8 ms·

American Letter Mail Company

75 points by kick 7y ago

virgakwolfw 7y ago
Did the ALMC deliver letters to every single address in the United States? I don't think they did. They weren't trying to "compete" with the USPS so much as skim off the profitable routes.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  How is that not competition?
  - mikojan 7y ago
    It's as if in the beginning of a marathon you were to sprint ahead of Eliud Kipchoge - stop - exclaim: "I beat you!" You're not competing. It's monkey business.
  - kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
    Let's say you start a power company in the same area as I, a public power utility. The board of utilities says that as a regulated monopoly I have to provide power to every parcel within the regulated area. I charge more than the average cost+ rate so that, on the whole, the denser areas that require less infrastructure can subsidize the less dense rural areas where individuals may require kilometers of dedicated transmission line to service their location. But you come along and charge less (or give power away), but you only do so in areas where it is either profitable or minimally loss-making. >but Spooner dropped his rates even lower -- delivering many letters for free. And you don't do this to run a competing enterprise, but to make a socio-economic/political point. So all of my customers in the limited areas that you serve, naturally, switch to you. But the areas you choose to serve, the densely-populated ones, are the areas that I need to fulfill my mission of delivering electricity to everyone. No longer able to subsidize sparsely-populated areas, I either have to raise rates or give up. "Well that's just the free market" is baloney. A utility's purpose is to serve its population. A mail service's purpose is to deliver letters to everyone. In countries where postal service is "privatized" there is still only one letter delivery service-- it's just run by a board instead of the government. And those "privatized" postal services still have a universal service mandate, required by the law that privatized the formally nationalized entities. As an aside, the UK's Royal Mail was privatized a couple of years ago. It was sold off at bargain-basement prices, ripping off the taxpayers, to investors who just happened, coincidentally, to be donors to politicians who were in charge at the time. Its "universal service" mandate expires next year. We'll see how the FrEe MaRkEt handles universal service when not forced to by law. The American Letter Mail Company wasn't competition. It was a vanity project launched for political purposes that wasn't even in the same game as the USPO, much less in competition with it.
- amluto 7y ago
  The USPS does not deliver to every address in the US. I don’t know what specifically causes the USPS to deliver to a specific area, but there are entire incorporated cities, some with reasonably large population and density, that don’t receive mail at all except to the local post office. Even UPS and FedEx’s low-cost all-but-the-last-mile services regularly lose packages because they hand them off to the USPS.
  - macintux 7y ago
    I was surprised to discover you're correct. Here's a look at that: https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/service-not-available-usps-mail-delivery-limited-may-think/ https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/service-not-available-us...
- syshum 7y ago
  >>so much as skim off the profitable routes. They were not even trying to do that, Lysander formed the company with the expressed purpose that the government would sue him. he wanted to get the monopoly protection law for the USPS ruled unconstitutional
hamandcheese 7y ago
Why was postage so expensive at the time? According to an inflation calculator I looked up, the $0.18 postage mentioned in the article is equivalent to about $6.00 in today’s dollars.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Horses are still just as expensive as they were. Railroads are faster now, and more efficient through diesel-electric engines.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  The past was extremely poor.
skrebbel 7y ago
According to wikipedia, ALMC founder Lysander Spooner "considered government monopoly to be an immoral restriction". Also according to wikipedia, he was a socialist and a member of First International. Can anyone more familiar with US history and/or political science explain this to me? How can you be both a socialist and against government regulation of business?
- klodolph 7y ago
  First of all, government monopoly is not the same thing as government regulation. Secondly, Lysander Spooner was a libertarian socialist. Libertarian socialism rejects economic control by the state. You’re probably thinking of social democracy when you think of socialism, because social democracy is what you see on the news. Social democracy is only one branch of the socialist movement (or movements). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
- lkramer 7y ago
  Socialism does not equal government regulation. It's true that many practical implementations have resulted in a big government, most famously communism relies on centralised control. But to take the opposite site of the spectrum, anarchism rejects the idea of government. In the same vein, conservatism is not automatically pro small government. For instance in recent years the British tories seems to be in favour of heavy government control/regulation.
- InvaderFizz 7y ago
  There is a long history of anti-government socialist movements. Spooner was of the opinion that governments themselves are illegitimate in how they come to be and that in particular the US Constitution was a charade. I had to look up the First International, I found this bit of trivia interesting: "In 1872, it split in two over conflicts between statist and anarchist factions and dissolved in 1876." I don't know when Spooner joined, but he was 68 when it dissolved. If you want to read about him, his works, and read his works. Punch his name into google with the word Mises tacked on the end. You will find that Libertarians(the Anarcho-Capitalist ones) tend to hold him in high regard for his actions and his writings.
klodolph 7y ago
This page is probably a good place for someone who wants to practice their editing skills. The article has the facts, but the style is lacking (it has awkward phrasing, unnecessary passive voice, and sentence fragments).
kalleboo 7y ago
The fact that the USPS has a postal mail monopoly has always confused me. Other countries like Sweden have a plethora of competing mail delivery firms (including dedicated "junk mail" firms that only deliver junk mail. Delivering junk mail is a popular job for teens to do on the weekend)
- true_religion 7y ago
  Talking about junk mail has just convinced me that the postal monopoly is totally worth it. I would hate to have multiple companies completing to efficiently deliver ever larger piles of junk mail.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    At least in Sweden there's an industry consensus to not deliver junk mail to anyone with a "no advertising please" sticker on their mailbox.
- robjan 7y ago
  When there is a monopoly, more densely populated areas cross subsidise more sparsely populated areas. If there isn't a monopoly then companies are incentivised to pick and choose whos mail to carry making it more expensive for everyone else.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    I would think there are ways to achieve the same thing without having a monopoly.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      You don't need a monopoly. But if the government/quasi-government entity is effectively letter delivery of last resort while private companies pick off the more lucrative routes, they're going to either need subsidies or price delivery at a level that it may be untenable. ADDED: IOW, you could have an external taxpayer-supported "rural mail delivery" department that has a charter to deliver a letter for a quarter anywhere in the country rather than providing a subsidy within the system. It's mostly academic at this point. (And the reality is most private package delivery is fairly universal because there are business advantages to having a fairly complete delivery network even if it's not necessarily the most efficient decision at the micro level.)
anonu 7y ago
Early disruptors. Pretty amazing story. Wonder what the pitch looked like back in 1844. Today's first class postage costs 55 cents. And almost 180 years ago the cost to send a letter from NYC to Boston was basically half that at 26 cents. Feels like today's price hasn't kept with inflation. Can we conclude that this disruptor company affected prices for over a century and a half by simply introducing a little competition?
- quickthrowman 7y ago
  I think we can conclude advances in transportation technology made it cheaper to deliver the mail. Trains, trucks, planes.
  - anonu 7y ago
    Sure - thats certainly one reason. But why would a near monopolistic business (USPS) cut their prices?
    - macintux 7y ago
      Prices have always been regulated by the U.S. government; in the mid-1800s the price of postage was flattened to be independent of distance, which I infer addressed most of the complaints that led to the creation of the American Letter Mail Company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta... Added: this PDF goes into gory details on the turmoil in the 1840s: http://mars.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/3477/Appendix%20C.pdf http://mars.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/3477/Appendix%20C....
    - mattmaroon 7y ago
      Because they aren’t a business and most years they don’t turn a profit. They were effectively government subsidized for most of their existence.
    - selectodude 7y ago
      It's getting ever cheaper to deliver mail from Boston to New York, but it's getting more and more expensive to deliver mail to remote exurbs that the USPS is constitutionally mandated to serve. So the cross-subsidy of routes grows.
andrewl 7y ago
This reminds me of IPSA (Independent Postal System of America) which I have vague memories of. I think they lasted until some time into the 1970s.
gojomo 7y ago
Spooner is also the author of 'No Treason'/'The Consitution of No Authority', essays refuting the legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason

75 points by kick 7y ago

Did the ALMC deliver letters to every single address in the United States? I don't think they did. They weren't trying to "compete" with the USPS so much as skim off the profitable routes.

skrebbel 7y ago
How is that not competition?
- mikojan 7y ago
  It's as if in the beginning of a marathon you were to sprint ahead of Eliud Kipchoge - stop - exclaim: "I beat you!" You're not competing. It's monkey business.
- kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
  Let's say you start a power company in the same area as I, a public power utility. The board of utilities says that as a regulated monopoly I have to provide power to every parcel within the regulated area. I charge more than the average cost+ rate so that, on the whole, the denser areas that require less infrastructure can subsidize the less dense rural areas where individuals may require kilometers of dedicated transmission line to service their location. But you come along and charge less (or give power away), but you only do so in areas where it is either profitable or minimally loss-making. >but Spooner dropped his rates even lower -- delivering many letters for free. And you don't do this to run a competing enterprise, but to make a socio-economic/political point. So all of my customers in the limited areas that you serve, naturally, switch to you. But the areas you choose to serve, the densely-populated ones, are the areas that I need to fulfill my mission of delivering electricity to everyone. No longer able to subsidize sparsely-populated areas, I either have to raise rates or give up. "Well that's just the free market" is baloney. A utility's purpose is to serve its population. A mail service's purpose is to deliver letters to everyone. In countries where postal service is "privatized" there is still only one letter delivery service-- it's just run by a board instead of the government. And those "privatized" postal services still have a universal service mandate, required by the law that privatized the formally nationalized entities. As an aside, the UK's Royal Mail was privatized a couple of years ago. It was sold off at bargain-basement prices, ripping off the taxpayers, to investors who just happened, coincidentally, to be donors to politicians who were in charge at the time. Its "universal service" mandate expires next year. We'll see how the FrEe MaRkEt handles universal service when not forced to by law. The American Letter Mail Company wasn't competition. It was a vanity project launched for political purposes that wasn't even in the same game as the USPO, much less in competition with it.
amluto 7y ago
The USPS does not deliver to every address in the US. I don’t know what specifically causes the USPS to deliver to a specific area, but there are entire incorporated cities, some with reasonably large population and density, that don’t receive mail at all except to the local post office. Even UPS and FedEx’s low-cost all-but-the-last-mile services regularly lose packages because they hand them off to the USPS.
- macintux 7y ago
  I was surprised to discover you're correct. Here's a look at that: https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/service-not-available-usps-mail-delivery-limited-may-think/ https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/service-not-available-us...
syshum 7y ago
>>so much as skim off the profitable routes. They were not even trying to do that, Lysander formed the company with the expressed purpose that the government would sue him. he wanted to get the monopoly protection law for the USPS ruled unconstitutional

hamandcheese 7y ago

Why was postage so expensive at the time? According to an inflation calculator I looked up, the $0.18 postage mentioned in the article is equivalent to about $6.00 in today’s dollars.

ryacko 7y ago
Horses are still just as expensive as they were. Railroads are faster now, and more efficient through diesel-electric engines.
BurningFrog 7y ago
The past was extremely poor.

skrebbel 7y ago

According to wikipedia, ALMC founder Lysander Spooner "considered government monopoly to be an immoral restriction". Also according to wikipedia, he was a socialist and a member of First International. Can anyone more familiar with US history and/or political science explain this to me? How can you be both a socialist and against government regulation of business?

klodolph 7y ago
First of all, government monopoly is not the same thing as government regulation. Secondly, Lysander Spooner was a libertarian socialist. Libertarian socialism rejects economic control by the state. You’re probably thinking of social democracy when you think of socialism, because social democracy is what you see on the news. Social democracy is only one branch of the socialist movement (or movements). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
lkramer 7y ago
Socialism does not equal government regulation. It's true that many practical implementations have resulted in a big government, most famously communism relies on centralised control. But to take the opposite site of the spectrum, anarchism rejects the idea of government. In the same vein, conservatism is not automatically pro small government. For instance in recent years the British tories seems to be in favour of heavy government control/regulation.
InvaderFizz 7y ago
There is a long history of anti-government socialist movements. Spooner was of the opinion that governments themselves are illegitimate in how they come to be and that in particular the US Constitution was a charade. I had to look up the First International, I found this bit of trivia interesting: "In 1872, it split in two over conflicts between statist and anarchist factions and dissolved in 1876." I don't know when Spooner joined, but he was 68 when it dissolved. If you want to read about him, his works, and read his works. Punch his name into google with the word Mises tacked on the end. You will find that Libertarians(the Anarcho-Capitalist ones) tend to hold him in high regard for his actions and his writings.

klodolph 7y ago

This page is probably a good place for someone who wants to practice their editing skills. The article has the facts, but the style is lacking (it has awkward phrasing, unnecessary passive voice, and sentence fragments).

kalleboo 7y ago

The fact that the USPS has a postal mail monopoly has always confused me. Other countries like Sweden have a plethora of competing mail delivery firms (including dedicated "junk mail" firms that only deliver junk mail. Delivering junk mail is a popular job for teens to do on the weekend)

true_religion 7y ago
Talking about junk mail has just convinced me that the postal monopoly is totally worth it. I would hate to have multiple companies completing to efficiently deliver ever larger piles of junk mail.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  At least in Sweden there's an industry consensus to not deliver junk mail to anyone with a "no advertising please" sticker on their mailbox.
robjan 7y ago
When there is a monopoly, more densely populated areas cross subsidise more sparsely populated areas. If there isn't a monopoly then companies are incentivised to pick and choose whos mail to carry making it more expensive for everyone else.
- ailideex 7y ago
  I would think there are ways to achieve the same thing without having a monopoly.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    You don't need a monopoly. But if the government/quasi-government entity is effectively letter delivery of last resort while private companies pick off the more lucrative routes, they're going to either need subsidies or price delivery at a level that it may be untenable. ADDED: IOW, you could have an external taxpayer-supported "rural mail delivery" department that has a charter to deliver a letter for a quarter anywhere in the country rather than providing a subsidy within the system. It's mostly academic at this point. (And the reality is most private package delivery is fairly universal because there are business advantages to having a fairly complete delivery network even if it's not necessarily the most efficient decision at the micro level.)

anonu 7y ago

Early disruptors. Pretty amazing story. Wonder what the pitch looked like back in 1844. Today's first class postage costs 55 cents. And almost 180 years ago the cost to send a letter from NYC to Boston was basically half that at 26 cents. Feels like today's price hasn't kept with inflation. Can we conclude that this disruptor company affected prices for over a century and a half by simply introducing a little competition?

quickthrowman 7y ago
I think we can conclude advances in transportation technology made it cheaper to deliver the mail. Trains, trucks, planes.
- anonu 7y ago
  Sure - thats certainly one reason. But why would a near monopolistic business (USPS) cut their prices?
  - macintux 7y ago
    Prices have always been regulated by the U.S. government; in the mid-1800s the price of postage was flattened to be independent of distance, which I infer addressed most of the complaints that led to the creation of the American Letter Mail Company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta... Added: this PDF goes into gory details on the turmoil in the 1840s: http://mars.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/3477/Appendix%20C.pdf http://mars.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/3477/Appendix%20C....
  - mattmaroon 7y ago
    Because they aren’t a business and most years they don’t turn a profit. They were effectively government subsidized for most of their existence.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    It's getting ever cheaper to deliver mail from Boston to New York, but it's getting more and more expensive to deliver mail to remote exurbs that the USPS is constitutionally mandated to serve. So the cross-subsidy of routes grows.

andrewl 7y ago

This reminds me of IPSA (Independent Postal System of America) which I have vague memories of. I think they lasted until some time into the 1970s.

gojomo 7y ago

Spooner is also the author of 'No Treason'/'The Consitution of No Authority', essays refuting the legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason