Wow, 79, I should have added that to the Old Time UPS thread! Yeah, I sure do remember Remote Delivery Initiative. It reminds me of a punch line to a joke that I can't put into print here, "Know it, heck, I wrote it."
Here's a story about rural deferral, as it was called. In our building, when the thing was about to begin, they invited about 10 of us down to a hotel for breakfast to explain the deal. We all had some or all of our area in rural areas. There were about 3 or 4 of us, including myself, that our entire area qualified for the rural exemption. There were a few drivers who didn't trust the system and didn't want to participate, and who, ultimately, did not defer a single package. I joined up with the program; I'd been deferring a few packages for a lot of years, by the time UPS had joined the program, so I thought it was a good thing.
However, with the drivers who weren't participating in the program, our center wasn't looking very good on paper, in the rural deferral department. The center manager called me into the office, saying he was getting beat up every morning on this rural delivery thing, and was there anything I could do to bring his numbers up. He said he couldn't make the drivers join in the program, but if I would give him 15 deferrals a day, he would completely ignor any days that I showed up underdispatched, and he wouldn't increase my dispatch. So, that's just what I did, and for the next couple years, I never worked any overtime until christmas. It worked great, drivers know what they are delivering, and if you used some common sense, and you kept service in mind (parts for a broken down tractor are more critical than a shirt from jc penneys), one's customers never even knew the packages had been deferred. Where the problem began in our building, was that the dispatch team began to use it to deal with heavy loads. They would simply defer an entire town, without ever putting it on the driver's truck. They missed the point that they needed those packages in the car, even if they weren't going to be delivered, because the driver would leave a lot of them in town, and he would know which ones needed to be there. The reason that the dispatcher didn't want to do this was that the driver would then be over his "max" dispatch target. So, there were complaints, service suffered, and the program ended, being replaced with a rural surcharge.
There were about three of us that reallly participated, and between the three areas we saved about 200 miles a day in the center. Remember the yellow sticky note dots that we'd put on the package when it was deferred?