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The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is a

The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff). See: https://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ https://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-of... The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. There needs to be significant value that others cannot meet. The reformation that is needed is being blocked. For example, how about allowing me to pay $5 a month to not have you deliver crap into my inbox? Or to fully digitize the process, so I don't have a recycle bin full of crappy products, alumni magazines, and pizza coupons that I don't need or want. Oh. And stop selling my data to third parties as well. Looking at you NCOA database.

thiagocesar 6y ago
For a moment there you had me wondering why the post office was delivering canned meat.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Having a last-mile delivery method available for every corner of the continental USA is enough of a raison d'être. That's value for the country. Advertising is a money maker and it subsidizes the other business. I don't really see a problem with this.
- tdeck 6y ago
  Not only is it valuable to private citizens, but FedEx and UPS use the postal service for last mile delivery as well. For example here's FedEx: https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost/network.html https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost/network...
- KeepFlying 6y ago
  You have hit on the EXACT reason that the USPS is so critical. There are huge areas of the US which are not serviced by other private delivery services. And even in areas where those services do reach, I imagine the cost is extremely high. People in Barrow, Alaska deserve access to mailing services as much as people in NYC. Without that, there is no reliable way to contact everyone in the US for the purpose of the Census, Voting (where mail-in voting is available), Jury Duty notifications, Selective Service, etc. There are critical government services that still must be run over "snail mail" and to pass that off to a private institution which will not be able to service all areas equally will lead to more inequality.
alexbanks 6y ago
How do I do mail in voting via Amazon, FedEx, DHL?
- ericmay 6y ago
  The question is why can’t we? Why can’t the USG print and mail out ballots using these services? I don’t think they are fundamentally less secure, and if they are than we can just have them add on the capability of doing secure delivery.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    Because they don't deliver everywhere. That's one of the biggest operational problems. They don't deliver consistently to rural areas. These companies farm it out. See FedEx Smart Post https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost.html https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost.html
    - ericmay 6y ago
      So we let private companies have the most profitable routes, our USPS serves to either deliver spam to the suburbs or perform expensive rural deliveries? I feel like something here needs to change. I’m not really advocating for getting rid of USPS, but if the only leg it’s standing on is delivering to rural areas, I feel like we need to take a look at different options.
      - jonathankoren 6y ago
        Who is going to deliver to the unprofitable rural area? It certainly isn't The Market(tm), because the for profit companies have explicitly rejected it. Or are rural people supposed to just suck it up, and lose a constitutionally mandated service for ideological reasons?
        ericmay 6y ago
        Is there a middle ground? I'm sympathetic to this, but at the same time I'm also sympathetic to not having a USPS in order to deliver only with unprofitable routes and to deliver spam mail. What do you think we should do?
toiletfuneral 6y ago
why should basic government services be profitable?
- exabrial 6y ago
  why should basic government services severely damage the environment?
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    is that the USPS or just the free market?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Then propose a plan for how to make USPS green while maintaining efficiency, and we can have a vote on it.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  Like the parent mentioned, the service is exploited by companies to do their cheap spam advertising. Is it okay for taxes to cover this?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    So, get rid of the “you have to make a profit” requirement, fund it via taxes, and charge the spammers normal rates.
    - DevKoala 6y ago
      How do you know it is spam?
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        It’s not worth spending 55 cents to mail it?
jacobolus 6y ago
There is huge value to the USPS, but it should be publicly funded (to whatever extent necessary) and should have serving the public as its mission, and should not be treated as a business.
qntty 6y ago
On the other hand, privatized delivery poses the same problem as private control of the internet in the absence of net neutrality. If there was no USPS to compete with, what's the stop Amazon and other major retailers from coming to agreements with delivery companies to charge higher fees for "non-partner" deliveries.
- treis 6y ago
  The Sherman anti-trust act
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    Which really doesn't seem to have helped the market capture by massive companies...with enough money behind it, it's unlikely the new private post company would be regulated.
  - mediaman 6y ago
    The Sherman anti-trust act is very very rarely ever used in prosecution.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Next you’ll ask for roads, schools, public transit, and the military to turn a profit! Public goods need not be revenue neutral, although efficiency efforts are palatable. The “profit” is the utility value it provides.
gcb0 6y ago
Ironically, the problem is that you accept that the Person responsible for the Post Office can say "American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers." with impunity, not that they say it. Corruption will exist, no matter how perfect the system is, but when the corruption becomes the norm without anyone fighting against it then privatization will not help you.
pfisch 6y ago
The USPS already has a purpose. Your problem is how it funds that purpose. We could fund it ourselves through the government instead, but why?
standardUser 6y ago
"...any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS" And then those things are handed off to the USPS for "last mile" delivery to the millions of rural addresses that UPS and FedEx don't delivery to directly with their own vehicles. USPS serves some very critical purposes, and ensuring mail 'works' for all citizens, even those with deep rural addresses, is one of them.
- GlenTheMachine 6y ago
  I came here to say this. I grew up in an extremely rural area. It's still extremely rural, forty years after I move away. When I was a teenager there was one grocery store, no department stores, no electronics stores, no restaurants. Just the grocery store, the feed store, the auto parts and hunting goods store, and mile upon mile of pasture. And the post office. The mail came every day. Sending a letter to anywhere cost $0.25, just like your were mailing it from New York City. It was, literally, a lifeline.
  - binsh 6y ago
    This is the critical piece. It's provided as a government service to absolutely _everyone_, for a low price. Like you said, the fact that you can send a letter to any US state or territory for the same price, and it gets there in a few days, is a miracle, and arguably one of the remaining functioning bits of American government. What happens to people in small towns who rely on the mail for prescriptions? Or important paperwork? "Sorry, ma'am, but since the post office was privatized, we'll need an extra $30 to deliver your insulin. But if you subscribe to our Super Shipper Preferred program, you can save 10%..." Imagine losing all connection to the outside world because your city wasn't deemed profitable enough. That's some Gilded Age hell right there.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- j88439h84 6y ago
  If USPS didn't exist, do you think FedEx start delivering to those places?
acdha 6y ago
The major problem the USPS has is the 2006 law requiring them to prefund employee pensions at the time of retirement, which no other business has to do. Changing that to normal accounting alone would substantially transform their finances. A secondary problem is that Congress will interfere with decisions to reduce service in unprofitable areas but not officially subsidize it. This makes the post office appear to be unprofitable because we see the cost of having service in rural areas but don’t directly record the costs to the people who live there and the business which otherwise would not happen without that service.
- treis 6y ago
  >The major problem the USPS has is the 2006 law requiring them to prefund employee pensions at the time of retirement, which no other business has to do. This is a common talking point, but is factually incorrect. (1) The USPS hasn't made any of those payments since 2013. Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments. (2) Pensions are required to be fully funded. In practice that's a bit more theoretical than actual, but the USPS isn't being treated any different.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    Citation? The linked article says: >The agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis. > According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.” >“[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted. >The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation.
paulgb 6y ago
From that article, it's not clear what USPS is getting the blame for here. Reading between the lines, it sounds like a startup asked them to reroute their customers' mail to them, and USPS said "no we don't do that"? They ultimately found a way around it but shut down due to lack of sign-ups[1], so it seems like USPS saved themselves some time. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/
- acdha 6y ago
  Any time I read something like this, the safe assumption is that this is how they’re telling their investors that the problem wasn’t a couple of recent business school grads trying to get rich quick parachuting into a business they don’t understand: “[we] knew that the USPS would not be able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost savings.”
notJim 6y ago
I actually tend to agree with you about the USPS. The thing is, it seems like a lot more could be done by the USPS. An obvious example would be postal banking, where they could serve as a bank that would provide services to all, especially those who struggle to get accounts at commercial banks. I've also heard perhaps wilder ideas—for example, what if they got into other logistics-heavy spaces like food delivery? In Finland, they apparently piloting a program to mow people's lawns.
uses 6y ago
Your first sentence isn't even true and you can go right here and read the table that shows their revenue sources: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2019-results.htm https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-... To spoil it for you: in 2019, First-Class Mail and Shipping and Packages made significantly more revenue than Marketing Mail. Yes, USPS needs some new revenue streams. They do provide significant value that others cannot meet, which is daily mail delivery to anywhere in the USA. But yes, they need to find other unique services too.
- donor20 6y ago
  The chart doesn't show the relative volumes of mail. For every priority mail package at $14.95 that same $14.95 buys HUNDREDS of pieces of junk mail. The terrible thing - you CANNOT opt out of the junk mail, at least in the past (hopefully this has changed). I have no interest in the USPS as a result. What type of business that is supposed to be providing a service FORCES its future and current customers to kill trees for junk mail that will go into the trash. If the govt didn't allow for spam filters on email, email would be dying too.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    What are you talking about? There is a volume column right in the chart. It shows that for every piece of first class mail there is roughly 1.5 pieces of marketing mail
    - elsewhen 6y ago
      in the interest of clarity: some marketers also use first class mail so there is some marketing mixed in with the first-class mail numbers. https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-standard-mail-learn-the-difference/ https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
      - alextheparrot 6y ago
        Even marketing mail sent through first class that's presorted will only get you about 30 letters for $15 at $0.46 per letter [0], so still not sure what the original author is talking about regarding 'hundreds'. [0] https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm
justin66 6y ago
> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff). Hundreds of millions of people use first class mail to pay their bills, rent, etc. and for all sorts of other things where those other delivery services would be needlessly expensive. The "basic problem" is that the post office is not permitted to set prices for first class mail or vary them where they lose money with every delivery, and yet they're expected by some to be run profitably "like a business." > The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. Because what the country really needs right now is a greater number of unstable jobs.
- andrewlgood 6y ago
  ? Are you suggesting the USPS is simply a job works program?
  - justin66 6y ago
    No, but the person I was responding to might have been implying that. I think it's a "stable" job, although the retirement benefits and so on that a USPS letter carrier gets, for example, are not what they once were, and the post office also relies more on "non-career employees" than they used to.
mumbisChungo 6y ago
USPS is actually an extremely effective lightweight parcel courier. Their rates aren't great for big, heavy stuff, but for typical ecommerce volume their rates are very competitive. They're also the only major courier who is anywhere close to maintaining their pre-covid delivery times. Outbound UPS delivery times from my area, for example, have more than doubled since March (from avg 5 bus days, to two weeks), while USPS volume is maybe a day slower on average. (avg 2.5 days up to avg 3.5)
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
They're already a significant value that others cannot meet. That's why a billionaire wants to kill it and ingest the money elsewhere. The elimination of money orders from the USPS alone would push more people to already-abusive payday lenders.
CharlesW 6y ago
> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. I suggest doing some research before presenting guesses as fact. Marketing email was 23% of USPS's revenue (53% of volume) in 2019.
yardie 6y ago
> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Probably because as a chartered non-government company they have a politically appointed Postmaster General who takes their orders from the POTUS. No company is required to fund pensions for 75 years. No company has their prices set by Congress. And no company has been a bigger political football than the USPS. > it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. I believe they have tried in the past, oh what's that, blocked because Postmaster General doesn't want it.

thiagocesar 6y ago

For a moment there you had me wondering why the post office was delivering canned meat.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Having a last-mile delivery method available for every corner of the continental USA is enough of a raison d'être. That's value for the country. Advertising is a money maker and it subsidizes the other business. I don't really see a problem with this.

tdeck 6y ago
Not only is it valuable to private citizens, but FedEx and UPS use the postal service for last mile delivery as well. For example here's FedEx: https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost/network.html https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost/network...
KeepFlying 6y ago
You have hit on the EXACT reason that the USPS is so critical. There are huge areas of the US which are not serviced by other private delivery services. And even in areas where those services do reach, I imagine the cost is extremely high. People in Barrow, Alaska deserve access to mailing services as much as people in NYC. Without that, there is no reliable way to contact everyone in the US for the purpose of the Census, Voting (where mail-in voting is available), Jury Duty notifications, Selective Service, etc. There are critical government services that still must be run over "snail mail" and to pass that off to a private institution which will not be able to service all areas equally will lead to more inequality.

alexbanks 6y ago

How do I do mail in voting via Amazon, FedEx, DHL?

ericmay 6y ago
The question is why can’t we? Why can’t the USG print and mail out ballots using these services? I don’t think they are fundamentally less secure, and if they are than we can just have them add on the capability of doing secure delivery.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  Because they don't deliver everywhere. That's one of the biggest operational problems. They don't deliver consistently to rural areas. These companies farm it out. See FedEx Smart Post https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost.html https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost.html
  - ericmay 6y ago
    So we let private companies have the most profitable routes, our USPS serves to either deliver spam to the suburbs or perform expensive rural deliveries? I feel like something here needs to change. I’m not really advocating for getting rid of USPS, but if the only leg it’s standing on is delivering to rural areas, I feel like we need to take a look at different options.
    - jonathankoren 6y ago
      Who is going to deliver to the unprofitable rural area? It certainly isn't The Market(tm), because the for profit companies have explicitly rejected it. Or are rural people supposed to just suck it up, and lose a constitutionally mandated service for ideological reasons?
      - ericmay 6y ago
        Is there a middle ground? I'm sympathetic to this, but at the same time I'm also sympathetic to not having a USPS in order to deliver only with unprofitable routes and to deliver spam mail. What do you think we should do?

toiletfuneral 6y ago

why should basic government services be profitable?

exabrial 6y ago
why should basic government services severely damage the environment?
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  is that the USPS or just the free market?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Then propose a plan for how to make USPS green while maintaining efficiency, and we can have a vote on it.
DevKoala 6y ago
Like the parent mentioned, the service is exploited by companies to do their cheap spam advertising. Is it okay for taxes to cover this?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  So, get rid of the “you have to make a profit” requirement, fund it via taxes, and charge the spammers normal rates.
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    How do you know it is spam?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      It’s not worth spending 55 cents to mail it?

jacobolus 6y ago

There is huge value to the USPS, but it should be publicly funded (to whatever extent necessary) and should have serving the public as its mission, and should not be treated as a business.

qntty 6y ago

On the other hand, privatized delivery poses the same problem as private control of the internet in the absence of net neutrality. If there was no USPS to compete with, what's the stop Amazon and other major retailers from coming to agreements with delivery companies to charge higher fees for "non-partner" deliveries.

treis 6y ago
The Sherman anti-trust act
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Which really doesn't seem to have helped the market capture by massive companies...with enough money behind it, it's unlikely the new private post company would be regulated.
- mediaman 6y ago
  The Sherman anti-trust act is very very rarely ever used in prosecution.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Next you’ll ask for roads, schools, public transit, and the military to turn a profit! Public goods need not be revenue neutral, although efficiency efforts are palatable. The “profit” is the utility value it provides.

gcb0 6y ago

Ironically, the problem is that you accept that the Person responsible for the Post Office can say "American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers." with impunity, not that they say it. Corruption will exist, no matter how perfect the system is, but when the corruption becomes the norm without anyone fighting against it then privatization will not help you.

pfisch 6y ago

The USPS already has a purpose. Your problem is how it funds that purpose. We could fund it ourselves through the government instead, but why?

standardUser 6y ago

"...any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS" And then those things are handed off to the USPS for "last mile" delivery to the millions of rural addresses that UPS and FedEx don't delivery to directly with their own vehicles. USPS serves some very critical purposes, and ensuring mail 'works' for all citizens, even those with deep rural addresses, is one of them.

GlenTheMachine 6y ago
I came here to say this. I grew up in an extremely rural area. It's still extremely rural, forty years after I move away. When I was a teenager there was one grocery store, no department stores, no electronics stores, no restaurants. Just the grocery store, the feed store, the auto parts and hunting goods store, and mile upon mile of pasture. And the post office. The mail came every day. Sending a letter to anywhere cost $0.25, just like your were mailing it from New York City. It was, literally, a lifeline.
- binsh 6y ago
  This is the critical piece. It's provided as a government service to absolutely _everyone_, for a low price. Like you said, the fact that you can send a letter to any US state or territory for the same price, and it gets there in a few days, is a miracle, and arguably one of the remaining functioning bits of American government. What happens to people in small towns who rely on the mail for prescriptions? Or important paperwork? "Sorry, ma'am, but since the post office was privatized, we'll need an extra $30 to deliver your insulin. But if you subscribe to our Super Shipper Preferred program, you can save 10%..." Imagine losing all connection to the outside world because your city wasn't deemed profitable enough. That's some Gilded Age hell right there.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
j88439h84 6y ago
If USPS didn't exist, do you think FedEx start delivering to those places?

acdha 6y ago

The major problem the USPS has is the 2006 law requiring them to prefund employee pensions at the time of retirement, which no other business has to do. Changing that to normal accounting alone would substantially transform their finances. A secondary problem is that Congress will interfere with decisions to reduce service in unprofitable areas but not officially subsidize it. This makes the post office appear to be unprofitable because we see the cost of having service in rural areas but don’t directly record the costs to the people who live there and the business which otherwise would not happen without that service.

treis 6y ago
>The major problem the USPS has is the 2006 law requiring them to prefund employee pensions at the time of retirement, which no other business has to do. This is a common talking point, but is factually incorrect. (1) The USPS hasn't made any of those payments since 2013. Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments. (2) Pensions are required to be fully funded. In practice that's a bit more theoretical than actual, but the USPS isn't being treated any different.
- mthoms 6y ago
  Citation? The linked article says: >The agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis. > According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.” >“[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted. >The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation.

paulgb 6y ago

From that article, it's not clear what USPS is getting the blame for here. Reading between the lines, it sounds like a startup asked them to reroute their customers' mail to them, and USPS said "no we don't do that"? They ultimately found a way around it but shut down due to lack of sign-ups[1], so it seems like USPS saved themselves some time. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/

acdha 6y ago
Any time I read something like this, the safe assumption is that this is how they’re telling their investors that the problem wasn’t a couple of recent business school grads trying to get rich quick parachuting into a business they don’t understand: “[we] knew that the USPS would not be able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost savings.”

notJim 6y ago

I actually tend to agree with you about the USPS. The thing is, it seems like a lot more could be done by the USPS. An obvious example would be postal banking, where they could serve as a bank that would provide services to all, especially those who struggle to get accounts at commercial banks. I've also heard perhaps wilder ideas—for example, what if they got into other logistics-heavy spaces like food delivery? In Finland, they apparently piloting a program to mow people's lawns.

uses 6y ago

Your first sentence isn't even true and you can go right here and read the table that shows their revenue sources: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2019-results.htm https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-... To spoil it for you: in 2019, First-Class Mail and Shipping and Packages made significantly more revenue than Marketing Mail. Yes, USPS needs some new revenue streams. They do provide significant value that others cannot meet, which is daily mail delivery to anywhere in the USA. But yes, they need to find other unique services too.

donor20 6y ago
The chart doesn't show the relative volumes of mail. For every priority mail package at $14.95 that same $14.95 buys HUNDREDS of pieces of junk mail. The terrible thing - you CANNOT opt out of the junk mail, at least in the past (hopefully this has changed). I have no interest in the USPS as a result. What type of business that is supposed to be providing a service FORCES its future and current customers to kill trees for junk mail that will go into the trash. If the govt didn't allow for spam filters on email, email would be dying too.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  What are you talking about? There is a volume column right in the chart. It shows that for every piece of first class mail there is roughly 1.5 pieces of marketing mail
  - elsewhen 6y ago
    in the interest of clarity: some marketers also use first class mail so there is some marketing mixed in with the first-class mail numbers. https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-standard-mail-learn-the-difference/ https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
    - alextheparrot 6y ago
      Even marketing mail sent through first class that's presorted will only get you about 30 letters for $15 at $0.46 per letter [0], so still not sure what the original author is talking about regarding 'hundreds'. [0] https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm

justin66 6y ago

> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff). Hundreds of millions of people use first class mail to pay their bills, rent, etc. and for all sorts of other things where those other delivery services would be needlessly expensive. The "basic problem" is that the post office is not permitted to set prices for first class mail or vary them where they lose money with every delivery, and yet they're expected by some to be run profitably "like a business." > The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. Because what the country really needs right now is a greater number of unstable jobs.

andrewlgood 6y ago
? Are you suggesting the USPS is simply a job works program?
- justin66 6y ago
  No, but the person I was responding to might have been implying that. I think it's a "stable" job, although the retirement benefits and so on that a USPS letter carrier gets, for example, are not what they once were, and the post office also relies more on "non-career employees" than they used to.

mumbisChungo 6y ago

USPS is actually an extremely effective lightweight parcel courier. Their rates aren't great for big, heavy stuff, but for typical ecommerce volume their rates are very competitive. They're also the only major courier who is anywhere close to maintaining their pre-covid delivery times. Outbound UPS delivery times from my area, for example, have more than doubled since March (from avg 5 bus days, to two weeks), while USPS volume is maybe a day slower on average. (avg 2.5 days up to avg 3.5)

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

They're already a significant value that others cannot meet. That's why a billionaire wants to kill it and ingest the money elsewhere. The elimination of money orders from the USPS alone would push more people to already-abusive payday lenders.

CharlesW 6y ago

> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. I suggest doing some research before presenting guesses as fact. Marketing email was 23% of USPS's revenue (53% of volume) in 2019.

yardie 6y ago

> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Probably because as a chartered non-government company they have a politically appointed Postmaster General who takes their orders from the POTUS. No company is required to fund pensions for 75 years. No company has their prices set by Congress. And no company has been a bigger political football than the USPS. > it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. I believe they have tried in the past, oh what's that, blocked because Postmaster General doesn't want it.