tagged w/ mailing services
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The postal worker was stunned when the package moved by itself and fell to the floor. Then came the sounds of heavy panting.
Within minutes, she and co-workers had unwrapped a tightly sealed box and rescued a 4-month-old puppy that a Minneapolis woman tried to mail to Georgia.
"It's just crazy," said Minneapolis Police Sgt. Angela Dodge. The air holes the woman punched in the box were covered up with mailing tape, and the priority mail trip would have taken at least two days, she said. "It was supposed to be a birthday gift for a family member. It would have been kind of traumatizing to get a dead puppy,'' Dodge said. "If you don't identify it so that it can be handled properly, it goes into the cargo hold of an airplane. It gets 40 below in those cargo planes that get up 40,000 feet. And there was no food or water. Puppies can't go for long periods without food or water."
The dog would have been dead on delivery, agreed police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer. "I've been doing this for 17 years. This is a new one on me."
The woman, Stacey Champion, declined to tell police why she decided to mail the puppy, Dodge said.
Champion paid $22 to send the black poodle-Schnauzer mix puppy named Guess to Georgia via priority mail, said Thompson Ojoyeyi, supervisor at the Loring Station post office. The worker who accepted the package asked all the standard questions: Any perishables, liquids, hazardous materials?
Champion said no, but then she cautioned postal workers to "be careful, be careful" as they handled the box because "it was so delicate," Ojoyeyi said.
On the outside of the package Champion wrote "This is for your 11th birthday. It's what you wanted," he said. She also told the clerk that if sounds came from the package, not to worry, it just contained a toy robot, Ojoyeyi added.
When the box began moving and making noise, workers called a postal inspector -- the Postal Service's enforcement arm -- and got permission to open the package, Ojoyeyi said.
Guess "was so happy to get out," Ojoyeyi said. "We gave him water and he drank so fast."
"How could someone do this kind of thing?" he said. "For us, it was very unusual."
The Postal Service will ship some live animals such as bees, certain small and harmless cold-blooded animals, chicks and ducklings. But sending dogs and cats through the mail is a definite no, he said.
Champion was cited for misdemeanor animal cruelty and has 10 days to appeal. The dog is now at the city's animal control facility. If Champion declines or loses her appeal, Guess would go up for adoption. So far, Champion hasn't notified authorities that she wants the dog back, Dodge said.
She did, however, return to the post office to demand a refund for the $22 she paid to mail the puppy. She also wanted a small amount of money she had attached to a makeshift dog collar returned to her.
Postal workers nixed the refund and told her to contact law enforcement about the collar currency. "We asked her, don't you want to know about your puppy? But she said no. She just wanted her money back," Ojoyeyi said. "It's just weird to mail an animal like that in a package all covered up. We don't know what she was thinking about."
http://www.startribune.com/local/115011544.html
update
The Minneapolis woman who tried to mail a puppy wants him back.
"I'm just appalled," said Mitzi Carroll, who learned about the puppy's plight from a TV broadcast in Georgia, where she lives. "And now she wants it back? Really? I have a strong problem with that. How do you put a puppy in a box and try to mail it? That's just animal cruelty."
That's exactly what Minneapolis authorities thought. They charged Stacey Champion, 39, with animal cruelty and impounded Guess, a 4-month-old poodle-Schnauzer mix that postal officials said likely would have been DOA at its Georgia destination.
As word of the pup's discovery in a sealed box with no air holes spread across the country, concerned animal lovers began calling and e-mailing city officials with requests to adopt the black dog.
But Carroll, who already has adopted two dogs and three cats, and other would-be rescuers will have to wait for the outcome of an administrative hearing Monday, at which Champion is scheduled to plead for the dog's return.
That request itself is a bit unusual. "In the four years that I've been here, we never had a person appeal after an animal was impounded because of animal cruelty," said Dan Niziolek, manager for Minneapolis' Animal Care and Control. Of course, city officials can't remember ever handling a case in which someone tried to send a puppy through the mail, either.
In appealing the case, Champion had to pay about $250 in fees for the city to kennel and care for the puppy. If she loses her case before the administrative hearing officer, the puppy would be put up for adoption or she could take her case to the Court of Appeals, Niziolek said. But Champion would have to pay the city $15 a day for the puppy's care until her case was resolved.
The hearing is set for 11 a.m. Monday at City Hall, Room 314, said city spokesman Matt Laible.
Champion also needs to resolve the criminal case for animal cruelty in Hennepin County District Court. Even if she wins the puppy back during her appeal, a judge could restrict her ownership of animals, Niziolek said.
Champion didn't return calls asking about her plans for Monday's hearing.
"I would like to be at that hearing. I really would," said Sally Shortridge, who is outraged over the idea that an adult woman who put a puppy in the mail might regain custody.
"I have nieces and nephews at 12 and 14 who would know much better," she said. "She shouldn't get that poor little puppy back."The postal worker was stunned when the package moved by itself and fell to the floor.... more
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The U.S. Postal Service plays two roles in America: an agency that keeps rural areas linked to the rest of the nation, and one that loses a lot of money.
Now, with the red ink showing no sign of stopping, the postal service is hoping to ramp up a cost-cutting program that is already eliciting yelps of pain around the country. Beginning in March, the agency will start the process of closing as many as 2,000 post offices, on top of the 491 it said it would close starting at the end of last year. In addition, it is reviewing another 16,000—half of the nation's existing post offices—that are operating at a deficit, and lobbying Congress to allow it to change the law so it can close the most unprofitable among them. The law currently allows the postal service to close post offices only for maintenance problems, lease expirations or other reasons that don't include profitability.
The news is crushing in many remote communities where the post office is often the heart of the town and the closest link to the rest of the country. Shuttering them, critics say, also puts an enormous burden on people, particularly on the elderly, who find it difficult to travel out of town.
The postal service argues that its network of some 32,000 brick-and-mortar post offices, many built in the horse-and-buggy days, is outmoded in an era when people are more mobile, often pay bills online and text or email rather than put pen to paper. It also wants post offices to be profitable to help it overcome record $8.5 billion in losses in fiscal year 2010.
A disproportionate number of the thousands of post offices under review are in rural or smaller suburban areas, though the postal service declined to provide any estimate on how many beyond those slated to begin closure in March might ultimately close or which ones are being targeted. "We want to make the smartest decisions possible with the smallest impact on communities," Dean Granholm, vice president for delivery and post office operations, said in an interview. He said the agency is identifying locations that are operating at a deficit and looking "for the opportunity to start the process of closing."
In addition to reducing employees—it has cut staffing by a third since 1999— the postal service has sought for years to deal with financial woes by raising rates or cutting services, such as a proposal to drop Saturday delivery. It has also talked in the past about closing a much smaller number of post offices. But while closures have been "on the table" in the past, this push is the agency's most serious yet, Mr. Granholm said, and is drawing widespread interest from a cost-cutting Congress. Still, shutting down post offices is often politically unpopular: elected officials in several communities have already written the Postal Regulatory Commission protesting planned closures.
Eighty-three specific post offices were approved for closing during the three months ending Nov. 15, more closings than in any quarter in the agency's history, according to the postal service. In addition, 408 post offices where service has been suspended for various reasons won't reopen amid the fiscal crisis, Mr. Granholm said.
Some of those suspensions are being contested by the Postal Regulatory Commission, independent from the postal service and reporting to Congress, which is investigating whether the postal service has been illegally using reasons such as lease expirations to close small, underused branches. The agency has denied wrongdoing.
While paring down is a common survival tactic for organizations these days, efforts by the postal service to do so routinely raise alarms because many citizens see post offices as an essential public service. Postal service dates to the founding fathers, with Benjamin Franklin serving as the first U.S. postmaster general and the Constitution explicitly authorizing Congress to establish post offices. Critics in Washington argue the postal service should reduce what they say is too much spending on employee benefits before resorting to closures.
As closure notices go up, citizens are rallying around their post offices in Millville, W.V., Hamilton, Tenn., Prairie City, S.D., and elsewhere, fearing not only a loss of convenience but a death knell for their small towns.
"It ain't right doing this to our community," says Delmer Clark, a 70-year-old retired coal miner in Eastern Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains, in the no-stoplight town of Holmes Mill. The post office here is set to close next month after more than 100 years. About the size of a garage, it has long been a part of the town's identity, and the pending closing is fueling local suspicion that public officials don't care about them. The local school closed years ago and reliable cable, Internet and cellphone reception has yet to arrive, residents say. "When they close the post office, they probably won't even come up here anymore and clean the roads," says Mr. Clark.
"It will hurt us real bad," says Esther Sizemore, a 62-year-old retired school-bus driver. Not owning a computer, and aching from hip arthritis that makes driving significant distances difficult, Ms. Sizemore drives down the street to the post office to mail her handmade quilts, trade news with friends and pick up packages, since she does her shopping by catalog. She also feels her mail is safer using a post office box; mail thefts have been a problem in the area, says Deputy Winston Yeary, of the Harlan County Sheriff's Department.
The Holmes Mill post office is closing in a consolidation set to claim more than 30 small Kentucky post offices this year, according to local postal officials. It's in the red, costing the postal service $12,748 in fiscal year 2010, according to the agency.
Residents will still have home delivery, and can use the post office and maintain P.O. boxes in the next town, but some locals fear the drive: The 12-mile roundtrip is on a winding mountain road bordering a steep drop-off to the river and named "Coal Miner's Highway" for the coal trucks that take much of the road.
Some lawmakers say closing post offices is the wrong answer. Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) says the agency should instead cut waste in its ranks. Although the postal service has cut its work force through attrition in recent years, it is still weighed down by overly generous employee benefits, she says.
Postal workers pay "significantly" lower premiums for their health and life insurance plans than other government employees because of union agreements, according to a September study sponsored by the Office of Inspector General. The report said the postal service could save $700 million this year alone by asking employees to pay more. The report, however, also said the postal service's contribution into employee benefits has started to decline, and that more reductions are planned as a result of recent union agreements.
"One of my frustrations is that the first approach the post office seems to take is to reduce service…when instead it needs to tackle a benefit structure that is too expensive, and it needs to look for ways to stay in business and deal with the digital age," says Sen. Collins.
Communities that lose post offices will still get deliveries, either at homes or at clusters of mailboxes set up in town, and there are multiple options for getting postal services, including stamps by mail, said Mr. Granholm of the postal service. Also, he says, many rural dwellers already travel to nearby cities for groceries and other services. "Why can't they go there for the post office?" he says.
More at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704881304576094000352599050.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStoriesThe U.S. Postal Service plays two roles in America: an agency that keeps rural areas... more
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