10 ms·

“There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.”

118 points by genepope 17y ago

Just one of many signs that say "Yes Martha, the internet really has changed a lot about our lives"

jonknee 17y ago
> Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three. ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
- CoryMathews 17y ago
  ye its probably one of the only ones that spam is a good thing for it. I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.
- ballpark 17y ago
  Good point! However, those spammers are doing some good because they're paying money to stamp their mail, which goes to employ mail personel, etc. For that reason I feel good when I throw away credit card letters while saying "Dear greedy creditor, No I don't want your raping fees, but thank you for paying money for me to throw this letter in recycling."
  - nsrivast 17y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
    - argv_empty 17y ago
      The window's broken either way. With snail mail, at least the one who broke it pays some of the cost of fixing it.
  - sp332 17y ago
    "[USPS] fiscal 2009 year-to-date net loss is $4.7 billion" http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.htm http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.ht...
  - jonknee 17y ago
    That money didn't come out of thin air.. It results in higher fees for their customers which means the customer spends less with other companies who then don't hire people, etc etc. Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!
  - kenj0418 17y ago
    Even better: Write what you say at your trash can on the offer, stuff that and every other piece of paper the CC company mailed you, and put it back in the business reply envelope. Now you've gotten the CC company to help the USPS twice.
- tsally 17y ago
  I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution). On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount. If they continue to send then the financial troubles are solved.
    - jackfoxy 17y ago
      Last I paid attention the USPO claimed the spam was making them money, and I tend to believe it. The "subsidy" is just a price break for large customers, which many businesses do.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount. The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that. Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it. If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.
      - dantheman 17y ago
        I don't think anyone is saying they don't make money off of spam, just that they shouldn't be encouraging it. If spammers had to pay full price perhaps we'd see less of it, or if not then the postal service would make more money.
- ryanelkins 17y ago
  Here is what I hate about the USPS and spam. I opened a PO Box to receive rental payments on some properties I owned. The only people who got this address were tenants. It wasn't used for anything else. I'd check it once a month and it would be crammed full of ads. By crammed I mean seriously tightly wedged full of junk. I'd have to pick through it all to try and find my rent checks and not throw them out with the ads. That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all. At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(
  - Titanous 17y ago
    In Canada this is called Unaddressed Admail, and it allows companies to send flyers to entire neighbourhoods without having to address the mail individually. I'm pretty sure there is a way to opt-out.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    I'm pretty sure they just pay the Post Office to put ads in every PO Box there.
    - dmhouse 17y ago
      Would there not have been an address on the mail?
      - cookiecaper 17y ago
        I assume there's a list of valid PO boxes provided, much the way addresses are taken off of a list somewhere, addressed to "Current Resident", and delivered that way though the mail was not only obviously mass spam but not even addressed specifically to the resident.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam. A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail. One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them." He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though." I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?
  - billswift 17y ago
    The shipper is the paying customer here, not the person who receives the mail. How would you like it if the post office decided they didn't want to deliver something you mailed out? Or maybe you want them to start collecting money in exchange for not delivering mail? But only some mail - how are they supposed to know which you (and everybody else) want delivered? Can you imagine how expensive keeping a detailed list of what not to deliver to what address would be?
cwan 17y ago
While I don't doubt volumes have fallen as a result of things like email, the US postal service also hasn't done itself any favors. You read anecdotes like this, and it's a wonder that volumes haven't plummeted even faster: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-are-worse-at-the-post-office-than-i-thought/38356/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-a...
- krschultz 17y ago
  And I have equally aggravating anecdotes about issues with private companies' customer service. It doesn't prove anything. I'd take the people at my MVC (NJ's "new" DMV) and post office over the people at my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company in a heart beat. Those companies aren't doing themselves any favors but somehow they manage to make it. The Zappos in the world are few and far between. So better to look at the facts than the attitude of the clerk you interact with on a daily basis, fact is no other service reaches every address in the US and that is a necessity that we need to keep up. If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.
  - mmt 17y ago
    my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company These aren't exactly archetypes of free market competition, being oligopolies, at best. I can't speak for NJ, but, in California, I consider it telling that they all have a state regulatory agency. Number portability has improved telephony competition, but I don't think we're yet free of the effects of the old A/B cellular duopoly in the US.
    - krschultz 17y ago
      But the same can be said for UPS and FedEx. I actually have more options for TV, internet, and phone than for shipping. My point is that these anecdotes can not be extrapolated to a larger point. Really your dealings with these large corporations or government agencies are few and far between with a handful of people that may or may not be nice as people and may or may not be having a good day. Should we decide public policy based on that?
Mc_Big_G 17y ago
"It’s five days of delivery, six days of service and Express Mail seven days a week" "It also will save more than $3 billion a year" If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.
- mikek 17y ago
  They still deliver 177 billion pieces of mail a year. By raising the price of delivery by 2 cents, they could make up the difference.
  - hexis 17y ago
    Raising prices by ~4.5 percent will probably reduce the flow of mail.
singer 17y ago
Most of the important packages I receive from USPS don't come on Saturdays anyhow. If I'm like most people, the 6th day won't be missed.
wallflower 17y ago
The postal service derives a significant amount of its revenue from pitching direct mail to businesses as an effective way to reach customers (4) This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts: "In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled." Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless) "One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online" Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand: "A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year" "Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address) Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone: "A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents." (1) http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_USPS_paper.pdf http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_U... (2) http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm (3) http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_PUBLIC_web2.pdf http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_... (4)http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?from=directmailhome&page=researchwhydirectmailworks http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?f... http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail+%2B+USPS+%2B+volume+%2B+billions&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=bcdf8cbbf06dc4f http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail...
- graywh 17y ago
  > Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand: But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.
  - lanstein 17y ago
hyperbovine 17y ago
The real loser here is netflix. 17% increase in delivery time and not a damn thing you can do about it. Ouch.
- csbrooks 17y ago
  Maybe that's ok, since in the future most of their customers will probably want to watch everything online (through them) anyway.
  - joshfinnie 17y ago
    I agree. I think netflix has made it quite apparent that they are looking for instant streaming as the model for the future. They already have aligned their website to feature the instant streaming over their mail service, they have teamed up with the gaming consoles to enhance the instant streaming experience and it sounds as if they have made a way for the iPad to have instant streaming. This change might hurt them in the short run, but I would think Netflix would love to be a streaming only company!
    - ojbyrne 17y ago
      I think streaming is _one_ of their products for the future, but I'd bet blue ray dvds are also a significant growth area both for them and the movie studios. There's going to be a war before those studios will let netflix stream recent releases in HD.
      - steveklabnik 17y ago
        Aren't Blue Ray sales pretty much a failure by all accounts? I was under that impression, I could be wrong.
- pxlpshr 17y ago
  Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
petercooper 17y ago
Awesome. I never saw why the mail system should work longer than the normal working week anyway. Hopefully the UK will go the same way sometime soon. The threat of having mail turn up on a Saturday (that you might need to wait in for) isn't worth it.
- metachor 17y ago
  And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Currently I can tell USPS to just deliver it again when I know I will be home (on Saturday).
  - petercooper 17y ago
    And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Surely this is a universal and solved problem though? Most couriers (e.g. for most larger/heavier items you'd buy online) will not deliver on Saturday unless you pay quite a bit extra, so weekday-only delivery is already an institution of sorts. That aside, maybe your issue is, secretly, USPS's primary motivation. If they don't have a Saturday service at all, people like you can't request Saturday delivery and will need to go pick up your packages from the depot. That'll save them a lot of time and money.
mhb 17y ago
This made me wonder whether it was a good deal to buy "forever" stamps: http://www.slate.com/id/2166475/fr/rss/ http://www.slate.com/id/2166475/fr/rss/
jzimdars 17y ago
This wouldn't be such an issue if the postal service operated like a business instead of an institution. Why not commercialize it more? Where are the Coke stamps and IBM Express Mail envelopes? Why isn't the mail truck wrapped with an American Idol promo? Seems like the USPS could be a huge advertising vehicle. Why is this sacred?
- Perceval 17y ago
  Because the Postal Service is provided for in the Constitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.
  - Eliezer 17y ago
    Why not?
  - hnal943 17y ago
    Reading this it just seems to grant the congress the right to create a Post Office. Is this the same as a mandate to provide this service?
muerdeme 17y ago
I saw the chairman of their board speak not long ago, and it turns out the biggest problem is that USPS can't fire any of their union employees, who consistently get awarded UPS salaries + 15-20% in arbitration.
- roboneal 17y ago
  It's even better - when they literally have no work for employees they are asked to find work elsewhere but the USPS will pay them any difference in pay/benefits essentially forever.
- Frazzydee 17y ago
  This is a huge problem, and we need to shift the power balance away from unions. The original purpose of unions was to compensate for the imbalance of power. I don't have a problem to the extent that they merely divert executive pay down to the workers, but where they significantly increase the cost of doing business, unions are economically inefficient. In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund." In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels. If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection). They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.
  - smallblacksun 17y ago
    There is very little difference between union strikes (especially in "closed shop" states/countries) and the mafia extorting protection money from businesses.
jrockway 17y ago
Hopefully UPS and FedEx will make up the difference by delivering on Sunday. The only stuff I get in the mail these days is some envelope warning me that I will go to jail if I don't tell the government my phone number.
- orblivion 17y ago
  If the USPS would make it legal to deliver small pieces of mail.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Do you receive small pieces of mail? Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant). Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
zephyrfalcon 17y ago
When I saw the title, I first thought it was another April Fool's joke. Like it currently takes six days on average to deliver something, but there is not enough mail anymore to keep that up, so they're forced to deliver it in five days... OK, so I didn't have my coffee yet... =)
robak 17y ago
commercialize them, introduce competition. Monopolies always have weird issues like "we'd like to, but we can't"
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Privatize the system and outsource it to UPS/FedEX,etc. (I know easier said than done). If I ever need to send snail mail, I just send it via those guys.
- sachinag 17y ago
  The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
  - mmt 17y ago
    I think you're confusing outsourcing with deregulation. A private contractor would happily do that for enough subsidy.
    - cjoh 17y ago
      (subsidies without regulation) == Corruption
      - mmt 17y ago
        Indeed. I think the OC was illustrating the converse situation, which is that unfunded mandates to the private sector are untenable. In either case, I agree that the two go together. Perhaps there's just too much ambiguity in the term "privatization."
  - hnal943 17y ago
    They certainly would. Just not for 44 cents.
    - dustingetz 17y ago
      yep, part of the cost of living in isolation.
araneae 17y ago
Why Saturday? They should cut out a day in the middle of the week. This way, you'll have to wait up to two days longer for a given item. It's better to distribute that wait time.
- jackfoxy 17y ago
  Good suggestion!
- bhousel 17y ago
  This has more to do with staffing and hiring than with getting us our mail in an optimal way. Most people don't like to work on Saturday unless they're getting paid overtime.
  - jackowayed 17y ago
    Plus businesses would complain that they don't get deliveries and pickups on all of their normal working days.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  Not only that, but Saturday is the only time I'm home when the mailman arrives, in case of the need to sign for a delivery. By eliminating any intersection between the mailman and I, it greatly complicates the delivery of signature-requiring mail.
- dabent 17y ago
  Most businesses want delivery (and pickup) during working days.
  - araneae 17y ago
    Every place I've ever worked had people working on Saturdays. I'm sure there are statistics on this somewhere, though.
  - jedberg 17y ago
    So deliver to businesses on the five weekdays and homes on Saturday but not Wednesday.
cjoh 17y ago
Amazing stats in their footer: With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.
- kscaldef 17y ago
  Keep in mind that they also have a government-granted monopoly. They probably wouldn't be a big otherwise.
  - cjoh 17y ago
    Maybe-- but that's a tough conclusion. While the USPS is a government agency, we still don't have enough data about the agency, or any agency's efficiency to be an accurate judge. It'd be great, for instance, if we could see what the average price per employee at the USPS was vs. UPS vs. FedEx. Sick leave comparisons, purchasing efficiencies, etc. Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
    - kscaldef 17y ago
      That information isn't all that useful, since UPS and FedEx don't compete (and are forbidden to compete) in the marketplace for mail (as opposed to package) delivery. Regardless, though, I'm making a very modest claim: competitors would take away part of USPS's marketshare if they were allowed to compete. If you feel like there's a natural monopoly on mail delivery such that that wouldn't happen, you need to support that assertion.
      - hga 17y ago
        Well, there's the cherry picking argument, something we can see with broadband build outs. E.g. they'd offer low low low rates for delivering snail mail on Manhattan Island and leave it to the USPS to handle mail in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Hmmm, didn't AT&T do the same back in the bad old days?
orblivion 17y ago
> The five-day delivery proposal is part of comprehensive plan announced March 2, “Delivering the Future,” Government program names just kill me sometimes.
- hga 17y ago
  Doesn't have to be government: when MIT had to tighten their belt in the late '80s or so they started cleaning a bunch of bathrooms every other day instead of daily (and that was largely OK, many have very little use (e.g. patterns changes as the Institute changed and grew)). This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning". It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.
dustingetz 17y ago
"Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three." It ain't linear, buddy.
- garply 17y ago
  Why not? I could see mail sending / receiving to be highly correlated with age, which is linear.
noodle 17y ago
interestingly enough, for a while i lived in a place that didn't have mail on saturdays. i now live in a place that delivers and picks up mail twice a day, including saturdays. i don't notice any difference.
dpcan 17y ago
Why can't I get/pay for a USPS.com email address of my physical address? 123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com? Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location? Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.
- aasarava 17y ago
  Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online. Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    It's dubious to rely on a company's electronic records for your statements imo. They can delete or change anything they want. They can easily make an accusation that your e-mailed statement was forged. It'd be harder to make the same accusation on mailed statements, especially since most use paper with special watermarks or letterheads. I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
    - hga 17y ago
      And I've never ever gotten such an offer that also includes a discount to recognize their savings and the problems you point out. Well, come to think of it my account with Consumer Cellular is 100% paperless, that's probably their default and I'd probably have to pay to get paper from them. (They're a great AT&T reseller for people who spend very little time using their cell phones.)
  - hexis 17y ago
leelin 17y ago
Isn't their logic confusing latency and throughput? Not enough mail to deliver suggests less mail volume, so less need for throughput, therefore we can hire fewer postal workers per post office. Cutting out one day of deliveries reduces throughput and increases latency. For example, Netflix becomes a worse deal. A power user could once cycle 2 roundtrips of DVDs in one week and is now down to 1.5.
- kscaldef 17y ago
  1 person can only deliver to so many houses in a single day.
- rationalbeaver 17y ago
  It's hard to address throughput that way when the Throughputers are in a union.
smokey_the_bear 17y ago
Maybe if this went through I could have home USPS delivery. The town I live in apparently adds enough new addresses to add two routes a year, but they can't hire that quickly. So half the residents have to use a PO Box for their address, and stuff shipped to their physical address gets returned. Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.
SuzyQT 17y ago
Plus most of the mail (bills) get delivered digitally

118 points by genepope 17y ago

Just one of many signs that say "Yes Martha, the internet really has changed a lot about our lives"

> Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three. ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.

CoryMathews 17y ago
ye its probably one of the only ones that spam is a good thing for it. I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.
ballpark 17y ago
Good point! However, those spammers are doing some good because they're paying money to stamp their mail, which goes to employ mail personel, etc. For that reason I feel good when I throw away credit card letters while saying "Dear greedy creditor, No I don't want your raping fees, but thank you for paying money for me to throw this letter in recycling."
- nsrivast 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  - argv_empty 17y ago
    The window's broken either way. With snail mail, at least the one who broke it pays some of the cost of fixing it.
- sp332 17y ago
  "[USPS] fiscal 2009 year-to-date net loss is $4.7 billion" http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.htm http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.ht...
- jonknee 17y ago
  That money didn't come out of thin air.. It results in higher fees for their customers which means the customer spends less with other companies who then don't hire people, etc etc. Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!
- kenj0418 17y ago
  Even better: Write what you say at your trash can on the offer, stuff that and every other piece of paper the CC company mailed you, and put it back in the business reply envelope. Now you've gotten the CC company to help the USPS twice.
tsally 17y ago
I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution). On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.
- jonknee 17y ago
  No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount. If they continue to send then the financial troubles are solved.
  - jackfoxy 17y ago
    Last I paid attention the USPO claimed the spam was making them money, and I tend to believe it. The "subsidy" is just a price break for large customers, which many businesses do.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount. The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that. Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it. If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.
    - dantheman 17y ago
      I don't think anyone is saying they don't make money off of spam, just that they shouldn't be encouraging it. If spammers had to pay full price perhaps we'd see less of it, or if not then the postal service would make more money.
ryanelkins 17y ago
Here is what I hate about the USPS and spam. I opened a PO Box to receive rental payments on some properties I owned. The only people who got this address were tenants. It wasn't used for anything else. I'd check it once a month and it would be crammed full of ads. By crammed I mean seriously tightly wedged full of junk. I'd have to pick through it all to try and find my rent checks and not throw them out with the ads. That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all. At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(
- Titanous 17y ago
  In Canada this is called Unaddressed Admail, and it allows companies to send flyers to entire neighbourhoods without having to address the mail individually. I'm pretty sure there is a way to opt-out.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  I'm pretty sure they just pay the Post Office to put ads in every PO Box there.
  - dmhouse 17y ago
    Would there not have been an address on the mail?
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      I assume there's a list of valid PO boxes provided, much the way addresses are taken off of a list somewhere, addressed to "Current Resident", and delivered that way though the mail was not only obviously mass spam but not even addressed specifically to the resident.
lionhearted 17y ago
> ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam. A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail. One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them." He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though." I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?
- billswift 17y ago
  The shipper is the paying customer here, not the person who receives the mail. How would you like it if the post office decided they didn't want to deliver something you mailed out? Or maybe you want them to start collecting money in exchange for not delivering mail? But only some mail - how are they supposed to know which you (and everybody else) want delivered? Can you imagine how expensive keeping a detailed list of what not to deliver to what address would be?

cwan 17y ago

While I don't doubt volumes have fallen as a result of things like email, the US postal service also hasn't done itself any favors. You read anecdotes like this, and it's a wonder that volumes haven't plummeted even faster: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-are-worse-at-the-post-office-than-i-thought/38356/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-a...

krschultz 17y ago
And I have equally aggravating anecdotes about issues with private companies' customer service. It doesn't prove anything. I'd take the people at my MVC (NJ's "new" DMV) and post office over the people at my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company in a heart beat. Those companies aren't doing themselves any favors but somehow they manage to make it. The Zappos in the world are few and far between. So better to look at the facts than the attitude of the clerk you interact with on a daily basis, fact is no other service reaches every address in the US and that is a necessity that we need to keep up. If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.
- mmt 17y ago
  my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company These aren't exactly archetypes of free market competition, being oligopolies, at best. I can't speak for NJ, but, in California, I consider it telling that they all have a state regulatory agency. Number portability has improved telephony competition, but I don't think we're yet free of the effects of the old A/B cellular duopoly in the US.
  - krschultz 17y ago
    But the same can be said for UPS and FedEx. I actually have more options for TV, internet, and phone than for shipping. My point is that these anecdotes can not be extrapolated to a larger point. Really your dealings with these large corporations or government agencies are few and far between with a handful of people that may or may not be nice as people and may or may not be having a good day. Should we decide public policy based on that?

Mc_Big_G 17y ago

"It’s five days of delivery, six days of service and Express Mail seven days a week" "It also will save more than $3 billion a year" If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.

mikek 17y ago
They still deliver 177 billion pieces of mail a year. By raising the price of delivery by 2 cents, they could make up the difference.
- hexis 17y ago
  Raising prices by ~4.5 percent will probably reduce the flow of mail.

singer 17y ago

Most of the important packages I receive from USPS don't come on Saturdays anyhow. If I'm like most people, the 6th day won't be missed.

wallflower 17y ago

The postal service derives a significant amount of its revenue from pitching direct mail to businesses as an effective way to reach customers (4) This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts: "In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled." Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless) "One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online" Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand: "A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year" "Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address) Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone: "A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents." (1) http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_USPS_paper.pdf http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_U... (2) http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm (3) http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_PUBLIC_web2.pdf http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_... (4)http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?from=directmailhome&page=researchwhydirectmailworks http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?f... http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail+%2B+USPS+%2B+volume+%2B+billions&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=bcdf8cbbf06dc4f http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail...

graywh 17y ago
> Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand: But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.
- lanstein 17y ago

hyperbovine 17y ago

The real loser here is netflix. 17% increase in delivery time and not a damn thing you can do about it. Ouch.

csbrooks 17y ago
Maybe that's ok, since in the future most of their customers will probably want to watch everything online (through them) anyway.
- joshfinnie 17y ago
  I agree. I think netflix has made it quite apparent that they are looking for instant streaming as the model for the future. They already have aligned their website to feature the instant streaming over their mail service, they have teamed up with the gaming consoles to enhance the instant streaming experience and it sounds as if they have made a way for the iPad to have instant streaming. This change might hurt them in the short run, but I would think Netflix would love to be a streaming only company!
  - ojbyrne 17y ago
    I think streaming is _one_ of their products for the future, but I'd bet blue ray dvds are also a significant growth area both for them and the movie studios. There's going to be a war before those studios will let netflix stream recent releases in HD.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Aren't Blue Ray sales pretty much a failure by all accounts? I was under that impression, I could be wrong.
pxlpshr 17y ago
Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.

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petercooper 17y ago

Awesome. I never saw why the mail system should work longer than the normal working week anyway. Hopefully the UK will go the same way sometime soon. The threat of having mail turn up on a Saturday (that you might need to wait in for) isn't worth it.

metachor 17y ago
And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Currently I can tell USPS to just deliver it again when I know I will be home (on Saturday).
- petercooper 17y ago
  And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Surely this is a universal and solved problem though? Most couriers (e.g. for most larger/heavier items you'd buy online) will not deliver on Saturday unless you pay quite a bit extra, so weekday-only delivery is already an institution of sorts. That aside, maybe your issue is, secretly, USPS's primary motivation. If they don't have a Saturday service at all, people like you can't request Saturday delivery and will need to go pick up your packages from the depot. That'll save them a lot of time and money.

mhb 17y ago

This made me wonder whether it was a good deal to buy "forever" stamps: http://www.slate.com/id/2166475/fr/rss/ http://www.slate.com/id/2166475/fr/rss/

jzimdars 17y ago

This wouldn't be such an issue if the postal service operated like a business instead of an institution. Why not commercialize it more? Where are the Coke stamps and IBM Express Mail envelopes? Why isn't the mail truck wrapped with an American Idol promo? Seems like the USPS could be a huge advertising vehicle. Why is this sacred?

Perceval 17y ago
Because the Postal Service is provided for in the Constitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.
- Eliezer 17y ago
  Why not?
- hnal943 17y ago
  Reading this it just seems to grant the congress the right to create a Post Office. Is this the same as a mandate to provide this service?

muerdeme 17y ago

I saw the chairman of their board speak not long ago, and it turns out the biggest problem is that USPS can't fire any of their union employees, who consistently get awarded UPS salaries + 15-20% in arbitration.

roboneal 17y ago
It's even better - when they literally have no work for employees they are asked to find work elsewhere but the USPS will pay them any difference in pay/benefits essentially forever.
Frazzydee 17y ago
This is a huge problem, and we need to shift the power balance away from unions. The original purpose of unions was to compensate for the imbalance of power. I don't have a problem to the extent that they merely divert executive pay down to the workers, but where they significantly increase the cost of doing business, unions are economically inefficient. In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund." In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels. If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection). They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.
- smallblacksun 17y ago
  There is very little difference between union strikes (especially in "closed shop" states/countries) and the mafia extorting protection money from businesses.

jrockway 17y ago

Hopefully UPS and FedEx will make up the difference by delivering on Sunday. The only stuff I get in the mail these days is some envelope warning me that I will go to jail if I don't tell the government my phone number.

orblivion 17y ago
If the USPS would make it legal to deliver small pieces of mail.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Do you receive small pieces of mail? Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant). Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
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zephyrfalcon 17y ago

When I saw the title, I first thought it was another April Fool's joke. Like it currently takes six days on average to deliver something, but there is not enough mail anymore to keep that up, so they're forced to deliver it in five days... OK, so I didn't have my coffee yet... =)

robak 17y ago

commercialize them, introduce competition. Monopolies always have weird issues like "we'd like to, but we can't"

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Privatize the system and outsource it to UPS/FedEX,etc. (I know easier said than done). If I ever need to send snail mail, I just send it via those guys.

sachinag 17y ago
The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
- mmt 17y ago
  I think you're confusing outsourcing with deregulation. A private contractor would happily do that for enough subsidy.
  - cjoh 17y ago
    (subsidies without regulation) == Corruption
    - mmt 17y ago
      Indeed. I think the OC was illustrating the converse situation, which is that unfunded mandates to the private sector are untenable. In either case, I agree that the two go together. Perhaps there's just too much ambiguity in the term "privatization."
- hnal943 17y ago
  They certainly would. Just not for 44 cents.
  - dustingetz 17y ago
    yep, part of the cost of living in isolation.

araneae 17y ago

Why Saturday? They should cut out a day in the middle of the week. This way, you'll have to wait up to two days longer for a given item. It's better to distribute that wait time.

jackfoxy 17y ago
Good suggestion!
bhousel 17y ago
This has more to do with staffing and hiring than with getting us our mail in an optimal way. Most people don't like to work on Saturday unless they're getting paid overtime.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  Plus businesses would complain that they don't get deliveries and pickups on all of their normal working days.
CWuestefeld 17y ago
Not only that, but Saturday is the only time I'm home when the mailman arrives, in case of the need to sign for a delivery. By eliminating any intersection between the mailman and I, it greatly complicates the delivery of signature-requiring mail.
dabent 17y ago
Most businesses want delivery (and pickup) during working days.
- araneae 17y ago
  Every place I've ever worked had people working on Saturdays. I'm sure there are statistics on this somewhere, though.
- jedberg 17y ago
  So deliver to businesses on the five weekdays and homes on Saturday but not Wednesday.

cjoh 17y ago

Amazing stats in their footer: With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.

kscaldef 17y ago
Keep in mind that they also have a government-granted monopoly. They probably wouldn't be a big otherwise.
- cjoh 17y ago
  Maybe-- but that's a tough conclusion. While the USPS is a government agency, we still don't have enough data about the agency, or any agency's efficiency to be an accurate judge. It'd be great, for instance, if we could see what the average price per employee at the USPS was vs. UPS vs. FedEx. Sick leave comparisons, purchasing efficiencies, etc. Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
  - kscaldef 17y ago
    That information isn't all that useful, since UPS and FedEx don't compete (and are forbidden to compete) in the marketplace for mail (as opposed to package) delivery. Regardless, though, I'm making a very modest claim: competitors would take away part of USPS's marketshare if they were allowed to compete. If you feel like there's a natural monopoly on mail delivery such that that wouldn't happen, you need to support that assertion.
    - hga 17y ago
      Well, there's the cherry picking argument, something we can see with broadband build outs. E.g. they'd offer low low low rates for delivering snail mail on Manhattan Island and leave it to the USPS to handle mail in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Hmmm, didn't AT&T do the same back in the bad old days?

orblivion 17y ago

> The five-day delivery proposal is part of comprehensive plan announced March 2, “Delivering the Future,” Government program names just kill me sometimes.

hga 17y ago
Doesn't have to be government: when MIT had to tighten their belt in the late '80s or so they started cleaning a bunch of bathrooms every other day instead of daily (and that was largely OK, many have very little use (e.g. patterns changes as the Institute changed and grew)). This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning". It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.

dustingetz 17y ago

"Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three." It ain't linear, buddy.

garply 17y ago
Why not? I could see mail sending / receiving to be highly correlated with age, which is linear.

noodle 17y ago

interestingly enough, for a while i lived in a place that didn't have mail on saturdays. i now live in a place that delivers and picks up mail twice a day, including saturdays. i don't notice any difference.

dpcan 17y ago

Why can't I get/pay for a USPS.com email address of my physical address? 123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com? Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location? Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.

aasarava 17y ago
Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online. Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  It's dubious to rely on a company's electronic records for your statements imo. They can delete or change anything they want. They can easily make an accusation that your e-mailed statement was forged. It'd be harder to make the same accusation on mailed statements, especially since most use paper with special watermarks or letterheads. I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
  - hga 17y ago
    And I've never ever gotten such an offer that also includes a discount to recognize their savings and the problems you point out. Well, come to think of it my account with Consumer Cellular is 100% paperless, that's probably their default and I'd probably have to pay to get paper from them. (They're a great AT&T reseller for people who spend very little time using their cell phones.)
- hexis 17y ago

leelin 17y ago

Isn't their logic confusing latency and throughput? Not enough mail to deliver suggests less mail volume, so less need for throughput, therefore we can hire fewer postal workers per post office. Cutting out one day of deliveries reduces throughput and increases latency. For example, Netflix becomes a worse deal. A power user could once cycle 2 roundtrips of DVDs in one week and is now down to 1.5.

kscaldef 17y ago
1 person can only deliver to so many houses in a single day.
rationalbeaver 17y ago
It's hard to address throughput that way when the Throughputers are in a union.

smokey_the_bear 17y ago

Maybe if this went through I could have home USPS delivery. The town I live in apparently adds enough new addresses to add two routes a year, but they can't hire that quickly. So half the residents have to use a PO Box for their address, and stuff shipped to their physical address gets returned. Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.

SuzyQT 17y ago

Plus most of the mail (bills) get delivered digitally