Again, this conflict exists between two sisters, but in this story it is the sister that stays home that is treated as essentially unwelcome by her family, and the sister that returns home that is welcomed and praised despite the many issues that are apparent in her life. At its heart, however, this story is one of senseless bickering and the type of frustration that crops up during periods of familial unfairness. Neither sister makes a real effort to try and make the other happy, and the other family members are equally guilty of perpetuating a type of squabbling that has no real merit or purpose -- the arguments are over senseless things such as a beard being cut or not -- yet the rift that this creates in the family seems just as permanent as that which exists in Walker's...

The narrator of Welty's tale is the "wronged" sister, who ultimately moves out of her family's home and into the post office where she works, but while the reader's sympathies stay with Mama and Maggie at the end of "Everyday Use," there isn't the same sense of completion and satisfaction at the end of "Why I Live at the P.O.." It is as if Welty is commenting on the depth of family emotions regardless of their root cause or the rationality of the disagreements.
Both of these short stories depict families in conflict that eventually experience a schism of one degree or another. The fact that the families are African-American is relevant in some ways, but their struggles and feelings can be understood and appreciated regardless of this fact.