailbox door. I guess I just got lucky then because I get my mail. Without any burning down of your... Or without a post office box, which we talked about, they've been around for a couple of hundred years. And that's if you want to have a little key

to your little own box in a post office and get your mail there, you can certainly do that. It's handy if you're starting out a business and you want to make people think that you're not working out of your house, you can get a post office and say, look, I have a PO box, which means I'm working out in my bedroom.

Right. It's like code, I think. Or are you getting guns in the mail? Is that what people do? I'm sure there's a lot of people who try to get guns in the mail in their PO boxes. Yeah. Sure.

Okay. Or if you tend to move around a lot in the same town and you don't want to worry about changing your mail and forwarding your mail, you can always just get a PO box. Yeah. So those are some reasons. You want to talk the future of the post office? If it's around after October 2013?

Sure. What is the future of the post office? Well, there's a lot of stuff coming down the pike. There's the cancellation of Saturday mail. Yep, this August. They're really going hard after package delivery services now. What, trying to, oh, with like the flat rates and stuff like that?

Yeah, just really like courting businesses to say, hey, consider us instead of UPS or FedEx. Right. And especially with prescription medicines. Sure. Because we have an aging population that's going to do nothing but increase in size. So you're going to need more prescriptions through the mail.

So, hey, let's get into that. Yeah, and you can get stuff like that certified and insured and signature delivery approved and stuff like that. It's helpful. Part of the post office is pledged that your letter carrier won't take your medication before delivering it.

Might hit you up for some. Right. But there's also a line of clothing coming out, postal service line of clothing coming out. Shut up. I'm not kidding. It's called rain, heat or snow. And that's, we almost didn't mention this.

So the postal service is creed, right? Sure. Neither rain nor snow nor. Sleet. Sleet or, hold on. Rain nor sleet nor snow nor. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion

of their appointed rounds. And that's actually not the post office's official motto. They don't have one. But it's been linked to them. And it's actually an adaptation of something from Herodotus, the Greek historian. Oh, yeah. Who was making a comment about how the Persians,

even during their war in like 500 BC, they were one of the first ones to establish a real postal service. And even during war, the postal service didn't stop. There were still documents being delivered. And Herodotus was commenting on that. And that's where that came from. It should include like or loss of limb.

It did originally. Like that's an adaptation. It wasn't loss of limb, but it was something like. Yeah, some sort of sicknesses befalling you. Right. They were putting the mail before themselves. The show must go on. Right.

So there's a line of clothing called Rain or Heater Snow. And then they're also talking about creating federal email addresses that you get at birth. Just like you have a physical address. You would also have an email address. But your email address is attached to you rather than the physical location you live at. And if you say you need to correspond with the IRS

or Social Security Administration or something like that, you would send like this very secure email through this Postal Services portal. Everything else you could just use like Gmail or Yahoo whatever for everyday stuff. But this is like the big stuff, the really important stuff. And then the Postal Service would also offer like a digital lock box for like a will

or your medical records or something like that. Yeah. And listen, as every conspiracy person in the country now says, in a way, I want a federal email attached to my name that I have to send things through. Yeah. Well, that's the number of the beast, obviously. Yeah.

I don't know that I would want that either. I'm not a big conspiracy guy. Oh, it's not that you have to send it through that. It's that if you send it through that, if somebody hijacks that or reads it, they're going to be in a lot more trouble federally speaking than they would be if they read your Gmail. Yeah.

Because isn't it illegal to open like a federal offense to get someone's mail? Exactly. And that's what this there's this guy who runs a think tank for the Postal Service who's like, it's not just about mailing documents. It's about protecting the connectedness of the United States and Americans.

So how do we do that in a digital world? And he's thinking about this. So if you're even the least bit interested by this episode that we just recorded, there's an Asquire article called. You almost said peace. I didn't, though. There's an Asquire piece. It's called Do We Really Want to Live Without the Posts Office.

And it's by Jesse Lichtenstein. And it is really good, man. It's a really good overview of. What does Jesse think? We need it. He or she, I think, kind of leans toward we need it. And the more you start to read about it, the more this weird kind of civic affection

for the post office developed in me. Where I'm like, yeah, we don't want to get rid of the post office. You want the post office. Who doesn't want the post office? It kind of develops. Yeah, I used to, maybe it was a simpler day, or maybe the people stuck with their routes longer. But I remember my postman growing up.

It was the same guy for years. And we didn't live in a neighborhood. We lived on a street in the woods with six houses. And so I would run out and check the mail and wave at them. And we would give them gifts at Christmas. That's awesome. And now I have no idea who my postal carrier is, which is my fault.

I need to just go out there. I think you do. And also, the postal service is responsible for the largest food drive in the United States every year. Oh, really? Yeah, you know that food drive where you just put canned food in your mailbox and your postal employee picks it up? Really?

You can do that? Yeah. I've never heard of that. It hasn't been very well publicized, but at least around here, I guess. But it's a huge food drive. Or at the very least, postal carriers are taking and eating cans of ravioli for dinner.

This is delicious. I love this food drive. Yes, so don't just put cans of food in your mailbox. Check into when that is supposed to happen. That's got to be the worst day of the year for letter carriers. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine? It's a lot of weight.

You got anything else? No. Respect your postal carrier. You want everybody to go out and meet their postal carrier? Yeah, why not? Give them a hug. Actually, don't do that. They might mace you or something.

But give them a wave. If you want to learn more about the post office, you can type those words into the search bar at HouseToWorks.com. And be sure to check out the Esquire article, too. It's very cool. And I guess before we get into that, Chuck, you want a message from our sponsor?

Let's do that. Yeah. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, now it's listener mail time. Josh, I'm going to call this a fan who thought we were wrong and did a little research. And we may not be wrong after all.

That's a nice title, yeah. We had a bunch of filmmakers right in when we talked about the subliminal messages being inserted into movies in the 1950s by James Vickery, because we said it's one 3,000th of a second or something. And a bunch of filmmakers went, there's only 24 frames per second. So if you switched out one frame, it would only be one 24th.

There's no way, there's no way. And where'd you get this number? Where'd you get this number? I went back and looked, and I was like, I mean, I see this number in various places. But so we got this email from Brian Henry that disputed this. And then he wrote back with this. Hey, guys, looks like I may have spoken too soon.

I was assuming that Vickery was just changing the film itself, which would result in the messages showing much slower and at the maximum, one 24th of a second. But I did some research, and apparently he used something called a, I've never heard of this before, a tachistatoscope. Tachistatoscope.

I think you got it. Tachistoscope. OK. To project the messages on the screen, not the movie projector. He said, so this way he would have had a lot more control over the speed of the messages. And so to all the filmmakers out there who wrote in

and challenged us, I wrote back to a few that I was like, jeez, I don't know, man. I'm looking for it. And some of them were even kind of snotty about, like, you should research this more. So apparently, put that in your tachistatoscope and smoke it, is what I say. And that is from Brian Henry.

Yeah, thanks, Brian, for the research. And being a good guy, saying, hey, I was wrong. Because you were wrong. He was one of the nicer ones about it. Well, thank you. If you want to let us know that you were wrong, even though you had told us that we were wrong at first, we love those.

You can tweet that to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts. And make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.