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The U.S. Postal Service will default on Wednesday unless Congress acts
- ck2 14y agoFor the USA degrading into a service-only economy, there sure is a funny attitude against preserving a pretty good service.
- solutionyogi 14y agoYou think USPS is a pretty good service? Have you ever used them? I HATE going to USPS location. The staff is rude and slow. It takes forever to get even the smallest thing to be taken care of. Compare this to UPS/FedEx. Generally, there won't be any lines and you can be in and out in less than 3 minutes.
- ck2 14y agoI guess the experience varies widely. I love USPS, very accessible and affordable, send anything up to 3 ounces in just a few days anywhere in the continental USA for $1.60 However I absolutely loathe, beyond description UPS. I wish Amazon used anything but UPS for prime, it ruins the whole experience.
- antidaily 14y agohttp://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.jpg http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.j... nuff said. I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.
- masklinn 14y ago> I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell. No need to "swear", they've been caught in that exact act several time by people who'd cleared their daily schedule entirely (or taken a home-work day for office drones) to get their package, either catching them trying to leave after having pinned/dropped a notice or plain not saying them the whole day. And that's beyond their basic "rules" such as a home number not being clearly visible from the truck means you don't exist and fuck you very much.
- pessimizer 14y agoSeriously? Having to pick up a package at UPS is usually the worst customer service experience I've had that week. I'd be pleased as punch if when they failed to deliver, they'd just drop it off at my local post office. I have spent over an hour in UPS more than once.
- Anechoic 14y agoAs ck2 mentions, our experiences with USPS may be location specific. My experience is the exact opposite of yours, my local USPS shops (I patronize two locations almost daily) have been outstanding (adding postage to letters that need additional postage and leaving a note in my PO box asking to reimburse them, routing mislabel mail to my address, etc), and my experience at the local UPS/FedEx shops have been underwhelming and their hours generally suck. I've shipped something like 3000 packages via USPS priority mail over the last 3 years, and there have been a grand total of two that have gotten lost (and I'm pretty sure that one of those two was a customer ripping me off). That's a much higher success rate than I've gotten with FedEx & UPS, at lower prices.
- ojbyrne 14y agoCount me in the USPS lovers. I'm from Canada, and the mail service there is horrible compared to south of the border.
- afterburner 14y agoI'm from Canada, and I have no complaints about my mail service.
- ojbyrne 14y agoIn the US, you can mail something Thursday and it will be received Friday, at least within a 100 mile radius. It takes 3 days in Canada.
- afterburner 14y agoI don't have any data for <100 miles, but I've gotten stuff across the country in 3-4 days at the basic rate, 2000 miles not just 100 miles. And there are options for next day delivery, it's not like it's not available. Canada's low and spread out population has to count for something in this argument.
- ojbyrne 14y agoYou can get stuff across country in the US in 3-4 days too. And I didn't say there weren't economic/geographic reasons why Canada's mail service isn't as good, just that it isn't as good.
- afterburner 14y agoBut you can get next day delivery if you pay for it, to anywhere in Canada. So... it's just as good.
- gibsonf1 14y agoIt would be nice to have a postal service not running billions of dollars in tax-payer funded deficits every year that was more reliable. A private for profit entity where innovation could improve service would be a very nice change.
- ck2 14y agoUSPS doesn't get any money from taxpayers. It's all funded from postage. This is an often repeated myth that is very mistaken. You really want UPS doing to daily mail what they do to packages?
- jeremyt 14y agoAnyone can run a "pretty good service" with massive shovelfuls of taxpayer dollars propping them up every year. The US should remove all the mandates from the Postal Service and all of the subsidies and open up mail delivery for competition from FedEx and UPS.
- Anechoic 14y agoThe USPS haven't received tax money for several decades.
- brightsize 14y agoGet out of here with your facts. We're here to whine about "entitlements" and "sustainability" and vent whatever other stories we can concoct about how the government can't do anything right, how turning over all government functions to for-profit corporations will fix everything, and how the USPS is evidence of the truth of these assertions. Communist.
- jeremyt 14y agoLooks like I was wrong on this one. However, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that they will come to the taxpayer looking for a bailout soon.
- D3lt4 14y agoI have also had a really good experience with USPS, but I have not had negative experience with UPS or FedEx.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Retric 14y agoThe specific issue is the government massively changed the way they needed to fund their pension plan and they don't have the money to do so. But, if Ford where to suddenly need to work under that system they would also fail.
- newbie12 14y agoFord also has to fund retirement benefits in advance. Because taxpayers are 100% on the hook for a USPS failure, and not for a Ford failure, the rules are tighter for USPS, which is appropriate. See: http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/_Blogs/NetNet/__DAILY_POSTS/CRSmemo_postal_rhb.pdf http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/...
- Retric 14y agoIt's not a problem with prepaying for heath benefits. It's changing the rule to force prepaying ~7 years worth of heath benefits every year until they are ~70 years ahead. If they had been forced to gain 6 months of headway every year you end up with the same mandate at far lower up front costs. PS: Also Ford does not need to 100% fund there pension plans they are allowed to have a gap which is currently around 20% or $15.4 billion as of end 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/30/us-ford-pension-idUSBRE84T1KW20120530 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/30/us-ford-pension-id...
- masklinn 14y ago> If they lose money, Congress will bail them out with our tax dollars. You do realize the vast majority of these losses are due to the 2006 act mandating that USPS pre-funds 75 years of retirement benefits over 10 years? The one passed by congress? Bail out? Congress dumped most of the shit USPS is currently in on the organization. Not saying they don't have a number of issues, and some of your suggestions are interesting (I'm surprised they are not already implemented really), but USPS's budget crisis is complete bullshit manufactured under the Bush administration.
- grandalf 14y agoAs I've mentioned before, the USPS is an environmental disaster. 6 days each week thousands of trucks set off to deliver millions of pounds of unwanted paper waste (junk mail) to homes and businesses all across the country. Every day I clear out my mailbox and 95% of the contents goes directly into the recycle bin. I have tried all the DMA removal forms, various generalized opt outs, etc., but the junk mail keeps coming. Recently with paperkarma (an IOS app) I've been able to reduce it somewhat, so now junk mail is about 75% of the contents of my mailbox on a bad day. There is certainly no reason for daily deliveries. I'd be happy with once or twice each week. This would save massively on fuel and labor costs and would not degrade the service significantly since the trucks could still operate between cities every day if necessary. The USPS and the paper direct mail industry should both have gone away long ago. Alas, it's illegal for any companies to offer standard letter delivery services, so the USPS is also a monopolist, with all the expected bloat and inefficiency.
- debacle 14y agoI live in a metro area, and businesses here absolutely depend on the overnight delivery service provided by the USPS to get things done in a timely fashion.
- tptacek 14y agoI recommend Jonathan Franzen's postal service essay in _How To Be Alone_ for some perspective on how important the postal service actually is. There are a number of business processes that actually touch normal people's lives that depend on postal mail.
- tptacek 14y agoBefore you develop an opinion on this, you'd want to know that the bill the USPS is defaulting on is a prepayment for future health costs, which the USPS is required to account for idiosyncratically. The USPS has structural financial issues, but is not on the immediate brink of collapse.
- debacle 14y agoThis is very important to note. This was done during the Bush administration in an attempt to hobble the USPS.
- mmphosis 14y agothe congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits for future retirees
- streptomycin 14y agoDoes that explain why it passed Congress nearly unanimously? Actually more Repubs than Dems voted against it IIRC, but I'm far too lazy to look up the vote totals now. I do find it hilarious that people think putting money in a pension fund is some kind of Republican conspiracy. Aren't Democrats usually the ones who support government pensions?
- knowtheory 14y agoTo be more specific this is the transaction taking place (failing to take place, rather): Congress passed a law in 2006 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407 ) insisting that the USPS fully fund its pension liabilities by 2043, beginning in 2007 (see SEC. 802. B of the full text). That amounts to a radical restructuring of the USPS's costs (not that doing so is in principle a bad thing, but the implementation of this law is... onerous to say the least). This is basically Congress telling the Postal Service how it should allocate its money, and the Postal Service responding by saying "we can't meet the terms that you've unilaterally passed" by not paying the treasury the sum of money necessary to fund future pension liabilities. This says essentially nothing about the costs of current operations or obligations.
- jakeonthemove 14y agoUSPS, to put it simply, sucks. Nobody I know uses them, and when I have to ship something via USPS, I use their more expensive options - things do tend to get lost a lot, unlike UPS and Fedex for example, which have been pretty exemplary as of late. I hope the Congress does nothing - but then again, I'm one of those who think bailing out the banks was a mistake...
- pessimizer 14y agoEverybody I know uses Flat Rate Priority. I participate in unregulated board game auctions on a forum (geeky, I know), and out of the last 50 packages sent from average boring people across the US, I don't think a single one came UPS. They're all Flat Rate Priority, defaulting into Parcel Post for larger packages. Bailing out the private and wealthy isn't comparable to bailing out a public service that wouldn't even need to be bailed out if Congress hadn't instituted pension funding standards on it that are harsher than the standards they impose on banks doing the same thing.
- r00fus 14y agoDo you realize that UPS and FedEx couldn't deliver to remote locations without USPS - they use USPS for last-mile delivery in many cases, because they don't have the footprint. USPS could be more efficient - they deliver lots of junkmail (that I can't filter out/decline) and they should be running more efficient vehicles and perhaps less frequently. However, I submit that if the USPS disappeared overnight, the country would have a minor crisis as many private companies (even shipping companies) depend on them. We need to modernize the USPS, and expand it, not cut it.
- davidw 14y agoThe postal service is what it is because at one point in time, it was deemed something that was worth providing to everyone, everywhere as part of being in the same country. Even if that was not always economically sensible, the idea is that there are other benefits to society. The debate, therefore, is really about that: is that still the situation? If not, then just cut it loose - privatize the sector, and do not require anyone to deliver to places like Lonerock, Oregon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonerock,_Oregon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonerock,_Oregon ). If so, the debate becomes how to best provide those services to minimize losses. However, that debate is clearly a political one, which would mean that it's probably not a suitable article for this site (comes from cnn.com, too, to boot).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- antidaily 14y agoedit: said elsewhere. “The Postal Reform Act”. end of story.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Anechoic 14y agothere's no reason to keep sinking public money to prop up an organization that can't even turn a profit Their operations are profitable, the financial problems are due to an unreasonable funding policy forced on them by Congress.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- debacle 14y ago> Just like the constantly-needing-a-bailout Amtrack ,and every other government service, I, for one, as a citizen of one of the most privileged countries in the world, am very happy that the government provides many of the services it does (EPA, FCC, FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, USPS, SEC, GAO, CBO, NOAA, CDC, just to name a few). These organizations aren't perfect, but that's not an indictment - nothing on this Earth is perfect, and libertarian capitalism is not a solution to any of the worlds problems. Context and history are important. Pure capitalism has never been, and never will be, unicorns and rainbows as far as the eye can see.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- debacle 14y ago> but your socialism has resulted in the slaughter of 200 million people What?
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoFTFA: "While default would be a first for the Postal Service and a sign of how deep its problems are, it's largely symbolic. Postal officials have pledged that employees and subcontractors will continue to be paid and mail will be delivered as normal."