Is the US Postal Service Biased Against Atheists? Check Out This Study

[hay rick]

79. I want my conspiracy theory back.

My personal postal experience (34 years) leads me to believe that the claimed discrimination is really far-fetched. It might be good marketing, though.

During my career, I listened to dozens of service talks about "address hygiene." We were told how mail should be addressed so that it would be machine-readable (instead of requiring the pesky services of those expensive human employees).

I am particularly skeptical of the idea that, from a 178 package sample, they were able to determine that offensively taped packages were 10X as likely to be lost as plain-taped packages. This suggests that at least 11 of the 178 packages were lost. I delivered 100,000+ packages during my career and didn't receive 11 inquiries about lost packages.

You mention the postal inspectors. The inspectors used to send out packages with incorrect names or addresses as bait. The packages were marked to suggest that the contents were valuable, for example, they might say "valuable autographed baseball cards." The bait package would be sorted to the carrier who served the address (or address range if the number was incorrect). If the undeliverable parcel was not endorsed and returned, they started an investigation. Entrapment was a fact of life in the Postal Service. The suggestion that employees would discard parcels with offensive wrapping tape, and do so with impunity, is ludicrous.