A German company has encountered some issues with the U.S. mail system. The company sells shoes, specifically shoes with "Atheist" or "Darwin Loves" written across the soles. They also emblazon their packing tape with their ATHEIST brand, and have recently started wondering if this had anything to do with the number of packages that went missing on the way to their U.S. customers.
They decided to devise an experiment-- send two packages to each of 89 customers in the United States, one with the ATHEIST packing tape and one with plain packing tape. Their results were astonishing: the ATHEIST packages took on average three days longer than the plain-packaged ones to arrive, and while only one of the plains went missing, nine of the ATHEIST ones did. (These are statistically-significant results.)
What does this tell us? Were U.S. postal workers deliberately sabotaging the ATHEIST packages? It's possible; atheists are one of the most distrusted groups in the U.S., according to this NPR article. The ATHEIST packages may be treated with more caution, or be vetted more fully, or the shipping differences may simply be due to the fact that one had emblazoned tape while the other did not. Who knows.
The full NPR article can be read here.
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