These dealers, jobbers, manufacturers and others interested in the maintenance and the improvement of the local stores and the local community, and who oppose any extension of the domestic parcels post, vie with its advocates in denunciation of the extortionate charges of the express companies. But they go further—their associations are fighting in many states to secure state regulation of express rates and classification; and they are making practical progress, with every prospect that their appeals for national regulation will be recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which has just won its fight to regulate sleeping car charges. The opponents of parcels post want lower and equitable rates for the transportation of small packages of merchandise, but they believe that these rates, like those on the transportation of larger packages, should be investigated and regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, especially as various state railway boards have recently demonstrated the fact that the express companies are chiefly owned by the railroads and are merely vehicles to bring into the coffers of the railroads larger profits than can be secured thru government regulated freight rates.
That any one can find an example for the United States in the parcels post systems over government owned railways in European countries, the largest of which is smaller than Texas, is incomprehensible to the average business man who is not asking for a government subsidy to arbitrarily annihilate distance and the natural local advantages of thousands of local business communities in order to increase the present $200,000,000 mail order business; and this in a nation that maintains a high tariff wall that may or may not “protect” the American manufacturer, farmer and workman, but the chief effect of which, so far as the distributor, the dealer, is concerned is to place him between the upper and nether millstones—the butt of criticism, the subject of Congressional inquiry on the high cost of living!
The mail order houses want a general parcels post; the general business community is opposed to it. Suppose that both are actuated by selfish reasons, one to gain an arbitrary advantage and the other to prevent it—where do the people come in, those besides the mail order men and the million retailers and their families?
Further Thoughts on Parcels Post pp. 3-5.
Charles W. Burrows.
Postmaster-General Meyer in an address to the New England Postmasters’ Association, Boston, October, 1907, and elsewhere, made recommendations urging legislation giving to the Postal Department a greatly extended parcels carrying service. The recommendations made were mainly two.
First. That the present rate of sixteen cents per pound for the mail carriage of merchandise with a weight limit of four pounds per parcel as the maximum shall be changed, reducing the rate to twelve cents per pound (with fractions at rates from one cent up) and increasing the weight limit to eleven pounds. The recommendation was that this should be, like the letter charge, a flat rate to prevail anywhere within the United States and its possessions irrespective of distance or accessibility.
In support of this, his first proposition, he calls attention to certain inconsistencies now existing in the service. He states that an individual entering any post office in the country with a parcel weighing four pounds, addressed to New York city will be obliged to pay sixty-four cents for its carriage by post. If on the other hand it is to pass through New York city to any one of the thirty-three foreign countries with which we have postal conventions, the charge will be but forty-eight cents. Further, should the package weigh more than four pounds, it will be denied admission to the mails in this country while it will be accepted and forwarded to any of these foreign lands if it weighs up to four pounds six ounces, and in the case of some, twenty-four of the countries it will be accepted even if it weighs so much as eleven pounds, and it is on account of these inconsistencies that he urges his legislation.
Let us first examine this point. General Meyer is quite correct in his statement that it does cost more to send, for example, a pair of shoes weighing just four pounds from Brockton, Massachusetts, to New York city, than it would cost to send the same pair of shoes through New York city to any one of the thirty-three foreign countries with which we have postal conventions.