Do USPS employees care?

This [unedited] guest post is by a student in my EEP100 class (background post).
Please praise/critique/comment on its economic quality and importance to you.

---

Kyle Chuan says:

We’re all rather busy people with school, work, social obligations, et cetera keeping us out of our home for a good part of the day. For this reason (and also my inadequately sized mailbox and unnecessarily large packaging), I often find the “Sorry we missed you!” pink slip from the USPS in my mailbox asking me to trek down to the post office. Well this only leads to further frustrations, as I wait hours (an exaggeration, of course, but the ten to twenty minutes of waiting for my number to be called does seem to drag on forever) for a simple package pickup transaction that usually takes roughly a minute.

It’s not as if the post office is understaffed, the employees all seem to have something to do most of the times, and hiring an extra employee to take care of the USPS pink slip holders like me just isn’t economically sound; the benefit of the extra employee (marginal benefit) to take care of the small amount of package pick-uppers just doesn’t compensate for the extra wage (marginal cost) the USPS has to pay for.

What would make sense though, is to open up one of those unused counters and have the customers with quick transactions line up instead of taking a number. Why? Well quick transactions like picking up a package can be done concurrently with many of the other services provided.

Bottom Line: Having the optimal amount of employees (hiring at marginal benefit = marginal costs) does not necessarily equate to optimal output in real life; employee work ethics and allocation matters.

---

Note from DZ: The Economist on the dead hand of postal monopolies...