Part 6

At times of increased postal traffic, before Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas, a waybill for each package is required. The prices charged by the postoffice for forwarding parcels vary according to the weight of the packages and distance. The fees charged are shown in the following statement:

For distance up to-- over

46 92 230 461 702 miles miles miles miles miles

For parcels weighing up to-- cents

11 pounds 5.9 11.9 11.9 11.9 11.9

15.4 pounds 7.1 14.2 16.6 19.0 23.8

17.6 pounds 8.3 16.6 21.4 26.18 35.7

19.8 pounds 10.7 21.4 30.9 40.4 59.5

22 pounds 11.9 23.8 35.7 47.6 71.4

additional 2.2 pounds 1.1 2.38 4.76 7.1 11.9

The maximum weight for parcels to be forwarded by post is 110 pounds.

For registered packages an additional fee of 4.76 cents is charged, while the insurance fee for packages with declared value is 1.19 cents for each $71.40 or fraction thereof. For “not-prepaid” parcels up to 11 pounds a collection fee of 2.38 cents is levied. Besides this, in places where there is delivery to the house, an extra fee of 3.5 cents is charged for packages weighing up to 11 pounds.

Packages may be sent c. o. d. in the German Empire if the amount to be collected does not exceed $190.40. These c. o. d. packages, if payment is not made at presentation, will be held for seven days. Meanwhile another request will be made on the consignee to pay the amount charged, and then if payment is refused the package is returned to the consignor. The fee charged for c. o. d. packages in addition to the ordinary postage is 2.38 cents, and the fee for the postal money order, by means of which the amount collected is returned to the consignor is charged. The charges for these money orders for amounts not exceeding $1.19 are 2.38 cents; not to exceed $23.80, 4.76 cents; $47.60, 7.14 cents; $95.20, 9.52 cents; $142.80, 11.9 cents; and $190.40, 14.28.

Printed matter, samples without value, newspapers and business cards do not come under the heading of parcels or packages, different rates of postage and also different limits of weight and measure being provided for these classes.

In case of loss the postoffice refunds for common packages at the maximum rate of 71.4 cents per 1.1 pounds, and for a registered package at least $10.

Parcels are handled by the postoffice entirely separate from letters and other mail matter. A request may be sent to the postoffice on an unfranked postal card to call for a package, whereupon the parcelpost wagon will call at the place designated in the request. An extra charge of 2.38 cents is made for this service, regardless of the size or weight of the package.

Under ordinary circumstances, a package sent from Bremen to Munich, Bavaria, a distance of 470 miles, thus crossing Germany from north to south, will be delivered on the evening of the second or on the morning of the third day. If it weighs up to 11 pounds, it will cost 11.9 cents. If it is a c. o. d. package for $142.80 it will cost 11.9 cents for postage, 2.38 cents for collection fee, 11.9 cents for return money order, and 1.19 cents for delivery charge for the money order, in all 27.37 cents. The same package could be sent at the same rate from Bremen to Königsberg, a distance of 579 miles.

There is no restriction as to the size of the packages to be shipped within the German Empire, as long as they are not cumbersome, but the size of packages to foreign countries, as a rule, must not exceed 23.6 inches in each dimension. Exceptions from this rule are made for goods like umbrellas, canes, charts, furs, plants, etc., which may measure 39.37 inches in length, if they do not exceed 7.87 inches in breadth and height. Besides this there is a space limit of 25 cubic decimeters (1 cubic decimeter = .035 cubic foot) for packages destined for Algiers, Tunis, Santo Domingo, and the French colonies, and 20 cubic decimeters for packages to Bolivia, Brazil, and Canada, while packages for Great Britain and nearly all its colonies may measure one meter in each dimension, with a space limit of 54 cubic decimeters. Packages to foreign countries, exceeding the before-mentioned limit in weight and measurement, may be shipped as “postal freight.” The rates for such shipments, however, vary too much to be quoted here, and they are, in most instances, subject to contracts of the postoffice department with prominent forwarding agents.

For packages to the United States--that is New York, Jersey City, and Hoboken--the charges are from 30 cents for 2.2 pounds up to 64 cents for 11 pounds. To all other places in the United States, Alaska excepted, the rates are 55 cents for 2.2 pounds up to 88 cents for 11 pounds.

According to a postal treaty between the United States and Germany, which is in force since October 1, 1907, packages, which for any reason cannot be delivered will not be returned after a period of thirty days, as heretofore, but the consignor will be informed of this fact by the postoffice in order to give him a chance to dispose of the package in some other way. If the consignor has not disposed of the package within two months it will be returned to him as undeliverable.

For special delivery of a package 5.8 cents is charged, and for urgent packages, which will be forwarded by the fastest mail facilities, a charge of 23.8 cents is made, in addition to the regular postage and the special delivery fee collected for each package.

AFFIRMATIVE DISCUSSION

Our Postal Express. pp. 1-6.

William Sulzer.

MR. SPEAKER: I am in favor of a parcels post. I believe the people of the country generally favor it, and I feel confident its establishment will be of inestimable benefit and advantage to all concerned. The post-office is one of the oldest of governmental institutions, an agency established by the earliest civilization to enable them to inform themselves as to the plans and movements of their friends and foes; and from the dawn of history the only limit upon this service has been the capacity of the existing transport machinery.

The cursus publicus of imperial Rome--the post-office of the Roman Cæsars--covered their entire business of transportation and transmission, and with its splendid post-roads, swift post-horses, and ox post-wagons the Roman post-office was a mechanism far wider in its scope than that of our modern post-office; and except for the use of mechanical power, the old Roman post was far more efficient in its service of the Roman rulers than is our modern post-office in the service of the American citizen.

The evil of the Roman post-office and of the royal postal services that succeeded it was their common restriction to the enrichment of the ruling powers. They were the prototypes of our modern private railway and express companies, which have for their chief end the enrichment of their managers rather than the promotion of the public welfare. In this country the citizen owns the post-office and wants to use it as his transportation company. Its end is to keep him informed as to what his representatives are doing at the centers of public business, to make known to them his wishes, and to provide means by which he may communicate with his fellow-citizens for their mutual benefit, and to supply his wants and dispose of his wares at the least possible cost, in the shortest possible time, and with the greatest possible security.

The postal system of rates, regardless of distance, regardless of the character of the matter transported, and regardless of the volume of the patron’s business, eminently fits it for this great service. That it will sooner or later be greatly extended over the entire field of public transportation, is absolutely certain; and the people will duly appreciate the aid of those who assist in its extension and development. As far back as 1837, Rowland Hill, of England, promulgated to the world the law that once a public transport service is in operation, the cost of its use is regardless the distance traversed upon the moving machinery by any unit of traffic within its capacity, and upon this law he established the English penny-letter post of 1839.

Instead of a taxing machine, a contrivance for making money, the post-office should be an agency for good, reaching out its multitudinous hands with help and comfort into all the homes in our widespread land.

Without the post-office where would be that national unity, with its guaranty of equal rights to all, which is the glory of the sisterhood of states?

The postal savings system and parcels post was inaugurated in England largely through the efforts of the great Commoner, William E. Gladstone. Near the close of his life he made the following statement about it:

The post-office savings bank and parcels post is the most important institution which has been created in the last fifty years for the welfare of the people. I consider the act which called the institution into existence as the most useful and fruitful of my long career.

It is because we realize these truths so keenly that we are so persistent in urging favorable consideration of a parcels post. Its only fault is its conservatism. What this country now needs, what Congress should give it, is a parcels post covering much of the business of public transportation.

In April last representatives of at least 10,000,000 American voters, including the great agricultural associations of the country, National Grange, the Farmers’ Union, the Farmers’ National Congress, Retail Dry Goods Association of New York, the Associated Retailers of St. Louis, the manufacturing perfumers of the United States, the American Florist Association, and others, appeared before the House Postal Committee, demanding a domestic express post as extended and as cheap as that provided by the Postmaster-General in our foreign postal service. The argument in behalf of this legislation, with its 4-pound weight limit, had then been before the committee for many months, but the bill was not up to the demands of these friends of the post-office. The report of the hearing showed that the public wanted an 11-pound service at least. Seldom, if ever, has any proposition received a stronger public support, and it seemed as if the House Committee on Post-Offices would be obliged to report at least some legislation back to the House for its consideration.

Their answer finally came on the 27th of May in the shape of H. R. 26348, introduced by Chairman John W. Weeks, which provides:

That all mail matter of the fourth class shall be subject to examination and to a postage charge at the rate of three-fourths of 1 cent an ounce or fraction thereof, to be prepaid by stamps affixed--stamps of the following denominations:

Cents.

1 ounce ¾ 2 ounces 1½ 3 ounces 2¼ 4 ounces 3 5 ounces 3¾ 6 ounces 4½ 7 ounces 5¼ 8 ounces 6

On the 1st of June Mr. Weeks wrote to the secretary of the Postal Progress League as follows:

It does not seem to me likely that any other parcels-post legislation than possibly the bill which I introduced last week--this bill--providing for the reduction in rate on fourth-class matter, will be considered at this session of Congress.

This means that for at least two years more the American people are to be left subject to the extortions of the rich and powerful express companies, while we have in the post-office a well-equipped service of our own through which much of the people’s business now carried on by these companies could be done quicker and at infinitely less cost.

Mr. Speaker, if the powers arraigned against the post-office continue their efforts to limit its functions in behalf of private interests, they will soon find themselves confronted with a Congress pledged to extend the service of the post-office to a much larger degree of the public transmission business; and hence, I think it wise that my bill should now be brought before the House for immediate consideration.

World’s Work. 21: 14248-51. April, 1911.

Parcels Post and the Retailer.

Fremont Rider.

Of all the arguments against a parcels post by far the most venerable is that of financial disaster; and even April 1911 finds many an opponent of a parcels post uttering gloomy prophecies of the enormous losses which the system would entail, losses which would have to be met, as he takes pains to point out, by an already bankrupt post office department.

On the other hand, the men best acquainted both with the problem of transportation and its cost and with the parcels post as it has been worked out abroad, go so far as to say, that so far from being an expense, a parcels post would probably be the most profitable business venture into which the United States government ever embarked. In fact a private parcels post, in certain of the metropolitan districts at least, would probably be started by private capital were it not for one thing--the growing agitation for a government parcels post which would render valueless the plant of the private company.

The plan of this private parcels post, in direct competition with the present express companies is no chimera.... Every thinking person marvels at the economic waste in the present day methods of city delivery. By your house in Yonkers, for instance, if you happen to live in Yonkers, there now rattles, once or twice daily, the wagons of your butcher, your baker, your laundryman, your milkman, and your grocer, as well as those of the various butchers, bakers, laundrymen, milkmen, and grocerymen of your neighbors, all covering in staggeringly wasteful duplication, the same route. Besides them, up from the city come, in further duplication and longer distance waste, the wagons of the nine different New York department stores that deliver in Yonkers, the wagons of the four local express companies that divide the “independent” business, and those of the two general express companies which do the high-priced long distance business. Yet, when you think of it, one wagon could come to you three times a day and do the work of all these people, more effectively and at one-tenth of the present total expense.

You buy a dollar’s worth of groceries of John Jones, the grocer. The whole package, bread, milk, eggs, butter, and vegetables, weighs, perhaps, ten pounds. A company doing all the delivery business of a town, centralized, complete, without waste labor or waste mileage, stopping its motor wagons two or three times a day at every house on every street, can make money delivering that ten pounds for six cents. It now costs Jones, sending out his boy and wagon to a dozen odd houses scattered all over town, two or three times that amount.

But such a private parcels post will not be undertaken because of the fear that the government may enter the field. Yet so far at least, although in the post office the government has most of the plant necessary to carry on such a business, it cannot be persuaded to go into it.

The most exasperating reason for this inactivity is the legislative assumption that our present “parcels post” approaches perfection. The fact is, of course, that the United States has no parcels post in the sense in which the term is in accepted international use. The present fourth class rate is but little used in this country simply because it is prohibitively high. To send ten pounds of merchandise from New York to Philadelphia involves, not merely the indefensible nuisance of separating it for mail transportation into three packages, but a charge of $1.60. Naturally, instead, the merchandise is sent in one parcel by express for fifty cents. As the work done by the express company, it is needless to note, gives them a very handsome profit indeed, it is evident that by far the larger portion of the government’s $1.60 in this case would be sheer profit--if the post office were as efficiently conducted as the express company.

The express company, however, does not attempt to carry a ten pound package from New York to Seattle for fifty cents. Such long and profitless hauls they leave for Uncle Sam. Yet, even so, with all the cream of the parcel business continually and inevitably going to the express companies, the Post Office Department according to its reports makes a profit in its “parcels post” business.

Of course were the post office rate from New York to Philadelphia a real parcels post rate, that is, for example, 20 cents for ten pounds instead of $1.60, there would be 1,000 pounds of merchandise so sent where there is one sent today. People will use a parcels post when it becomes cheap enough to be an economic possibility, and they will use it enormously, as experience elsewhere has abundantly and conclusively proved. Until then they will use the fourth class postal rate only for the occasional cross continental parcel on which the express rate soars out of all reach, or for the small parcel under a pound in weight on which the fourth class rate is less than the express companies’ minimum charge.

The four vital arguments (the four great express companies) against a parcels post, once so succinctly enumerated by Mr. Wanamaker, and the other hoary arguments sampled above, have, however, of late years been bolstered by another--the welfare of the “small country retailer”; and round the great fear of a vague but very horrible something called “trade centralization” the battle for parcels post is at present being waged.

It has been taken for granted that the small country retailer will be put out of business by the parcels post with its low delivery charges--yet there are stores in Yonkers, Plainfield, etc., in spite of the fact that the New York department stores deliver in these places free.

Let us examine another aspect of this death-of-the-small-retailer-fattening-of-the-mail-order-trust-bogey a minute, and see whether a parcels post means really a more centralized basis of distribution, or a less.

Speaking very roughly, there are in the world two great tides of merchandise traffic: one of raw materials, of which food products is the most important, from the farmer to the urban consumer; one of manufactured products--to wear, to use, or to eat (as refined sugar or prepared breakfast food)--from the urban maker to the farmer consumer.

Surprising as it may seem the parcels post argument has dealt almost entirely with the latter tide: of the former tide, even more important, as I think I can show, very little has been said.

Let us look for a moment into our existing high cost of transportation, and therefore, decentralized distribution of farm products.

In New York the farmer sells his milk for--these figures are quoted very roughly and without elaboration but they will give my point--2 cents a quart. He sells it, usually, to one of two or three--there is considerable evidence that they all act in agreement as one--gigantic milk companies (of which Borden’s is the largest) which bring it into the city and distribute it. The ultimate consumer--again I give a rough figure--pays 10 cents a quart. The other 8 cents is the “distributing cost”; and in each case it goes, mind you, to two great corporations, a milk company and an express (or a rail-road) company. Is this that decentralized distribution that the defenders of the express companies in and before our Committee have eulogized.

Take almost any other farm product, strawberries, for example. The farmer, who grows them, gets 3 cents a basket. Then begins a long line of tolls: the express company, 3 cents; the commission merchant, 2 cents (he claims, and often with reason, that his “spoilage” is high); the jobber 1 cent; the small retailer--delicatessen store, corner grocery or street cart vendor--3 cents (it “costs 25 per cent. to do business” he says, and it does too). The ultimate consumer pays 12 cents a basket, sometimes more, sometimes, when the market is glutted, a little less. Here is 9 cents of “distributive costs” of which but 3 went to our friend, the “small retailer.” The rest went to more or less centralized distributing agencies. Now suppose on the other hand that the farmer could send his products direct to his list of regular customers in the city. It would be perfectly feasible with a parcels post. Strawberries, which the farmer would get 6 cents a basket for (double what he gets now) could be delivered at your breakfast table the next morning after picking instead of two or three days old in the triple transit of commission merchant and his storage place, jobber and his trans-shipment, retailer and his store, and finally to you. And for this infinitely better article you would pay only 8 cents (2 cents for the parcels post) instead of the former 12.

There are only three factors, the farmer, the government parcels post, and you! This is not theory: it is being done in England, in Germany, in Japan, and in almost every other civilized country in the world every day; and has been done for years.

And as for the mail order business bogey, it would not be a bogey in the country districts because every farmer would be running a little mail order business of his own, shipping his eggs and butter pats and comb honey and fresh fruit and vegetables by mail right to his customers, on their standing or postal card orders, getting enough for his produce to make small farming worth while, but giving the consumer better goods at a big saving. Cost of living! There is no other revolution in the methods of distribution that would make so much difference in the cost of living as a thoroughgoing parcels post would work. And instead of greater centralization it would be almost the ultimate of trade decentralization.

Or, let us look at the thing the other way round. What is the chain of trade from urban producer of manufactured articles to the country retailer and consumer? Is there any decentralized purchasing now except by mail? The farmer buys of the small retailer. But the retailer buys of the lesser jobber and he of the main jobber and he of the manufacturer; and this is true whether the product be canned goods or dry goods. Freight shipments in bulk can underbid single shipments by mail or express; and the present system of distribution, cumbersome and expensive as it is to the ultimate consumer, is nevertheless cheaper than direct single shipments at the present mail or express rates. The moment that you introduce bulk shipments into any distributive system you necessarily introduce a middleman somewhere to divide up that bulk shipment for individual consumers; and the greater the bulk economically shipped the more middlemen there will be between producer and consumer.

Now where the parcels post could afford a cheaper way of doing the distributing than the machinery at present in use, the people ought to have the benefit of it; but in spite of the obvious benefits of a parcels post it is not wise to jump to the ultimate conclusion. No one would be rash enough to say that the present system of retail selling is entirely wrong. Even if the flat-rate, “zoneless” parcels post were established there are certain kinds of goods--books, for example, in which every article is a “novelty” which must be personally handled before choice and purchase, in which a local retailer with a display is, if not essential, at least a great convenience.

But so far we have been considering an ideal, flat-rate parcels post, without that “zone” provision which is an important provision in the bills and proposals for a parcels post which are now being most actively agitated.