The communal mailboxes in the Cedar Glen subdivision are in really bad shape. They're rusted and broken, and the fine folks at the U.S. Postal Service say they'll replace them. But the post office won't do what the neighbors want, which is split up the clusters of mailboxes and give the folks individual mail delivery. The Naperville postmaster says once a delivery method has been established, it's virtually impossible to change.
Ah, good old bureaucracy.
What do you think? Is it reasonable for the Cedar Glen residents to want a different method of delivery? Is it reasonable for the Postal Service to turn down the request? What's been your experience dealing with the post office in Naperville, for any reason? Are you satisfied with the service you've received from the Postal Service?
I don't think you'll find anyone who won't agree with you on all the bureaucracy at the USPS -- it's probably almost an understatement. I certainly can understand why the Cedar Glen residents want curbside delivery -- you'd only have to walk to the end of your driveway to get the mail instead of the the "cluster" location.
I've enjoyed both cluster service as well as curbside delivery. I personally prefer cluster only because the mailbox is locked. Too often I have seen curbside boxes run or knocked over -- sometimes maliciously and mail is strewn across the street. On the other hand, my current situation is that I have a cluster box and the only problem I have with that is my mail is often misdelivered to my next door neighbor's mailbox. Unfortunately for me, the neighbor doesn't bring it over right away -- they let it sit at their house for a couple of weeks. Missed out on a party invitation because of this and almost was late for the electric bill too.
I do think the least the USPS can do is keep these cluster boxes is good repair and good appearance. Since it is more convenient for the USPS to deliver to clusters, they really should take care of the boxes.
Satisfied with the USPS? GahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I could write a BOOK on dealing with the wacky crap the Naperville Post Office has put my family and friends through in the last 30 years. A few favorite stories of mine-
A friend actually managed to complain enough to city council to get them to dispatch some workers to attend to this cavernous pot hole that could swallow a child whole which had gone several years without repair and was getting worse and worse. Workers came by to survey the damage and deemed the gaping road sinkhole a hazard and surrounded it with a set of road cones. A week or two later they returned and filled the hole, and put a fresh splotch of asphalt on top of it, leaving the road cones up for another week, presumably to protect it while the patch job set since the pothole was so ridiculously huge.
The day the road cones went up, mail delivery for the entire street stopped. For the first few days my friend wrote it off as some random hiccup in the mail service, eventually this lead to investigating the cause at the post office. Why had their mail been stopped? The carrier listed the road as CLOSED, and as such, an entire swath of mailboxes unreachable. Three road cones covering no more than four square feet of road on the side of one lane of a residential street with so little traffic you could play an uninterrupted ten frame game of street bowling if you had the inclination was "CLOSED"!
As my friend put it, when she went to the post office to complain about this, she felt like she was on a hidden camera show and at any minute Dom DeLuise was going to pop out with an epic "GOTCHA!" but it never came. Apparently, the "swerve around obstructions in the road" is not a maneuver that is taught at postal carrier boot camp.
My niece lives in one of the small apartment buildings near North Central College. I went out to lunch with her not too long ago and we returned to a scribbled note slid under the door to the common area where the mailboxes are which read something along the lines of, "KEY BROKE U NED GIV 1 2 POST OFICE". She called her landlord, volunteered a spare key she had, and planned to drop it off at the post office on the way to work that evening just to get it taken care of. She spent over an hour at the post office arguing with all levels of grunts behind the counter trying to get anyone to take the new key. Apparently, even though the post office had been delivering mail to a locked common area with a key for god only knows how long (her building is ancient) this delivery was completely against post office policy and despite what you may have seen, mail carriers are forbidden to carry any keys to common areas.
Eventually she gave up and just stalked her mail carrier the next day to give him the key. When asked about this mysterious policy of never carrying any keys to common areas, the mail carrier responded- "Huh? I've got at least 20 keys on this key ring here for common areas like yours."
Finally, my personal favorite, the Naperville post office has assured me numerous times that I do not live in Naperville, and as such, they cannot continue delivering mail to me.
When we originally moved to the area aeons ago we had a Plainfield rural route address for our mail box on the side of a (then) barely gravel covered dirt road. When we had Plainfield mail service we never had a single issue. You could set your watch by the arrival of the mail carrier, and if we ever received a package which was too large to fit in the mailbox, they would ring our doorbell and leave it on the doorstep. Truly top notch service.
In the late 80's or early 90's we lost our Plainfield rural route and instead gained a Naperville street address along with all the other wonderful things that come with living in Naperville. Since then it has been a never-ending battle where every few years the post office will just up and decide to stop delivering mail to us since we can't possibly live in Naperville! This usually results in an argument which doesn't stop until you get to the post master of the Naperville main office. During these periods of them deciding we're not Naperville postal customers, mail will be returned to sender covered in question marks, held in limbo at the Naperville post office, forwarded to the Plainfield post office covered in question marks THEN returned to sender, and a bunch of other goofy junk.
Plainfield can't deliver mail to us because according to our address we now live in Naperville. Naperville mail service, when it actually gets delivered, is so spotty that we've grown to not rely on it at all. Anything we care about has been delivered to a P.O. Box in Plainfield. God forbid we actually get a USPS priority mail or other package which either is too big to fit in the box because that's NEVER going to get delivered. Long gone are the days of a friendly doorbell ring and a package placed on the front step. Our mail carrier now has a cloaking device straight out of Area 51 so he is not only impossible to see when he arrives, but he leaves the "Sorry we missed you!" post card in our mailbox with notes that say things like "Honked horn, no answer." So far the best we've been able to determine is the horn on the mail truck sounds at an ultrasonic frequency and if I want to receive packages I need to get some kind of trained USPS spotting dog to alert us of his presence.
My favorite package delivery though, and something I have an ancient polaroid photo of somewhere is when I responded to the "Sorry we missed you!" card with "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LEAVE PACKAGE!!!" which resulted in the package literally being thrown from the mail truck in to our front yard. Now that is what I call SERVICE!
Don't mistake this post as a rant, as I assure you it's not. The Naperville post office is a constant source of comedy that I've grown to love over the years. If my family had remained a Plainfield rural route customer, I wouldn't have enough material to write a book on with my downright hilarious misadventures with the Naperville post office. Keep it up, valiant postal workers, and never forget your oath-
THE SLOWER YOU WORK, THE LESS YOU HAVE TO DO!
In regards to these poor souls attempting to get curbside instead of cluster delivery. Tell you what, I'll go grab a tea spoon and start digging to China. I'll be eating egg rolls on the Great Wall before they convince the Naperville post office to do more work than the bare minimum required.
Cluster mailboxes are one of the worst and by far ugliest ideas dreamt up by a government bureaucracy. The time, gas, and other savings of cluster mailboxes vs curbside mail boxes is really trivial when one considers what one of these rusting hulks sitting in front of your home can do to your property values.
We all pay the same price to use the mail... with the understanding that large volume business do get discounts. However the residential side of delivery has at least three very different standards on how how we receive mail at our homes. Three or more different delivery models is not a very good way to treat your customers. Certainly not something UPS, FedEx, or even the pizza guy could get away with. Why should the USPS be any different?
I'm not sure about what everyone else is experiencing in their mailbox. In mine there is junk mail, catalogs, bills, the occasional card, invitation, or other correspondence. I've worked hard to get off the junk mail list so there isn't really much of that any more. More and more of my bills are available on line so I don't really even have to receive the paper copies anymore so I probably should start killing those off one by one as well. I pay all bills online so I don't mail much of anything these days. One book of stamps now lasts most of the year.
The way my needs of the postal service have changed over the past 10 years or so I can honestly say that I, for one, no longer need or desire daily postal delivery and I operate a business from my home to boot. There isn't anything I receive from the USPS that another day or two would make any significant difference to me. I don't think I'm alone on this either.
For that reason it has always seemed to make more sense to me that if the USPS wanted to save money they could cut their entire residential delivery cost in half by going to a 3 times per week delivery model. "Mailman Sam" could bring the mail on my route on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Then "mailman Sam" could work an entirely different route on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
With all of this cost savings and better utilization of manpower maybe the USPS could go back to providing all residential mail routes with curbside delivery. Permanently eliminating cluster mailboxes would not only eliminate the capital, operational, and maintenance cost from the USPS by transferring the cost of curbside mailboxes to the residents; it would also help improve the neighborhood aesthetics in a lot of communities.
I don't want to walk to the end of my driveway. I want the mailbox within reach of my front door. Where does it end?
But I do agree that the PO should maintain those boxes, but I know for a fact they aren't going to change their delivery habits. If it is that serious of an issue, you should have considered it in your home purchase.
It's the freakin' mail. I see that this homeowners' association, like most, must be running low on things to complain about. I live in an apartment building with a cluster mailbox, and I personally prefer having a locked box, but maybe that's just me.
The Naperville post office delivers a magazine and an out-of-town newspaper erratically. I've written letters to the postmaster about it and nobody ever gets back to me. Sometimes random things get returned to sender, but the world has never ended because of it. The majority of my mail shows up without any trouble.
The residents of Cedar Glen deserve to have mail delivered to their curbside. Why should they be the only residents in Naperville that have Cluster Boxes? Why can't they have the "luxury" of walking to the end of their driveway to get their mail? Why should they have to walk across the street or walk a half a mile to get their mail? They shouldn't have to. For the residents of Naperville who already have curbside delivery, its easy for us to say that its not a big deal. But when you really think about it, these residents (including children) are crossing main streets to get their mail. The cluster boxes can also ruin the look of a subdivision, especially if they are not kept up. I hope the Post Office makes the right decision and replaces the cluster boxes with individual mail boxes. That would be the right thing to do. And I do not feel sorry for the postal carrier who has to make extra stops with his prepaid gas vehicle.
to "Oh come on people"
Your second sentence in your post, negates the rest of your point.
the only residents in Naperville that have Cluster Boxes
what hole are you living in?
I am proud of Cedar Glen to stand up for themselves and to do what is right for their community. The cluster boxes been an ongoing issue for the last 22 years. The President of Cedar Glen is standing up for what she believes in and is fighting on behalf of her neighboors and friends. I congratulate her for taking time out of her personal life and making her volunteer job a priority at this time. For those who made rude remarks, I feel sorry for you. Naperville is a wonderful place to live and the reason why we live here is because of the community. Everyone is so kind and generous and cares for one another - at least I thought so. Its sad to see that there are still some people out there who don't care about people wanting to make a difference and to improve our neighboords. If we don't stick together on these type of issues and constantly work on making Naperville a better place to live, than we don't deserve to be in the number 3 spot for the "Best Place to Live."
>>Are you satisfied with the service you've received from the Postal Service?
My answer is no, and we don't even have cluster mailboxes. We live in the Brookdale subdivision and have a curbside mailbox. A few months ago, our mail carrier of 20+ years informed us that he would no longer be assigned to our street. The post office was re-distributing routes to improve efficiency. Since then our mail service has gotten worse. Items we receive weekly now arrive 1-2 days later than they used to. And if there's a package that doesn't fit in the mailbox, the carrier drops it on the front step without even ringing the bell. Our former carrier used to leave small packages between the screen door and front door, just as FedEx and UPS do. In the past I've complained to the USPS about mangled and misdelivered mail, but no one ever returns my calls/letters. I'd love to see a feature on problems with mail delivery in general--maybe then the officials at USPS would take notices.
Don't complain to the post office! A friend who owned a small business did that, and lo and behold, their business's mail (both in-going and out) was "lost", "undeliverable," - you name it. The mail carrier on the route played dumb all the time, and went on to complain to her superior that she was being harassed. It took moving their business to another suburb for their mail problems to finally be over.
I do think it's reasonable of this subdivision to request another form of mail service. If they still have the boxes, the USPS should fully maintain them on a regular basis.
I have lived where there were cluster boxes (in a subdivision as opposed to apartment/condo building), a drive-up mail box at the end of the driveway, and a walking route delivery with the mailbox attached to the house. Each one has different advantages, but I have to say, the old-fashioned walking route was the best. We got to know our mail carrier well. He always had a minute to chat, mail delivery was dependable, and the mail wasn't ripped or otherwise mangled as mentioned above. He was proud to do the job he did, which is missing from the USPS of today.
My wife and I moved into the Cedar Glenn development in 1989 from a community in Ohio where individual mail boxes were the norm. Cluster boxes in Cedar Glenn were strange at first but I've actually grown to appreciate them as a form of gathering around the water cooler.
We have met and have become freinds with several neihbors as a result of meeting them at the cluster mail box. I can recall having conversations with "fellow mail fetchers" whom I've introduced to other neihbors who have lingered and talked while sorting through the junk mail.
I also appreciate the efficiancy of the postal service only having to make one quick stop to supply the mail for a large cluster of houses. That has to save a considerable amount of time and gas.
Two last points in favor of the cluster boxes. I like being free of the maintenace of a individual mailbox. And lastly, I asked my next door neibor if he minds the cluster box in his front yard and he responded,no, he has the best of both worlds in this debate! Ceep The Clusters!
I'm wondering why the $2+ million homes at the old Calvery School property don't have cluster mailboxes? It doesn't make any sense.
I have been a resident for nearly two decades now. I understand that there are other neighborhoods with this issue as well. Let me add something here left out of publication.
Heres the issue, the post office broke a promise, they lied. The fact of the matter is, they said once the neighborhood was complete, then they would of given us regular mail boxes. It is for that reason, they don't deserve respect. I don't blame the carriers, I have heard some of them say the cluster boxes aren't fair for them, because the markings are too hard to understand the address, resulting in stuff occasionally going to the wrong address. The least they can do is get better non-rusting cluster boxes for everybody, and I mean everybody who already has them in the nation. Its the 21st centuy we got better looking materials and designs now. So c'mon. At least compromise. However those who still wish to lose the cluster box, lose your privacy, lose the privelege of being allowed to lock your mail with a key, lose the freedom of having somewhere to shovel your snow where your driveway hits the curb.