For the last 50 plus years my parents paid all their bills by mail as did most Americans before the internet. Even today they still do. Always arrived on time. Coming from a developing country with atrocious postal service, they were proud of the USPS. You could send a cheque by ordinary post and not have to fear it disappearing. Rent, utilities, car payments, house payments, insurance, and so on. Just toss in any blue box and move on. I have had the same experience all my life.
Yeah, well we can’t have nice things can we?
Blue boxes everywhere are being broken into by thieves looking for cheques and other valuables since we trust our postal system so much. You cannot trust the boxes anymore, even in small towns or busy shopping districts. Our PostSMASHER-General cut postal security personnel. Master keys for the blue boxes are being stolen wholesale and sold on the street by crooked postal workers, or honest postal workers are being attacked and even murdered for the keys. So no wonder criminals steal from the boxes in plain sight and not get noticed. You don’t have to do anything that would attract attention like say trying to force the lock with a sledgehammer. Just recently some criminals believed to be part of a gang were arrested and convicted of having stolen postal keys. The judge only sentenced them to a couple years in prison, when the penalty for unauthorized possession of a postal key alone is TEN years. And possession of stolen mail and others, they could have been sentenced to twenty years or more. Judges used to give the maximum, and before that, postal security agents were authorized to shoot to kill, on sight no less. That made mail theft quite rare for over a century. Today, the underworld has gotten a new message, USPS does not care anymore so knock yourselves out. Crooks broke into the blue box right outside the post office itself(!) last year, down the road from me. The box in front of my building was also broken into about the same time.
As for those of us on the inside, I used to work for USPS and as a career applicant I was subject to a full FBI screening before being hired. They took my mugshot and fingerprints, and I think, even DNA. I heard they even checked as far back as my high school records when the school contacted me. Well, career employees are unusual these days. To cut costs USPS would rather hire temporary workers and whatever longer term positions open are often Non-career. I discovered that these applicants are exempt from the full on background check. Just a cursory one. What could go wrong? sarcasm
As for the stolen keys, the rules say each one must be accounted for at the start and close of business. Apparently this is not being done if keys are being sold on the street. And in recent news reports there have been investigations into postal workers stealing cheques and parcels, in Texas I believe.
These things rarely ever happened when I was growing up. Now there’s always something new in the national news. It’s really depressing.