The United States Postal Service wants you! KELO reports that the USPS is looking for clerks, carriers, and handlers to handle the Christmas rush in Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Huron, and Chamberlain.
Given South Dakota’s tight job market, the Postal Service may struggle to recruit enough skilled workers, just like the rest of our employers. But if you’re looking for a seasonal gig (November 14 through January 8), here are a few reasons you should apply at the Post Office:
- $12 to $15.63 per hour—that’s pretty good starting money for a temporary gig, and better than you’ll find elsewhere.
- Fresh air: land a carrier gig, and you have the joy of getting outside, walking around town, and seeing your neighbors every day! Just wear longjohns and keep moving.
- Uniforms—if the apocalypse happens while you’re on shift, people will look at you and respect your authority. (Did Kevin Costner wear an Arby’s uniform to bring hope to survivors of the collapse of civilization? No!)
- Less caterwauling—do you really want to work in store with spoiled brats fighting over tacky toys (and that’s just the grown-ups acting like savages on Black Friday)?
- Service—you could sign up with some retailer, put your soul on pause, and spend the holidays reciting manipulative messages to trick people into buying things they don’t need. Or you could serve your country and make sure cards and letters and Grandma’s homemade scarves get where they need to go.
Don’t spend Christmas being a corporate tool—serve your neighbors and deliver the mail!
Actually, UPS pays as well or better and you’ll start in October and porbably get more hours in.
In a way, Black Friday shopping and USPS go hand in hand. Some people shop locally on Black Friday to try and get presents, and if they are successful in getting that present, they send that to others via USPS or some other carrier. Others shop online instead, usually having their products delivered via the mail.
It’s better to shop locally run businesses than national chains on Black Friday, but there is always going to be people camping out for days trying to get their hands on an Xbox One or a 60” 4K Ultra High Def TV. But if they need to send their gifts they fought crowds for, at least they have the USPS to do so. ;)
An article in today’s DenPost was saying how our Christmas shopping may be slower because there is such a shortage of workers in almost all jobs in CO. Not trying to lure SoDak-er’s to move here. Lord knows there’s enough coming already … you know, for the scenery. (rents are way up and so is apartment construction with 50,000 set to open, which is still not enough)
Post office service is getting ridiculously slow. Because even local mail from Winner is sorted in Sioux Falls, it now takes 3 days for a letter mailed in the local slot to get 15 miles north of Winner. Priority mail now takes 3 or 4 days to get from Rapid City to Winner. Even plain old first class mail a couple years or so ago took only one day.
Rural routes and city routes used to have an obvious route number in the address. Now it is the uniform address system and the route sorting is done in Sioux Falls. I don’t know how many local letters are sent here, but my guess is the extra sorting time for all of them might be 15 minutes.
The local post office also has another obvious bit of stupidity in design. The handicap accessibility ramp exactly parallels the sidewalk. It should start on the south end even with the sidewalk instead of the north end also even with the sidewalk. The ramp is twice as long as necessary which forces people who are handicapped to walk twice as far as is necessary. I don’t know if it was an exaggeration or not, but a retired postal employee here claimed they had to get approval from Kansas City to change a light bulb.
When I was a kid near Volin, SD, the local mail went from the local mail slot to the correct postoffice box in a matter of seconds or minutes. Then, the US Post Office put a chunk of money into a Sioux Falls sorting system. Then the local mail had to be bagged with all the other mail. Put on a train to Yankton, and from there to Sioux Falls and then back to Volin. The delay resulted because the system in Sioux Falls was not sorting enough mail, so to justify keeping that running, the PO had all the mail moved through it whether or not it made a bit of sense.
Instead of US Congress screwing around voting for the 50th or so repeal of Obamacare and going after Planned Parenthood on the basis of cut and pasted video, the worthless SOB’s should be fixing the damn Post Office self-inflicted mediocrity and lunacy.
All the local Post Office people do good work and are friendly and helpful. It is a shame their good work is diminished by idiocy in the overall management of the system which gets worse every year instead of better.
I do not understand why businesses in Rapid City and Pierre are not raising hell, because this Post Office inefficiency in the name of foolish modernity harms business communications as well as personal mail.
The problems for the postal service began with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (109th Congress) which required them to set aside enormous amounts of money each year. It led to the cutbacks in service and needs to be repealed.
There is a serious flaw in starting to work for the Post Office, at least in Rapid City.
My niece was hired by USPS a few months ago and successfully completed her training and probationary period. Although she started at $14 per hour she was not getting enough hours to sustain a living. She was only working two or three days a week and told to try and hold on until the holidays when she could “possibly” get a permanent route.
I don’t know how others survive on those limited hours and maintain a home, but it definitely was not for her.
Taking a second job is out of the question since you have to be available for whenever you are called.
Doug, I thought the mail is sorted in Huron before it heads to Winner. I had some eBay packages come in the mail lately, each with tracking. Usually before getting to my PO Box, they get sorted in Sioux Falls, then they head towards Huron. One of the helpful ladies at the window also mentioned this one day when discussing package tracking.
Sometimes I wonder why Congress never seems to bring up privatizing the USPS, such as letting either FedEx or UPS take control of it. Privatization may not be the best answer, but with the USPS’s fortunes continuing to decline, I envision that option could be talked about at some point in the future. The UK privatized their state-owned Royal Mail for the most part, but I’m not sure if that has made service better or worse for them.
http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/2927#.Vgmqf8uFOM8
If the link doesn’t work just search “jim hightower post office”. This is an interesting piece from 2012 about the supposed problems the USPS has been having for the past several years. According to Hightower, the USPS is working just fine and any problems it has are being created by politicians in the hands of corporate entities who want the system to fail so they can step in and get themselves a piece of the action. The article even mentions a few ideas that Bernie Sanders was suggesting at the time. Detractors say the post office isn’t making a profit the way it is now run; well, it isn’t supposed to. Not all basic services need to be lining someone’s pocket.
Wade, et al,
My comment on 3 days from RC to Winner for priority mail was based on what a clerk at RC Post Office said. Apparently he or she read “Thursday” instead of “Tuesday”. The package arrived here today (Tuesday) just one day after mailing. Sorry about that. However long it takes for mail to get from A to B, it is sort of amazing that as few delivery errors are actually made. As far as we remember, some of our mail has been delayed too long, but only one check sent by the mail (to REA Coop) has completely disappeared in the mail in over 40 years of mailing.
Unfortunately, the current sorting system has doubled or tripled time to send first class letters. The results are strange. Three days to get 15 miles in the same post office for sender and receiver, and 3 days to get to eastern Iowa, and 3 days to Florida. Mailing to the NW or SW is however significantly slower.