If you need overnight shipping, you can have it, but it is not cheap, so most people won't do it. As for documents, is is all electronic now.
Logistics is very much alive, but it is adapted to our needs, that is massive containerships for worldwide trade, local warehouses for fast delivery of common items, reliability that is in balance with the cost of losing items, speed matching what people are ready to pay for, and specialized services for special needs, like overnight shipping.
EDIT:
It made me think about the "Lettre Verte" in France, named after the green stamp, and also supposedly because it is good for the planet. It was introduced early 2010s as a cheaper, slower (2 days instead of 1) alternative to the "priority" red stamp. And now the red stamp is gone, replaced with an electronic service and the green stamp is now 3 days instead of 2. Mail has become much slower overall, because there is much less mail than before, and fast service is not economically viable nor essential on a day-to-day basis. La Poste used to have a dedicated high speed train, equipped with sorting center for overnight mail across the country, now decommissioned, not enough mail to fill a train.
These hard limits mean that the improvements in delivery speeds are asymptotic to a significant, nonzero value.
Product delivery throughput is profit to logistics companies; they aren't sitting around just hoping their trucks see all the green lights on their next trip. Storage management is being aided by robots, but no one expects them to start retrieving packages 10x faster than humans. We've had robotic inventory control for at least three decades in many factories, and the possible gains are probably already technically realized.
Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible.
The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of ships arriving each day just leads to more time at anchor.
The complaint isn't that logistics should follow Moore's Law or that we need same-day delivery for everything. It's that we're paying more for objectively worse service than we had a decade ago. Services aren't "adapting to consumer needs", its just objective decay being masked as optimization.
The Lettre Verte example actually reinforces the point: service got slower, then slower again, not because physics demanded it but because maintaining the previous standard became inconvenient. The dedicated sorting train wasn't decommissioned because trains stopped working; it was decommissioned because the institution decided the mail didn't matter enough to run it.
Nobody expects sea transport to break the sound barrier. But when 73% of consumers experience an outright delivery failure in a three-month period, that's not bumping against hard physical limits. That's drivers marking packages "delivered" that weren't, because lying clears the route faster. That's solvable. We're just in a system that doesn't incentive fixing it.
The asymptotic argument would land if we were approaching some theoretical maximum. We're not. We're sliding backward from where we were, while costs rise. I'm not asking for magic, I'm asking where went the reliability we already had, at the prices we're already paying.
It seems to me that modern freight ships are optimized for capacity/cost ratio and not for speed - hull shape is very close to a box with a short bow/stern attached. I'm not an expert but it looks like if you make the hull longer and a bow/stern narrow you can go faster. Military ships are optimized for speed and their hull shape is not a box.
Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next.
Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value.
It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
I've not had issues with the USPS, but I don't doubt that it is getting worse. Private delivery (Amazon and the like) has been pretty much flawless. Order from McMaster, and it almost invariably arrives within two days (continental US)
I just don't experience what the author is getting at.
Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything. And where the old system of 50 NDC (National Distribution Centers) are being consolidated to ~30 RPDC (Regional Processing and Distribution Centers) leading to a whole new strategy of how mail moves East to West and West to East. And mail sorting for delivery used to happen by mail carriers at local Post Offices, is now happening at LSDC (Local Sorting and Delivery Centers) set up service all mail carriers in a 50 - 70 mile radius.
And all of these changes are happening while still having to deliver mail (It never stops Jerry. It just keeps coming and coming)
So if you’re in the Midwest like Chicago, stuff coming from the Midwest or Eastcoast has been getting stuck in Indianapolis-taking 10 to 15 days. Stuff coming from West Coast gets here in 5.
There are 42,000 active zip codes and 640,000 employees. Making changes to that organization is hard and takes time.
What’s really cool is the work going on with Amazon, Walmart, Target and others for them to deliver packages directly to LSDC for same day delivery. Once you get away from the cities, no one can compare with the USPS for last mile delivery.
TLDR USPS is changing. Things may get worse before they get better.
The simple "elimination" of nightly mail pickup from rural post offices has resulted in multi-day backlogs just getting anything out of your local Post Office. If I walk into any of my local POs in the county this morning to ship a Priority Mail Express letter overnight, they will not guarantee that it will be received tomorrow. The envelope will sit for nearly 24 hours locally for tomorrow morning's mail truck before it is brought back to a processing center tomorrow night to be introduced into the mailstream and finally processed outbound.
Basically anything being shipped cross-country is going to be snared in Rural Delay Hell and it absolutely sucks. Combine this with the recent postmarking changes and we're in for an absolute fun treat when it comes for mail-in-voting time.
I like to say, things ALWAYS get worse before they get better!
Halfway through a remodel your kitchen is now torn up and nonfunctional.
Halfway through a surgery you have an open gut wound AND a tumor.
Halfway through combing your hair you look like you had a stroke halfway through combing your hair.
Swisspost had been cutting its budget back consolidating locations but despite this is delivering even better service using tech.
but i do agree, Swiss Post is great. live-tracking while they're delivering, nice app which shows you all info etc.
This sentence sounds straight out of ChatGPT (along with the general substance-less nature of the article).
Living in Germany I find the contrast always interesting and often, unfortunately, annoying. Almost anything legal has to be done on paper via letter. Fax (yes, really) is one of the only other alternatives that is accepted. Im just really glad that after moving, my new hometown is significantly stepping up their digital game and making it as easy as possible. They even respond to emails in city hall!
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/30/europe/denmark-postal-ser...
I give you that. Most organisations are paper first and you have to login and select "digital communication only" once.
Any communication from water and garbage utilities is always in paper form. No option for digital in any way. When asked it was for "legal" reasons.
Property owner's insurance also sends their legal information and billing updates via letter.
Property tax updates and bills also come exclusively on paper. Even though they have my email and communicate non-billing and legal stuff over that.
I made an inquiry with local Bauamt about something and asked for email communication. The email I got said: "You've requested communication via email. So we're letting you know that we've sent a response to your question via letter.
USPS has been a disaster by comparison. We've been dealing with actual criminal elements in my local post office stealing and tampering with mail. I don't know of anyone in my community who hasnt filed a complaint with the USPIS. I don't even care about the packages anymore. I'm more worried about the tax forms, vehicle titles and replacement credit cards getting lost now.
Any merchant who only offers USPS or uses them as the last mile of delivery is a no-go for me. Amazon is the most stressful experience because you never know. The best approach I've found is to use their pickup box and batch things to coincide with my grocery trip.
I'm not familiar with US law in this, but I know the FBI has stepped in for some cases that are over state borders. Anecdotally, that is.
And I also know that private citizens can bring criminal cases to the prosecutor if the police aren't. If there are a lot of you, it wouldn't be too expensive to jointly hire a lawyer. Because this is absolutely not normal, at all.
And it should be squashed, and hard, with people led away in cuffs.
If this problem is persistent, the local city should get involved too.
The issue is that management of all shipping companies is expected to run their services 100% resource-efficiently and without any slack (wasted money). The problem is that the only way to do that you are essentially constantly above capacity.
I had certain services where literally every second month a new unfortunate subcontractor with yet another beaten up white van would show up. Needless to say their service quality was absolutely shit, since those subcontractors didn't even get a chance to learn how to do the job properly.
Extracting as much money as possible from shipping isn't the same as providing a good service. Reliable service needs redundancy and underutilized capacity. If your laptops CPU was constantly at 150% load you wouldn't say "Great I am not wasting resources", you would get a beefier CPU that gives you enough headroom for your daily tasks.
> Two days. In 165 years.
Going back to the start of the article, just like the Pony Express was closed due to telegrams, letter speed is not that important most of the time thanks to phones, internet, etc.
It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.
1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency
2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot
That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."
Plus the trend being fixated on is between 2022 and 2024/2025. I feel like the author is being abit disingenuous here by not acknowledging the black swan in the room with those numbers
