Going Postal: chapter 2 — Law and Liberty
By: Ron Collins
Tags: Walmart, Shipping, Civil Liberties, Online Business, Usps Tracking

Some very interesting questions, far larger ones than the matter of a twelve-dollar machinery part lost in the mail, are beginning to form here.

Am I (is anyone?) under any statutory obligation to maintain a permanent business arrangement (also referred to as a ‘mailing address’) with the United States Postal Service? Cite specific statute, if applicable.

2. When an online merchant offers any option to customers containing the word ‘shipping’, does this by definition include that merchant retaining the right, after prepayment has already been authorized, to place what then amounts to the customer’s property, in the mail?

3. How does the answer to the preceding two queries come to bear on the further question of whether the term ‘shipping’ and the term ‘mailing’ are equivalent and interchangeable ones?

4. When personal information, as requested by the seller and provided by the buyer, is labeled in the seller’s records of the buyer’s account as ‘shipping address’, does this postulate that the seller then has the right, at its own discretion and requiring no prior statement of intent, to assume that the ‘shipping address’ is therefore a ‘mailing address’, and to place a prepaid order in the mail?

5. Re all the above, is the United States Postal Service in the ‘shipping’ business, or is it not? According to what law(s)?

6. Re (1) above, if a person is not under any obligation to retain a ‘mailing address’ and lives in a community where ‘mail’ may only be received at a post office box and there is no local delivery offered by USPS, by what inherent legal right does a seller presume that the person’s ‘shipping’ address’ is also their ‘mailing address’?

7. In the condition outlined in (6), does an item’s arriving at a nearby government facility calling itself a ‘post office’ thereby postulate that the item has been ‘delivered’, when the ‘shipping address’ provided was never expressed as also being a ‘mailing address’ because it is no such thing?

8. When, at the seller’s sole discretion and absent prior statement of intent, an order is sent by mail instead of by a reliable shipping firm, and subsequently vanishes, was the decision in the first place to use the USPS in the role of ‘shipping’, as offered by the seller and contracted upon by both parties, a breach of reasonable good faith which has been expected by the buyer and implied by the seller?

9. As such, can the subsequent loss of time and income, or any further needless harm, to the buyer while awaiting a lost order for which payment has already been made and collected by the seller, amid the seller’s assurances of a timely delivery, be regarded as possibly well in excess of the actual price agreed on for the lost item itself?

Or to put it all colloquially: who says I have to use the mail? For anything? What gives anyone else the right to assume I do?

How does anyone, in the course of executing a contract including the term ‘shipping’, get away with using the least-reliable player in the transportation industry (USPS), when in doing so they have to assume that the person waiting for the order both uses the USPS at all and has agreed by default to have orders sent (eventually if at all) by it?

Who is at fault, or most at fault, when the failure of USPS to do its job results in a breach of faith between a buyer and seller? Is it the post office, which can only investigate itself and is best-known for anything but making serious efforts to mitigate its many and mounting failures?

The USPS answer to its calamitous non-performance in recent years amounts to its blaming the United States Congress, for not authorizing enough funds for it to operate properly.

(!!??!!)

Somehow, both Fedex and UPS, along with myriad other smaller shipping and trucking outfits, have been able to ride a wave of profit-making by getting into the online-sales game, even though a great deal of that tonnage is being sent via ‘free shipping’ contracts.

I think the operable term here is ‘economies of scale.’ Big outfits can do lots of things and only turn profits on some of them, because those profits more than cover the break-evens and losses from the other things. It’s a fairly simple principle, but upon it great commercial enterprises have been built.

Commercial enterprises

Which, as it turns out, the United States Postal Service is anything but.

The sad old post office gets itself into hot water and learns to live there, out of pure mismanagement and internal graft and ineptitude which no official agency other than its own Inspector General’s office can seek to address, and then goes begging to the Congress to make up for the shortfalls?

Seriously?

In the real shipping industry, these current times amount to a gold rush.

More people than ever are availing themselves of a highly-developed and streamlined-efficient commercial transportation sector just now, what with that eleven-letter word starting with ‘c’ and all making them feel like it isn’t safe to leave the house, and the real players are adding staff, expanding fleets, working round-the-clock, and making money.

The defunct and derelict old post office, a tired and declining eighteenth-century bureaucracy losing credibility by the minute (and whose flailing underperformance reduces the idea of its having ‘market share’ in a legitimate industry to a hyperbolic oxymoron) is meanwhile lurching along, going through its motions, losing packages, passively generating endless and inexplicable delays, while almost certainly thoroughly infiltrated with gang-paid thieves on its payroll who routinely collect items which could fetch a price on black markets, right out of the stream with not even the remotest risk of criminal consequences.

And the old PO just goes begging Congress for yet another bailout?

Why does anyone do business with that old dinosaur anyway?

Is it because they have to, or else some scary government edict will be served on them from some dust-raising convoy of black SUVs (air cover provided at the team leader’s discretion), for not treating where they live as official business whether they like it or not?

Or just because, like so many other things people do because they assume some obligation where none exists (like dropping everything and interrupting everyone to answer every last ringtone, for example, or sending kids to public school, or filling out forms telling officialdom everything about how you make a living while authorizing it to seize a cut, or…) , they only think they have to?

An inexpensive lawn mower part lost in the mail is nowhere near being the core issue here.

What gives anyone the right to assume I do business with a semi-official government agency which can barely even keep its lights on much less do its job? What makes my giving someone an address so they can deliver things I have paid for to it, the same thing as my giving them permission to send the item instead to a nearby government facility I don’t do business with, because I don’t have to and don’t care to?

Is something I paid for, my property, or isn’t it?

Don’t send my property in the mail when I didn’t say you could.

What’s so hard about that?

This thing may get a lot bigger than I’d first thought, when all I wanted was to finish refurbishing an old mower with a brand-new engine and start using it to help make me a living. It touches on, yet again, the challenge I have issued to my fellow citizens all my life:

…to what extent is any of us obligated to do business with government?

I say, and have said all my life: none whatsoever. Zilch.

I have no obligation to do business with government.

Think about the staggering magnitude of such a non-negotiable condition.

Is this, or is this not, a fundamental component in any reasonable definition of ‘freedom’? Is not freedom FROM government far more valid and defensible than the erroneous concept that freedom itself is but a government-issued commodity, with endless conditions? Like, I have to have a mailing address whether I agreed to have one or not? Like, I have to allow an antique anachronism like the post office to handle my property, whether I ever said it could or not?

(Like somebody has the right to seize portions of my income and call this brazen extortion a ‘tax’, whether I ever agreed to allow them to or not?)

If it says I do, that any such right exists on the part of government to presume that my business is also its business to be conducted on its terms, it had damn well better be prepared to prove it. I’ll wait, while I carry right on with my life, on my terms and not its.

I have yet to be satisfied that it can.