On Mailboxes (et cetera)

I don’t often think about mailboxes. But sometimes, mailboxes make me think about them. Like when my old one has reached such a point of sorrowfulness that it is time for a new one. 

Did you know that mailboxes were not a thing until 1863 when the U.S. Post Office began offering free city delivery? Before that, most people had to go to the local post office to retrieve their mail. Rural free delivery got its start around the beginning of the 20th century. By 1923, it became mandatory for each residence to be possessed of a mailbox. It seems that by then, letter carriers were wasting an hour and a half of their workdays waiting on front porches for people to answer the door for their mail.

I grew up in a house built in the late 1950’s. I had no idea how spoiled I was because our mailbox hung on our front porch, right next to the front door. I revisited this luxury in my first house, a small bungalow built in the city in the late 1920’s. Luxury is never having to leave your house to check for mail.  Actually, my late mother-in-law experienced an even higher level of luxury with a mail slot that dropped mail into a basket right inside the house, without the need to so much as open a door!

I realized my loss right away when we moved to our current house. It was evidently a “rural” subdivision when it was built in the late 50’s, because now we have a mailbox post at the end of the driveway. All of the mailboxes are on the same side of the road, so my neighbors across the street and I each experience a trade-off. I don’t have to cross the street to check my mail, but they don’t have to trim around, landscape or live with mailboxes in their front lawns. I have later learned that owners of homes in newer subdivisions must drive their cars or walk to a centralized mailbox station where every box in the neighborhood congregates, so I guess I will not gripe at the need to don a coat and some shoes in order to check my mail on a weekend.

Mailboxes do not get a lot of love from their owners. I learned this when I would occasionally deliver notices for my neighborhood association. People will put up with mailboxes in horrible condition, and I realized that my own was quite nice. Until someone mowed it down with a car one night. They left some of their car in my lawn (including part of a “Mercury” nameplate” but I never found out who it was. That was why I understood when a friend replaced his mowed-down mailbox post with a railroad tie that he slipped into a chest-deep hole in the ground. It must have worked because nobody ever hit it again.

I put a lot of effort into my next mailbox, painting it with automotive paint in a color that complimented our house – “Dark Bronzemist Metallic” that graced quite a few General Motors cars back in the day. That box probably went up in the mid to late 00’s and I am pleased to announce that my paint finish outlasted the finish on the numbers I stuck to it, which had become virtually unreadable. Then the metal gave way around the hinges. Again, that is, after I replaced rivet-hinges with nuts and bolts.

For awhile I became more like my neighbors, and had what I thought to be a quite workable system. When I collected my mail, I would hang the un-attached lid to the front of the box, where it would stay until our letter carrier arrived the next day. She would then place the lid inside the box with the mail. Whether that was just easier or whether she lacks the finesse or patience to hang a loose lid I cannot say. The system apparently worked better for me than for her because one day she left a notice saying that “your mailbox needs attention”. There was no deadline to fix it, but the implication was that she would stop delivering mail soon if I did not spend some quality time with my mailbox. I resisted the temptation to suggest that she look at the condition of some of the equipment maintained by the Post Office.

I’ll bet you don’t know who designed the most common mailbox in the US – an engineer and postal employee named Roy J. Joroleman invented the tunnel-shaped mailbox in 1915. The curved top kept rain or snow from pooling and leaking into the box so that your mail could stay all comfy and dry. The one defect to this design is that there is no way to know when you have mail, without trudging to the end of the driveway to look. A second flag would have been nice.

Because I am of the more-is-better school of thought, we opted for the extra-large parcel-sized Joroleman box. Because . . . it’s more convenient to walk to the street than to my front door to retrieve mid-sized parcels that get delivered? Maybe I should have re-thought and went with the smaller version. And given the weather and my time constraints, we are sticking with Henry Ford factory-black this time. At least for now.

The variety of mailboxes is much larger now than what it was the last time I went shopping for one. I had to hit a second store to find one like I had (large-sized black metal box with a red metal flag). Now, plastic boxes are common and there is even a large variety of boxes with locks to prevent mail theft. It must be true that things are different today. Another reason things are different today was that my new mailbox cost me more than $60! I’m sorry, but I come from a world where a new mailbox should not cost more than about $35. And I want to go back there.

After buying the new box and some new gold numbers to stick onto it (just gold colored numbers – I couldn’t afford real gold ones after paying for the box itself), I finally installed my new mailbox one rainy Friday evening in advance of a nasty cold snap that was sure to make the job worse. After all that effort, I was a little disappointed that my letter carrier did not leave me a thank-you note. I only went to all that effort for her sake. But perhaps this is what happens when you don’t leave the $20 kickback to the unionized postal employee in response to the cute little Christmas greeting that helpfully provides her name.

So now I am all set to receive smaller deliveries of online orders as well as the never-ending stream of junk mail. At least it will all stay warm and dry, if still subject to theives.

Author’s Note: None of the mailboxes depicted in this post are my own, but were from random photos found online and are for illustrative purposes only. Although the quality of the landscaping in the third photo is not far from that around my own mailbox post. Anyone who wishes to find my house number will have to look harder than just reading this blog post.

38 thoughts on “On Mailboxes (et cetera)”

  1. You have reminded me about the need to replace my mailbox. It’s a shame, too, as it is fabricated sheet metal of a delightfully thick gauge, welded to square steel tube. It had been rather stout.

    The young man in the Mercury Grand Marquis (Mercury’s must have a thing for mailboxes) tore up his car when he hit my box, but my box was unaffected.

    The Chevrolet 3500 that backed into it is what did it in. Plus rust at ground level. It’s been sitting about 15 degrees off vertical for about two years now. It will flop around in a stiff breeze.

    Perhaps I need to obtain a crankshaft from a Mack truck and have somebody weld a mailbox to one end. I can then mount the entire thing in reinforced concrete. That should last a few years.

    Hopefully your new box will last as long as its predecessor. And if you put on a coat and shoes to go to the mailbox, you are an overachiever. My wife shamed me for going out to our mailbox in my underwear. It was dark, I could have seen the cars coming. We are in an obscure area, anyway.

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    • I have not seen a crankshaft used for a mailbox post in a long time! I would imagine it was ones from the old straight 8s that were really good for that application, so maybe that is why we don’t see them anymore. Well, that and homeowner’s associations.

      Thinking back, I mis-remembered my friend’s project with the railroad ties. Someone had smashed his mailbox with a ball bat, and he buried TWO railroad ties in the ground, about a foot apart. About a foot down from the top, he put a piece of 2×4 between them and mounted the box, which was now shielded on both sides by the railroad ties. It is still there.

      My neighbor across the street and I kind of cooperate on the mailbox post – someone did hit it a few years ago (and somehow my own mailbox was mostly unscathed). It is one of those wooden posts made from 4×4, but is a little rickety after my neighbor did what he could to re-assemble it. Neither of us cares enough to try to replace it. I suppose if someone hits it again, the answer will be to saw it off at ground level and sink a new one a foot or so away.

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  2. Long time apartment dweller here, and as such, when I change cities, perusing the mail boxes at any possible rental for security and quality is of prime importance. I will say, due to the needs of my freelance endeavors, where I can be getting checks in the mail, as well as not be around for a few weeks, I actually had a post office box in different cities from about 1980 to just recently. It was a great thing to not have to worry about your mail when you are gone, or go through the process of stopping and starting your mail and hoping that works out in the ever devolving quality of mail services.

    I have to stop here, because you’ve opened a can of worms here by even talking about anything mail oriented! Mail theft out of mail boxes, assaults on mail carriers, and the ineptitude of the actual post office with hiring substandard employees who they also catch stealing the mail, is rampant and non-stop where I live! Never in my life have I spent more money on stamps with less actual quality of service!

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    • My recent life inside of postal distribution facilities shows how open the mail is to bad actors if they get hired. Virtually everything mailed in central Indiana is sent to Indianapolis for sorting, then shipped out to where it needs to go. Smaller cities like Lafayette or Bloomington do not sort mail even when it is sent from and to be received within that city.

      I guess mail is like everything else – some systems were designed for the high-trust society we used to have in most communities. Those systems do not fare well when honesty is no longer something that can be safely assumed. I remember being told as a kid that messing with the mail was a Federal crime. It scared me, but I don’t think it scares too many bad actors today.

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  3. The likelihood of the postal service delivering anything other than the never-ending stream of junk mail is low. Even lower is the likelihood their delivering anything other than the never-ending stream of junk mail I’m actually interested in receiving.

    To me, the USPS is the daily interaction with government bureaucracy and inefficiency. I detest the postal service. When our apartment complex stopped taking packages at the office (and didn’t install parcel lockers for some frickin’ reason), we now get parcel slips letting us know the stuff we actually want that has the misfortune of being delivered via USPS is now in mail jail.

    Once we leave this city, I may opt to simply route all my mail back to a post office box where we can just go pick it up once a month, bring it back to the house, and put it all in an industrial shredder.

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      • Haha – I presume you mean people like me who are not part of the postal workers union? 🙂

        That reminds me of an odd situation I have been experiencing. There are “spotters” at these facilities who move trailers where they need to go. I presume they are in the union. But when there are not enough of them, we drivers are told to hook to trailers in the storage lots and move them to the bay for loading so we can proceed with our scheduled trip. More than once I have thought about asking the employees in the transfer office (whom I also presume are union members) why it is OK to ask a non-union guy like me to do union work? But then again, that is the kind of “lawyer brain” that gets me in trouble sometimes in this new life. It is best to just smile and say OK.

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      • I may have realized, after slagging off the postal service in my comment, that I might’ve inadvertently included you, and people in your role — and that’s most definitely not the case.

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    • The modern postal service seems to exist for a world that has gone away. First-Class mail (its real reason for being) has become rare, other than birthday and holiday cards that folks send. They seem to have priced themselves out of much mailing – I think of my old law offices that used to receive and send tons of mail, but that was down to a relative trickle by the time I retired. Junk mail pays the bills, and then they try to compete for parcel business with companies that were set up solely for that purpose and are more efficient at it.

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      • It’s important to note that a lot of valuable first class mail, like social security, and Medicare updates, and changes, are sent to you via the mail. In fact, they tell retirees never to respond to what is most likely scammers via telephone calls saying they are from social security or Medicare, they will rarely, if ever, contact you via phone. I still pay bills via mail, altho now I fill out checks with a pigmented pen, to keep it from being stolen and “washed” (and only put it in a mailbox right before scheduled pickup) mostly because residential internet access is highly expensive in my state (no competition), and some of my services that want me to pay via internet, also want to charge me more for the privilege, or want direct access to my bank accounts to charge me at will without my OKing it! I see myself using the mail for years to come, unless something else happens. I will be more likely to move someplace with safer mail.

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      • Yes, this is an accurate assessment of the situation, as I see it. It’s like holding on to something that’s more or less served its purpose.

        When the Post Master mentions prices going up and services going down, I think — you will work hard at making things worse, but not put the same amount of effort into rectifying the deficiencies that make your product less viable to customers? This is why I consider it an example of government largess; and, for the most part, utterly useless. The one job they have, they can’t get right.

        I’ve had lenses shipped from Japan by private carriers arrive at my door in fewer than 2 days, while the PO can’t manage to get a card from my house to my brother’s (a 6-hour drive) as efficiently.

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  4. We have not had home mail delivery since we moved to this house in Suburbia 25 years ago. We did however, have a mailbox, hung on the brick wall on our porch, that was used for a whole variety of things delivered here. The first one we had rusted, so it was replaced with one that had a lock on it. That lasted a good number of years, but then flaking paint on its surface led to its doom. When we started looking for a replacement, we noticed they were very sparse in the stores. We then surveyed the neighbourhood and noticed that almost nobody else had one any more. So I plugged the holes in the mortar and that was that.
    Our mail delivery here goes to a community delivery box, that Canada Post installed every few blocks or so, and serves just our local street, say, within walking distance. Walking distance for you, not them. You get a little 6″ by 6″ (maybe slot) into which they jam your stuff. Anything bigger, you get a notification to go get it at the postal outlet at the drugstore or dollar store.
    In the house where I grew up, we had a milk chute at the side of the house, where mail was delivered. Right to the house. I bet they still get door to door delivery in that neighbourhood.

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    • I think you are right – here in the US the mail delivery seems to vary with the age of the neighborhood. Old city houses still have carriers that walk onto every porch and put mail in the box by the front door. I’ll bet they really hate neighborhoods like the one where I grew up, with boxes on the front porch but with houses spaced much farther apart and set much farther back from the street. When I was a kid, they used Cushman three-wheeled scooters that they could wheel up the driveway, then to a U turn to head out again. The last I remember, our letter carrier would walk through the yards between houses, which would have been a high walking-to-mailbox ratio.

      It is interesting that there seems to be a prohibition (probably legal) on stopping the kind of service that was previously offered.

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      • I think it is more expectation of those that have had home delivery all the time, that they feel entitled to have it continued. However, with shrinking funding/revenues at Canada Post, and already using outsource contractors heavily, I think the day will come for them too.

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  5. My grandpa used to have to drive a half-mile down the road to get to his mailbox.When I was very young we had a mail slot but no basket attached. I don’t think we got as much junk mail back then, but that may just be a perception.

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  6. Interesting post and comments! At our winter place in Arizona, we pick up our mail at a central post office that serves our whole community. There are also ‘alpha boxes’ along one interior wall – just slots where you can put mail for anyone else in the community without having to attach postage. The post office also serves as a place to meet and greet at about 4 PM when the mail has just been sorted! Last, but not least, there is a bench near the front door where you can leave the oranges and grapefruits that your fruit trees grow too many of…
    At our rural home place in Alberta, there is a bank of boxes about a mile from our home. Each box was locked with a padlock but these weren’t much of a deterrent to people with bolt cutters. These boxes were replaced a few years ago by Canada Posts ‘new and improved’ boxes, which are keyed.

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    • That’s interesting that the post office in Arizona will sort mail that is dropped off with no postage! I wonder if that is the way things work in small, close-knit communities. I have never lived in an area like that. As for your Canadian system, I’ll bet the American Postal Service would LOVE to ditch house-to-house delivery in favor of big banks of boxes.

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  7. I always liked the “Approved by the Postmaster General” standard sheet metal boxes, they appeal to my sense of order. I think the USPS is partially hobbled by their mandate, do they not deliver 7 days per week? Given the amount of “real” mail these days I’d think that 4 would be fine and they’d save a pile of money. That’s what the DDPS would do anyway.

    You should try angling for tips from the various warehouses you visit come Christmas. It could be a thing!

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    • Haha, it’s hard enough to get a smile from some of the postal folks there, let alone a tip! I should add that most of them are quite decent to work with for our short interactions.

      The USPS does 6 day a week delivery. They want to do away with Saturday delivery, but there is a ton of pushback. When I started lawyering, downtown addresses got both morning afternoon deliveries.

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      • When I had my freelance advertising photography studio in the downtown district of my town in the 80’s, there was also morning and afternoon mail delivery! As we used to say, just like England!

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  8. When we moved to the States in 1966, my parents were shocked to find there was mail delivery on Saturday and even on Sundays during the Christmas holidays. I just Googled and Canada still has no mail delivery on weekends. In Canada, we called the mail carriers “Postees” (which sounds like some type of breakfast cereal). Gee, I have had my oblong-shaped mailbox forever, probably 30 years. It is a small house, so a small mailbox works well, (unlike my neighbor who has a smaller house than mine and has a huge mailbox on a wide white post near her front door). Proportion is important! I’ve brought home a few nice door wreaths in my day only to realize what looked nice at the store, simply overwhelmed the front door and looked downright silly. I have a nice mail carrier, whom I finally had to ask to shut the lid – he always leaves it open and yes, I work from home and could dash out and get it, but he told me once he varies his delivery times because he has an 11-mile route and doesn’t want to get bored, so he starts on different streets every day. I’ve never tipped with money, just chocolate treats at Christmas and Easter.

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    • I love “Postees” – it sounds so British!

      Our carrier never varies the route, and we must be near the end of it because our mail never shows up until after 5 pm. When things are busy, it can be around 7, so she must start late.

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      • She must be a robot! My mail guy (and this is important, it’s if you actually have an assigned carrier!) sometimes does the route frontwards, sometimes backwards, as a change-up, so he’s not bored!

        If you don’t have an assigned carrier, and I just went through two years of this, you might not get your mail at all! They “claim” that the postal union won’t let them hire temps, they want the overtime, so they divide your route up among other carriers, who do their section of it after their regular route, and this is key: “…if it’s not too late, or they’re too tired…”. Which means a lot of times, you don’t get your daily mail. This has resulted in some neighborhoods not getting deliveries for up to two or three days a week! When you talk to the post people, they claim the it’s not them, the managers won’t hire temps to save money. Talk to the managers, and they claim it’s the union.

        I will tell you the twenty years I’ve been looking at stats around the post system in This country, and nobody is to blame for anything that’s happening today except the post office, right down to the fact that for years, you couldn’t get a job at the post office without military service, which of course is the premier genius employment pool in the country!

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  9. My wife has that exact same old mailbox hanging next to our front door but she fills it with flowers. My son who lives in an old house in Arlington, Virginia, gets his mail delivered through the slot in the front door (same system we enjoyed when I was a kid). Now we have a locked box on the street which offers only a bit more security than neighbors who have not yet installed the lock boxes which also get broken into.

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    • If your old box on the house was actually used for mail once upon a time, you are the first one I have heard of who lives in a house where the postal service replaced house-to-house delivery with delivery at the street.

      I thought about the locking box, but kind of rebelled at the idea that I should have to lock up my mailbox. Then again, none of my neighbors use a locked box, so maybe I live in a better neighborhood than you do. 🙂

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      • No, my wife inherited the old box from some relative who for all I know bought it at a garage sale or antique shop. You do live in a better neighborhood than we do if you do not have a mail theft problem. Mailboxes are used for less with all the online options as noted. But I never even use the outgoing lock box after stolen key incidents. I still find postal service amazing. I can send something across the country in a few days for way less than a cup of coffee.

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  10. First, I disagree with the negative comments about the post office. I like getting delivery 6 days a week. I don’t mind so-called “junk mail”. I have sent many things and received many things, and have had very few problems over several decades. In fact, I’m amazed that it all works as well as it does!

    The problem is the U.S. Post Office is underfunded–the government spends billions on garbage that I disagree with, but won’t adequately fund the post office. So the P.O. has to keep raising the rates, and even then they’re still in the red!

    My house previously had the typical rural box on a post. But a Victorian house deserves a Victorian mailbox, so I picked this one up on Craigslist. Now we get delivery on the porch.

    Finally, I really appreciate the work you and the other postal workers do, getting the mail delivered. Much postal work seems very boring and repetitive to me–I’m glad there are people out there willing to do it!

    Victorian Mailbox

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    • Thanks for the kind words, both for me and for all the hard working postal folks (though hopefully you will agree that this description does not cover all of them). It is my understanding that going back to the early 1970s, the postal system got turned into an odd entity that is not really government but is not really private business either. It is supposed to be self-supporting, but the feds have to make up a shortfall at the end of the year (or when necessary). It seems to be a system that combines the worst of government and the worst of private enterprise.

      I am amazed that you could get the carriers to go to your porch for delivery after having the old curbside box.

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  11. BTW, my mail carrier claims that most of the post office current financial problems started when the republicans required them to pre fund retirement benefits, unlike most businesses and industries that that partially fund and also pay as they go. This requires them to pay vast amounts of money now that may not be needed because of usual attrition through early deaths and other misfortunes. Anyone who has been paying attention, as I have, has seen the death age dropping in the baby boom generation! Whether this is from a life of processed foods, or high stress, many of my friends died before my parents! Anyway, my carrier says there’s actually plenty of money based on the old system, and this new op is the thing that screwing everything up. I’m sure there’s a better explanation than the following, but here’s a short overview:

    https://www.thoughtco.com/postal-service-losses-by-year-3321043

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  12. JP, I want to comment here, that I really like your use of the term “high-trust-society”. It is a very good term for what has been a slide in the understanding of morals, ethics, and duty over the last 30 years. I remember having to manage a young, just out of college, gen-x group (these would have been people in their mid-20’s in the mid 1990’s), and being appalled that many of them took jobs they weren’t particularly interested in doing, and had no intention of doing to standards, and didn’t care if they got fired or not. Just a paycheck until they got something they wanted. The idea that if you agreed to do a job, regardless of your feeling if it was on your career path or not, you had to do it correctly, was totally lost on this group! I can say that this attitude was rapidly sliding downhill with the subsequent Gen-whatever’s (fill in your age group here). Also long on attitude, and very, very short on a broad based education that made them of any value. Starting about fifteen years ago or so, I started to realize that many, many jobs were based on the idea that they were assuming a level of ethics and performance that were not going to be generated by this generation, without redefining the system with far more oversight than in the past. I think the post office has fallen under this problem as well.

    I will also say, the junk mail delivery is a bane to everyone, including the post office. It a money-making devil they are in bed with. As a retired advertising guy, I can tell you the ad impression impact of junk flyers the postal carrier drops off at you box every week, is worthless, and not worth whatever little it costs to produce. In my apartment building, no one, and I mean no one, picks them up, and a few of us take it upon ourselves to pick them up 24 hours after they are left, and put them in the recycling. If we didn’t, they would be all over the floor in our foyer, and then the clean-up person that comes twice a month, would just throw them in the trash, and not in the recycling! This junk mail is exactly the same flyer sheets that used to go into your Sunday newspaper, until you decided not to read the newspaper (and decided not to read vetted information at all). It is the same size, the same quality, and the same retailers that used to “flyer” your papers. This is of so little sell-through value, none of us can figure out how this happens at all? No one looks at them, and no one picks them up. I’ve even lived places where the management put a recycling bin right next to the post boxes, or they’d be all over the property! Is it the printer companies that are telling retailers this is viable? This has even less ad value that internet pop-ups!

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    • All good observations. Many disagree with me on this, but I believe that the generalized decline in religious belief has been one of the causes of declines in honesty, integrity, or whatever we want to call it. If the only thing keeping you on the straight and narrow is the chance of real-world punishment, then your standards of conduct will be different than if you believe that you will eventually be judged at the end of life.

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  13. Our Colorado neighbor had a mailbox with the standard hinged door on the front, but also a secondary slot once you opened it which could only be unlocked with a key. I always debated whether that was a good idea or simply paranoia with mail theft. A mail thief could help themself to the predominantly worthless stuff that comes in my box these days (including the Amazon boxes that are crammed in and virtually impossible to get out again). In our rural area the only thing I worried about was Spring Break, when the restless high-schoolers would jump into the back of their pickups with baseball bats and go on a high-speed mailbox-bashing spree. Ironically, it seems like an innocent brand of trouble these days.

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