The United States Postal Service is aware of this, which is likely one reason why they commissioned New York-based creative agency GrandArmy to redesign their signage and packaging last year. Most of the work ("90 percent," says GrandArmy co-founder Eric Collins) was implemented across the postal service's 31,000 locations last August, but it wasn't until last week that the designers published the full breadth of their work online.

When GrandArmy took on the project, they quickly learned that of the post office's many imperfections, long lines are the worst offender. "When people go to the post office they were just there too long, because they couldn't figure out what they needed to do," Collins says. "There's a lot of people standing in line for a half hour, for the teller to just say, 'Yeah, just drop that in a slot over there.' "