By SteveJack
The United States Postal Service, supported by customers and taxpayers via postage charges, federal appropriations, and even postage taxes in some states to the tune of roughly $75 billion annually, offers a “USPS Shipping Assistant” which is “free” software that combines all the functions you need to create labels (domestic, international, Merchandise Return and custom forms), ship packages, compare rates, calculate estimated delivery times, verify deliveries, request free Carrier Pickup, and much more.
“Free,” meaning, of course, that you already paid for it, if you bought stamps or paid U.S. and/or state taxes.
The USPS Shipping Assistant requires Microsoft’s Windows 2000, 2003, XP Home or Professional, or Vista and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 6.0, or higher.
In other words, in this case, Mac users need not apply, but keep buying stamps – and paying your taxes for nothing, of course.
Why does the USPS feel it’s okay to ghettoize Mac users? U.S. postage buying and taxpaying Mac users, does this seem fair to you?
You’d think that with $75 billion annual revenue, the USPS would be able to hire a Mac developer or two or a hundred. (If they weren’t bleeding $5.327 billion annually, that is. Ah, government efficiency; a bigger oxymoron than “Microsoft innovation.”)
According to research firm Gartner, Apple’s Mac comprised 9.5% of U.S. market in Q308 with the Mac growing 29.4% year-over-year, 30 times that of PC market. That’s a lot of postage buying/taxpaying Mac users left out in the cold, USPS. Tens of millions in fact.
Contact the USPS here.
The most important action that you can take, which could actually result in some positive result — as your vote is the key to their having the job — is to identify and contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives about equal access to USPS software here.
Additional email contact information can be found here and here.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “GizmoDan” for the heads up.]
wonder if it will run under crossover? you can do everything except first class (13 oz or less) with click-n-ship from usps.com on firefox, opera, or even safari (sometimes it just need the current acrobat reader. bulk labels are much easier to use with the ms word template for avery adhesive labels. most all the forms and non-monetary transactions can be done from usps-com.
the usps has a $3B cash/capital position from the treasury. it was an appropriation the year is was given. we taxpayers all coughed that up. it is made up at least two fold in the value/service we get in terms of mailing and delivery. as much as people like to complain about it, it is the gold standard in the world. if you look at the ling provided, it bled $5.2B in 2007, they will cut costs and raise postage to right the ship. they had made $1B and $1.6B the previous 2 years and had enough reserve to cover the one year $5.2B loss. no bail out needed. if the banks and investment/insurance companies were as transparent as the usps, we wouldn’t be in this mess and the one would have had a closer contest.
move on, nothing here.
“Good points. We can agree to disagree on whether a stamp is a tax or not.”
no, we can’t. not any more than we can agree to disagree on the color of the sky. one is real, the other is in your head.
moron.
Buy Windows OS, install on Mac and use BootCamp.
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Well, at least they are consistent. Their “contact us” email page does not work with Safari.
We used to use this Shipping Assistant coupled with a Pitney Bowes postage meter running under WindowsXP in VMWare Fusion in our shop for all our Postal Service shipping. The software is abysmal failure. It was riddled with bugs, half the time it wouldn’t even recognize the postage meter, it would leave an instance of itself running so you couldn’t relaunch it without Ending Task from the task manager. It was a disaster. We then moved to Endicia for Mac which is a gloriously simple program that works flawlessly and gives discounts over the normal USPS rates for Priority and Express Mail. Just support the companies that do value the Macintosh community. That’s my stance.
Well, if you ever used Shipping Assistant, you would know that you are not missing much. It’s a pretty crappy piece of software. It’s .Net based, slow. buggy, no database connectivity, etc. What I would really like to see is a Mac version of UPS Worldship.
No wonder they are Billions in the red. Horrible service and love to lose your mail.
Postmaster,
Dig a little deeper into those ‘additional costs mandated bythe Postal Act of 2006’.
I was criticizing Congress, not the USPS. Very difficult to compete indeed with imposed rules.
Heh I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if Congress launches an investigation into the UPSP’s 2008 fiscal loss. A process enabled, in part, by artificially low-cost mail service…
my god the dumb asses are multiplying.
Kinda like the town that wanted to do a Christmas play, but couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin?
Nobody said multiplying required brains!
Wow, SteveJack. This is low. This is the kind of crap I see Microsoft tools writing about the Mac.
First from the “postage tax in some states link”, you seem to have missed this part: “Since delivery charges refer only to charges made by the seller of goods and services, the purchase of postage directly from the U.S. Postal Service remains nontaxable.“
The “postage charges” link does not have the word “postage” or “charges” anywhere in the webpage. It’s just a fiscal revenue/expense report. (In which the postal service LOST over $5 billion in the fiscal year of 2007. Seems like they DIDN’T have any extra money lying around eh?)
The “federal appropriations” link lists emergency funding to biohazard attacks related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Hardly a normal circumstance.
And had you bothered to do any actual research instead of your half-assed attempt at posting a few irrelevant links, you might have found this page:
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm
Which features this fact: “We… Do not receive tax dollars for operations. We are a self-supporting agency, using the revenue from the sale of postage and products to pay expenses.“
Funny how none of that fits into your USPS bashing article. I’m as upset as you are the they don’t offer a Mac software solution, but you needn’t use Steve Balmer-like FUD to get your point across.
@ Historian
The US Government favoring IE and Microsoft is nothing new:
Federal Grant Applications to Require Windows
Besides that, I don’t see how you can classify postage as a “tax.” Are the fees UPS, Fedex, and DHL charge for their services taxes as well?
@everyone else
People who bash the post office need to go work their for a week. When you handle over 1000 pieces of mail a day (as a rural carrier. Clerks might handle over 10x more) mistakes are bound to happen. When I give you the wrong piece of mail, it is my personal fault. And one wrong piece of mail out of 1000 is a very good day indeed. I used to be the same way until I started working there. Now I know why and how mistakes happen, and I will never complain again.
I did a survey and found out that 99.9% of Mac users are to smart to use the USPS.
@ Rural Mail Carrier
Thank you,
As a former UPS employee I agree with you completely. When you handle as many packages or letters as the handlers and carriers do, mistakes will happen. The USPS does a great job overall.
That being said, I do think that tools for the general public should be written using open standards not crap like .net or, heaven forbid, Active X.
COMMIES! The US is going to have many more problems with the democrats running things.
To NYC, directly above, and probably many others with similar misconceptions …
The USPS was the first ‘commie’ thing the US Government did way back when. Was started by Ben Franklin, the first US Post Master.
The idea was to help commerce by providing a unified service across the Nation. Otherwise, good luck trying to get anything from here to there.
And, if you think it’s inefficient and/or incompetent, well, try to find anyone else who’ll deliver a letter from Gumpstump, Alaska to Middle of Nowhere, Kansas for $0.43 – remember, that postal truck has to drive 50 miles out of the city to Farmer Brown’s Place to deliver that letter. A money losing proposition that FedEx or UPS won’t touch.
And, remember reading about the Pony Express ?
THAT is some hard core “sleet, rain, snow, gloom of night, etc”
“The US Government favoring IE and Microsoft is nothing new:”
Stop whining. you can run this software on your Mac with Parallels or Boot Camp, or go to the web based page.
I would prefer that the USPS didn’t waste money writing applications to satisfy 3% of it’s customer base when they’re already well served by web based apps. Why not bring out native versions for Linux, Mac OS X etc etc. Why? Because they’re small user bases already covered by the web based product, and those that really want to run the native application on the Mac can.
After all wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said that native apps were for the birds and all you’d ever need were web 2.0 applications?
Anyone notice that if you tried to write feedback from the link, the page that opened wouldn’t display correctly in Safari? Links didn’t work (blue Q. marks in boxes) the submit button was a blank square.
I opened it in Firefox, read what was supposed to be there, clicked on the blank box that should have said Submit, just in case they take count on who uses what browser.
This site depresses me; I don’t think I want to visit it anymore. No matter what the topic, most threads descend into political warfare. If the Democrats have some power in government, then all of a sudden we’ve become socialist, or communist. If the Republicans have some power in government, then we’ve become fascist. This is no way for civilized people to behave. All we need is for the street violence to begin to look like pre-WW2 Germany.
Please, everybody. Keep the comments on topic. Please, MDN, moderate this site. It’s not censorship. All the lunatic fringe on both sides have plenty of other political websites to go vomit their hate. If I want that crap, I can visit Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann online.
How is PayPal doing these days at making it’s extra business software OS X compatible?
There’s two problems here…
1- The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the Federal Government and supported by the Federal Government no matter how you slice it.
2- the E-Government Act of 2002 states that all publicly available electronic information and services provided by various Federal Government agencies should be easily accessible by all US citizens in a manner that is non-discriminative.
In a nutshell, the USPS has no excuse and I don’t care how they get tax dollars!
Don’t panic, everyone…I emailed the USPS asking if they are planning Mac support, and got this reply within 24 hours:
Dear USPS Customer,
We are currently working on the program.
Thanks,
Rita
USPS Internet Customer Care Center
icustomercare@usps.com
It used to be that the ability to print mailing labels was offered from the web service. Now, they no longer offer that. If you want to use the web site to print a label you have to sing in and buy postage too. They say ‘to print labels without postage use the shipping assistange’.. which remains MS-only (I know this is a Mac forum, but I used Linux and I’m in the same boat. Personally the solution is to ditch the special app you have to download and make *all* functions available via a web interface).
OH btw, I work for the USPS, and everything is MS. It sucks (And no, I’m not remotely near a position where I would have the slightest ability to influence the issue)
Good write-up. I definitely appreciate this site. Stick with it!