Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Even in 1982 you could mail a letter from your house, order shoes from a catalog, and order delivery food to your house. Admittedly, your choices were basically pizza, subs or Chinese for that type of delivery, but still, DoorDash mostly competes with cooking at home not with going out to restaurants (in fact, it has become more common to dine out than it was in 1982).

I do lament the decline of brick-and-mortar retail somewhat, but I think it is holding on stronger than what I would have assumed in some cases.

View on HN

>your choices were basically pizza, subs or Chinese for that type of delivery

Aka the only food that's adapted to delivery, or almost.

At some point UPS / FedEx became much faster. I recall ordering things in the mid 90s and it taking weeks or months to arrive. That definitely tilted shopping toward retail brick & mortar.

"Please allow 4-6 weeks for shipping"

I've always found the concept of mailing a letter from your house really interesting. My understanding is that it's common in the US (which is why they have the little red thing on their mailboxes I think?), but I've never lived in a place where it's a thing. For such a capitalistic country, the way the US historically treated the USPS as a common civic good is really cool.

USPS is run as a federally owned business. It was traditionally self sustained by postage fees not by taxes, but it is nice that it was from our country's earliest days, a key piece of infrastructure.

Nowadays mailing any letter is pretty rare as most people communicate via text, email, etc but it is still absolutely possible to do so.

And yes the red flag is to indicate a letter needs to be picked up for delivery.

Hah, that's very interesting to learn. I've always thought the little flag was lifted by the mailman, so that the homeowner could tell from a distance that they got mail. Cool that it's actually the other way around.

I think that's mainly because the mailman might not notice that the mail in your box is not your mail being left over from when he dropped it off the day before. The flag lets him know what's remaining in the box is to be delivered. He could read the addresses but they have very busy routes!

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense!

Nowadays the USPS is basically a spam delivery service. 95% of the “mail” I receive goes directly in the trash

The Postal Service is one of the few entities directly authorized by the US Constitution. From Article 1, Section 8:

> The Congress shall have Power… To establish Post Offices and post Roads

With that one of the hallmarks of the USPS is they really strive to service every person in the country no matter how remote.

The fact they’ve turned it into a “business” and not a public good is really a tragedy.

> which is why they have the little red thing on their mailboxes

Yes.

One of my surprises when moving from the US to the UK were that I couldn't mail a letter from my house (and also how expensive the postage is!)

> your choices were basically pizza, subs or Chinese

Subs blew my mind because for almost all my childhood it was only pizza and Chinese.

I was at a friend's house and they got them for the whole family, couldn't believe it.

Then in cities, at first, it was like any ethnic food.

Then that crazy bastard started taking photos of people's menus.

> Then that crazy bastard started taking photos of people's menus.

I don't get the reference. Is this a startup origin story?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com