Every day I go to my mailbox and put 98% of its contents directly into the recycle bin.
I have followed all the recommended steps to remove my address from various mailing lists.
The USPS is a garbage-spamming environmental disaster that solicits money from companies to do direct marketing, offers no opt-out features, and every day drives tens of thousands of polluting vehicles to stuff unwanted paper into mailboxes across the country.
In addition to its monopoly, the post office is one of the most unpleasant retail locations anyone could imagine -- filthy counters, grudging employees, and long lines.
Since "first class" mail takes between 2-12 days, there is no reason to have first class mail delivered every day. Doing so is just a handout to the employees' unions. There may be a case to be made for more frequent delivery of expedited mail, but this would take a fraction of the number of vehicles and personell that the current system does -- and with less reliable guarantees, nearly identical prices and worse service than UPS, I always choose UPS over USPS for parcel shipment.
It's fine to be nostalgic about the pony express, but the USPS needs to either be phased out or drastically scaled down, and laws forbidding other companies to deliver standard mail must be changed.
Regarding long lines: that's a common complaint (e.g. Of the DMV), presented as evidence of government inefficiency (not that you were making that argument).
But sizable lines are evidence of government efficiency here; one unskilled employee is able to process a huge number of people.
In return for for the massive taxpayer savings, you have to wait in line for ten minutes 2x a month (or per year in the case of the much-maligned DMV), and occasionally endure employees who are unenthusiastic to be earning very few of your tax dollars per hour.
I send small parcels through mail every day. They go all over the world and the error rate is less than 1one percent.
I am consistently amazed that I can put something in a slot in Woodstock NY and have it turn up in the correct slot on the other side of the world in just a few days. They even come to my house and pick up.
When I do go to my local post office the only surly people are the people behind me in line.
As to junk mail, I opt out where I can and recycle the rest. And quietly thank the spamming businesses for subsidizing mine.
It's the usual story: capture of the USPS by its unions, such that 500k employees are getting raises simultaneously with their reports of "We're dying!!!"
America in 2011 simply doesn't need to set aside half a million lifetime sinecures to deliver two pieces of mail a week which actually matter. The nation receives no value from a civil servant whose full-time job is literally to convince BoA not to go paperless.
It's a cool institution. Let's remember it in a small museum somewhere.
The full story is more complicated. The USPS is in an unattractive position of being supposedly independent of the taxpayer's money, yet any major operating issues are at the whim of Congress. Predictably, it goes like this:
USPS: "Volume is down, we need to raise prices."
Congress: "Nope, sorry"
USPS: "Uhm, ok. We'll have to cut Saturday delivery then..."
Congress: "No can do, sorry"
USPS: "Well I guess we have to close a bunch of post offices at least"
Every member of Congress in unison: "Sounds great, but not in my district"
etc...
I'm a big fan of the USPS -- I've found them to be more reliable than UPS and FedEx by far and they're amazingly inexpensive to boot. They know what they need to do to fix themselves, but sadly it seems to take a crisis before Congress will get out of the way and just let them do it.
What about those news reports of multibillion losses? Well, the $20 billion in losses over the last four years has nothing to do with what you’ve been told about a failing business model or obsolete mail. Here’s the real skinny: In 2006, Congress mandated that the Postal Service prefund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years, and do so within a decade—something no other public agency or private firm does. The resulting annual payments run $5.5 billion a year, costing the Postal Service $21 billion since 2007. That’s the difference between a positive and a negative balance sheet, as it would be for virtually any entity facing a similar burden — if any did.
Remove that unreasonable obligation and the Postal Service would have been profitable.
I look forward to when you move back to Kansas and expect mail delivery six days a week, or the ability to ship a package anywhere for less than fifteen dollars.
Like ubernostrum and bodyfour point out, the real story is much more complicated than this.
This isn't to say that the USPS hasn't made many terrible missteps along the way, or that they don't need to dramatically revise their business model: they have and they do.
But, the fact remains that they are critical to many aspects of American life, even for stalwart market-driven replacements [1]
I'm surprised that nobody has asked the question in this thread yet--why is the government still in the mail business?
Pure libertarians would say the government should only exist to protect citizens from each other and external threats. I see a somewhat wider role: government is where we pool our money to accomplish projects that are beyond the scope of any private institution, like building an interstate highway system.
But mail? The USPS is fairly unique among government entities in that it competes directly with industry: FedEx, UPS, etc. It might have been legitimate a hundred years ago, when delivering mail nationwide was an epic undertaking that no private organization could do, but today, the USPS is obsolete.
>It's the usual story: capture of the USPS by its unions...
Oh, if only it weren't for all those undeserving, greedy workers! Clearly the problem is that they banded together to protect each others' wages, access to medical care, and dignity in the workplace! Thank goodness we have Businessweek to confirm our reactionary free market biases for us.
You guys must be loving these budget crises — they provide such a convenient pretext for attacking worker's rights and consolidating the power of the owning class while sidestepping the inherent contradictions of the system which caused those crises at the outset.
Do we ask the highway system to be profitable? If we eliminate the rural routes and only leave the profitable ones, we might as well get rid of the entire thing - the profitable routes could easily be privatized, but as it is, they offset the cost of the rural routes a bit.
I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.
If we did ask the interstate highways to pay for themselves (e.g. by raising the federal gas tax to fully cover the cost of the interstate highways), we'd go a long way towards putting various modes of transportation on even footing and enabling people to choose the optimal solution for each trip.
Have you thought about all the people who are unemployed thanks to gridlock on the US highway system? The massive inefficiency of people (in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) wasting 2-3 hours per day sitting in their car going 5 miles per hour is astounding.
If the highway system were not held back by government planning, much of this inefficiency and waste could be eliminated, and reallocated into productive pursuits. Imagine if 80% of a city's' commuting professionals had two hours more per day to spend money on things (or to work more).
It's easy to assume that highways are one aspect of central planning that works, but in urban, congested areas they are a disaster that hits the poor the hardest.
Also, by making it seem "feasible" to live in suburbia and commute into the city, they led many middle class workers to flee cities, eroding the tax base, and causing the decay of city governments/services, etc.
Everything has tradeoffs. The highway system got us a way to ship military personnel and tanks across the country, and benefitted home builders and strip mall owners, at the expense of the urban poor.
I don't think cutting mail service to 2 days a week would disconnect 'country folks.' Anything time sensitive could use email, fax, or (more expensive) private delivery services.
Plus, it's managed horrifically. What sort of real company would have a union contract that categorically prohibits layoffs and mandates rich pensions for basically unskilled workers?
I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.
What, exactly, is the public good in having the rest of us subsidize mail service to rural people? It's not like they couldn't get mail - they'd just have to pay what it costs.
Where I live I pay more for land than people in rural areas do, but I don't expect them to subsidize my house. Why do they expect me to subsidize their mail, their airports, and their roads?
From what I understand, the entire reason why we have public goods is because to have it private would cause many people to be left without service.
If it were privatized, the companies would not bother to spend money servicing routes which do not add to their profits, leaving many Americans without mail service.
And honestly, if the private companies had to deliver to every house 6 days a week, they would probably be far less profitable than USPS is.
This quote summarizes what is wrong with the Post Office: "They are supported by junk mailers, greeting card manufacturers, and magazine publishers whose businesses are, in some cases, subsidized by the post office's generously low mailing prices. Never mind that their benefactor loses money on some of their products, most notably magazines and some junk mail.
If you are "los[ing] money on some ... products" then just maybe you need to increase the cost of delivery of those products until you are no longer losing money...
Assuming they can increase cost of delivery (something that, apparently, congress is against), chances are this is what would happen: they raise prices to cover (marginal) costs, and some customers run away. A commercial company would reply by either cost-cutting, shutting down (parts of) the company, increasing productivity, or finding new revenue streams.
The USPS does not have first or second options, and the third on its own only helps if it brings in extra work, which it does not (remember the 'some customers ran away' part?)
It all boils down to the fact that the USPS is not operating in a free market. They have huge expenditures that they cannot get rid of. If you have an employee, but no work for him, and cannot fire him, it makes economic sense to take on work that pays less than what the employee costs. Sure, it loses you money, but it loses you less money than not taking on that work.
So, that leaves the fourth stream. In e EU, that has seen post offices turned into shops, selling mail-related stuff such as postcards. That may work, but especially in smaller villages, it is easier to outsource the post office tasks to existing shops, rather than trying to compete with them in a market that cannot sustain two shops.
it is a politician's jobs to make actions that result from basic economic realities illegal when those actions conflict with the warm fuzzy picture their constituency has of the world.
I found myself surprised to agree with the USPS position that online-services are a bad idea (for the USPS). I mean generating a postcard from your mobile picture just seems like something that a tech-company will do a better job at.
I can only imagine how much money the USPS would spend on some of these applications, only to have a startup with $250K funding (or, you know, Facebook) steamroll them.
I think USPS would have been in a great position to be an online identity depository and payment platform for consumer to business dealings. They should have done it 10 years ago.
Imagine an email like system where you and the companies you do business with can communicate, and you can pay them. Some sort of whitelisted communications channels, whereby when you enter in a service contract with a company, you also add them to this comm channel. No spam. Just valid communications and invoices. Verified identities and verified payments.
The USPS is in a great position for that sort of thing, being they actually come to your house every day. They already know who you are, and where you are. They have a pre-existing business relationship with every entity in the US.
Whereas now I have to tell my parents and grandparents to basically not believe anything they see in their email inbox -- it would be nice if a more secure channel existed. $250K startup -- get on it!
I agree with that - but they should at least build an API that would let other applications send digitally-generated mail, or to order stamps, get parcel information, tracking details etc.
Yes I dont think thats whats making money in Europe. Deutsche Post is making money from owning DHL I think. Not that USPS buying fedex is likely. Closing post offices has reduced costs, delaying the issues. Here in the uk we are in a similar position to the US. There is a shift to banks and utilities sending by email, and junk is shifting to phone as it is more effective.
However merging and being profitable has probably helped some of these outside the uk be less government minded and more commercial.
Here's what I don't understand about the USPS situation. They deliver 200 billion pieces of mail per year. So if they're short 2 billion dollars, then they just need to raise the price of a stamp by 1 cent. Problem solved, no? Can somebody tell me why I'm wrong here? Would volume really fall that substantially if they raised the price of a stamp by a few cents?
Much of the mail is bulk (aka junk) mail sent by companies and organizations that have lobbyists. These lobbyists make it very difficult to raise postal rates as you suggest.
Add this to the Mephistophelean bargains that they have made with their unions over the years (because they too are politically powerful) and you can start to see the predicament. They're being squeezed dry.
You're wrong because you have no idea what the relationship is between price and demand. Even though you might not care if the price is raised by x, it is obvious that for essentially every x, there are people who do care and will no longer pay it.
The postal service is being forced to make a massive prepayment for decades of pensions all at once. No regular business would even think of doing that on it's own. It's congress behaving stupidly as usual.
Also, it needs to stop the practice of employees purposely retiring early and then being hired back by friends as contractors. So they get both retirement benefits and then a second paycheck. If they leave, make it so they cannot be a contractor, would solve an expensive labor abuse.
I mail and receive small packages weekly that would be unaffordable (and mishandled) by UPS. I'd hate to lose Saturday delivery but it would be a bearable compromise among alternatives.
While it _seems_ bad to hire someone who's already receiving a pension, what's the alternative? Hiring someone else, who's unskilled, and _still_ paying the pension? Maybe the problem is the pension itself, not the double-dipping.
I'm willing to bet that if there a private company had to operate under the same stifling rules as the USPS, they would have quit a long time ago.
The USPS could raise the price of delivering mail to match the costs. BUT THEY CAN'T! Even though the Government does NOT provide any funding to the USPS, the Government (specifically, the Congress) keeps thwarting the USPS' efforts to operate like a business.
You want to fix the USPS? Take away the Congress's ability to interfere with it. The USPS' only mandate should be to deliver mail to every physical address. That's it. Just let them fix their rates, their benefits, etc. and I'm willing to bet they'd be just fine.
I always thought that they should do home pick up & delivery 3 days per week but adjoining regions would have different days. So region A would get mail M,W,F and region B would get mail on T,Thurs., Sat. The mail carrier would alternate between regions A and B. It seems like you could almost halve the number of mail carriers this way.
It's hard to feel sorry for an organization that is going bankrupt even as they maintain a government-enforced monopoly. If business is really so bad, why doesn't the Postal Service allow private businesses to compete with it? If there's no money in the business, then there's no need to fear competition. No one wants to enter a business you can't make money in.
I don't even know why I'm replying to this, but this sort of reasoning makes my blood boil.
A lot of clueless people throw in the "p" word (privatization, or private competition) without really thinking things through.
The USPS is based on the idea of cross-subsidies. The fact that it's easy to deliver mail to, say, 100 addresses in San Francisco (a carrier can just walk a block and do it), subsidies the fact that in, say, Nebraska they would have to drive 100 miles to deliver to the same number of addresses. No private company would do this; they would just deliver in the cities, and tell the rural folks to fuck off. The private operators would just cherry-pick the profitable routers, and dump the rest. Is that what you want to see happen?
After decades of mismanagement and neglect, service broke down completely in Chicago in 1966. "The sorting floors were bursting with more than 5 million letters, parcels, circulars, and magazines that could not be processed," Lawrence O'Brien, the Postmaster General at the time, would recall somewhat poetically. "Outbound mail sacks formed still gray mountain ranges as they waited to be shipped out."
And here I thought Terry Pratchett's Going Postal was fiction.
How about organizing a summit to disrupt the USPS?
I got involved in the question of the future of postal, oddly, because of my book, What Would Google Do? [sorry for the plug], when postal execs asked what the USPS would be if Google ran it. Hmmm. You guys could help answer that.
A consultant in the industry organized an event in DC, PostalVision 2020, and we had Vint Cerf come keynote. I'd like the next phase to focus on how to disrupt postal entirely.
First class will die and with it its subsidy for media and other mail. Parcels will take off but the private sector can handle that. (If we need to guarantee universal service, that can be done with subsidies -- a la, phones -- better than by owning the infrastructure). There are entrepreneurial ventures such as Manilla aiming to disrupt physical bill delivery..... It's an area ripe for innovation and investment.
Why should the postal monopoly exempt "urgent package delivery" (aka FedEx and UPS)? If we want an economically healthy postal service, ceding that profitable segment of the postal business to private industry was a strategic error. I personally believe that a healthy postal service is critically important.
The USPS needs to come to terms with the shift in communication mechanisms. People don't write letters as a common means of communication anymore. I believe there is some value in maintaining the Postal Service but its role will need to shift dramatically if we expect to see any sustainability from there.
I think that people in the USPS definitely realize this, but they are unfortunately prohibited from doing any of the obvious things that one would expect them to do in response. They can't close unprofitable post offices, lay off redundant employees, increase prices, or decrease the level of service being offered.
All they can do is let it blow up and then hope Congress gives them enough leeway to put the pieces back together into something better and more sustainable ... hopefully using profitable semi-privatized Western European services as a model.
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
I have followed all the recommended steps to remove my address from various mailing lists.
The USPS is a garbage-spamming environmental disaster that solicits money from companies to do direct marketing, offers no opt-out features, and every day drives tens of thousands of polluting vehicles to stuff unwanted paper into mailboxes across the country.
In addition to its monopoly, the post office is one of the most unpleasant retail locations anyone could imagine -- filthy counters, grudging employees, and long lines.
Since "first class" mail takes between 2-12 days, there is no reason to have first class mail delivered every day. Doing so is just a handout to the employees' unions. There may be a case to be made for more frequent delivery of expedited mail, but this would take a fraction of the number of vehicles and personell that the current system does -- and with less reliable guarantees, nearly identical prices and worse service than UPS, I always choose UPS over USPS for parcel shipment.
It's fine to be nostalgic about the pony express, but the USPS needs to either be phased out or drastically scaled down, and laws forbidding other companies to deliver standard mail must be changed.
[+] [-] jberryman|14 years ago|reply
But sizable lines are evidence of government efficiency here; one unskilled employee is able to process a huge number of people.
In return for for the massive taxpayer savings, you have to wait in line for ten minutes 2x a month (or per year in the case of the much-maligned DMV), and occasionally endure employees who are unenthusiastic to be earning very few of your tax dollars per hour.
[+] [-] markzip|14 years ago|reply
I am consistently amazed that I can put something in a slot in Woodstock NY and have it turn up in the correct slot on the other side of the world in just a few days. They even come to my house and pick up.
When I do go to my local post office the only surly people are the people behind me in line.
As to junk mail, I opt out where I can and recycle the rest. And quietly thank the spamming businesses for subsidizing mine.
[+] [-] supersetgreg|14 years ago|reply
i'm within a post office that is about 5 years old and clean. just because your post office is crap doesn't mean that every post office is.
[+] [-] sundae79|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorrr|14 years ago|reply
Got almost no spam, maybe 10-20% of my mail, mostly sent by local businesses and free local newspapers.
It's not a monopoly. Forgot about UPS, DHL and FedEx?
Their employees are usually very hard working and have to deal with all kinds of assholes.
Plus, it's much cheaper than their competitors.
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
America in 2011 simply doesn't need to set aside half a million lifetime sinecures to deliver two pieces of mail a week which actually matter. The nation receives no value from a civil servant whose full-time job is literally to convince BoA not to go paperless.
It's a cool institution. Let's remember it in a small museum somewhere.
[+] [-] bodyfour|14 years ago|reply
I'm a big fan of the USPS -- I've found them to be more reliable than UPS and FedEx by far and they're amazingly inexpensive to boot. They know what they need to do to fix themselves, but sadly it seems to take a crisis before Congress will get out of the way and just let them do it.
[+] [-] ubernostrum|14 years ago|reply
Except, you know, not really. You might want to read this: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial-page/viewpoints/article...
Especially this bit:
What about those news reports of multibillion losses? Well, the $20 billion in losses over the last four years has nothing to do with what you’ve been told about a failing business model or obsolete mail. Here’s the real skinny: In 2006, Congress mandated that the Postal Service prefund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years, and do so within a decade—something no other public agency or private firm does. The resulting annual payments run $5.5 billion a year, costing the Postal Service $21 billion since 2007. That’s the difference between a positive and a negative balance sheet, as it would be for virtually any entity facing a similar burden — if any did.
Remove that unreasonable obligation and the Postal Service would have been profitable.
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|14 years ago|reply
Like ubernostrum and bodyfour point out, the real story is much more complicated than this.
This isn't to say that the USPS hasn't made many terrible missteps along the way, or that they don't need to dramatically revise their business model: they have and they do.
But, the fact remains that they are critical to many aspects of American life, even for stalwart market-driven replacements [1]
[1] http://fedex.com/us/smart-post/outbound.html and http://www.ups-mi.net/packageID/, for example
[+] [-] dcposch|14 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that nobody has asked the question in this thread yet--why is the government still in the mail business?
Pure libertarians would say the government should only exist to protect citizens from each other and external threats. I see a somewhat wider role: government is where we pool our money to accomplish projects that are beyond the scope of any private institution, like building an interstate highway system.
But mail? The USPS is fairly unique among government entities in that it competes directly with industry: FedEx, UPS, etc. It might have been legitimate a hundred years ago, when delivering mail nationwide was an epic undertaking that no private organization could do, but today, the USPS is obsolete.
[+] [-] scrod|14 years ago|reply
Oh, if only it weren't for all those undeserving, greedy workers! Clearly the problem is that they banded together to protect each others' wages, access to medical care, and dignity in the workplace! Thank goodness we have Businessweek to confirm our reactionary free market biases for us.
You guys must be loving these budget crises — they provide such a convenient pretext for attacking worker's rights and consolidating the power of the owning class while sidestepping the inherent contradictions of the system which caused those crises at the outset.
[+] [-] pessimizer|14 years ago|reply
I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.
[+] [-] Empact|14 years ago|reply
If we did ask the interstate highways to pay for themselves (e.g. by raising the federal gas tax to fully cover the cost of the interstate highways), we'd go a long way towards putting various modes of transportation on even footing and enabling people to choose the optimal solution for each trip.
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
If the highway system were not held back by government planning, much of this inefficiency and waste could be eliminated, and reallocated into productive pursuits. Imagine if 80% of a city's' commuting professionals had two hours more per day to spend money on things (or to work more).
It's easy to assume that highways are one aspect of central planning that works, but in urban, congested areas they are a disaster that hits the poor the hardest.
Also, by making it seem "feasible" to live in suburbia and commute into the city, they led many middle class workers to flee cities, eroding the tax base, and causing the decay of city governments/services, etc.
Everything has tradeoffs. The highway system got us a way to ship military personnel and tanks across the country, and benefitted home builders and strip mall owners, at the expense of the urban poor.
[+] [-] smanek|14 years ago|reply
Plus, it's managed horrifically. What sort of real company would have a union contract that categorically prohibits layoffs and mandates rich pensions for basically unskilled workers?
[+] [-] tsotha|14 years ago|reply
What, exactly, is the public good in having the rest of us subsidize mail service to rural people? It's not like they couldn't get mail - they'd just have to pay what it costs.
Where I live I pay more for land than people in rural areas do, but I don't expect them to subsidize my house. Why do they expect me to subsidize their mail, their airports, and their roads?
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
I support having country folk subsidize the rents of people who live in cities.
I'll then attach the word "public good" to goods which are rivalrous and excludible in order to confuse the issue with ideological feelings.
[+] [-] PLejeck|14 years ago|reply
If it were privatized, the companies would not bother to spend money servicing routes which do not add to their profits, leaving many Americans without mail service.
And honestly, if the private companies had to deliver to every house 6 days a week, they would probably be far less profitable than USPS is.
[+] [-] pseudonym|14 years ago|reply
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_23/b42...
[+] [-] pwg|14 years ago|reply
If you are "los[ing] money on some ... products" then just maybe you need to increase the cost of delivery of those products until you are no longer losing money...
[+] [-] Someone|14 years ago|reply
The USPS does not have first or second options, and the third on its own only helps if it brings in extra work, which it does not (remember the 'some customers ran away' part?)
It all boils down to the fact that the USPS is not operating in a free market. They have huge expenditures that they cannot get rid of. If you have an employee, but no work for him, and cannot fire him, it makes economic sense to take on work that pays less than what the employee costs. Sure, it loses you money, but it loses you less money than not taking on that work.
So, that leaves the fourth stream. In e EU, that has seen post offices turned into shops, selling mail-related stuff such as postcards. That may work, but especially in smaller villages, it is easier to outsource the post office tasks to existing shops, rather than trying to compete with them in a market that cannot sustain two shops.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latch|14 years ago|reply
I can only imagine how much money the USPS would spend on some of these applications, only to have a startup with $250K funding (or, you know, Facebook) steamroll them.
[+] [-] rmrm|14 years ago|reply
Imagine an email like system where you and the companies you do business with can communicate, and you can pay them. Some sort of whitelisted communications channels, whereby when you enter in a service contract with a company, you also add them to this comm channel. No spam. Just valid communications and invoices. Verified identities and verified payments.
The USPS is in a great position for that sort of thing, being they actually come to your house every day. They already know who you are, and where you are. They have a pre-existing business relationship with every entity in the US.
Whereas now I have to tell my parents and grandparents to basically not believe anything they see in their email inbox -- it would be nice if a more secure channel existed. $250K startup -- get on it!
[+] [-] enko|14 years ago|reply
I think the point was that the overseas mail services have become tech companies.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincormack|14 years ago|reply
However merging and being profitable has probably helped some of these outside the uk be less government minded and more commercial.
[+] [-] mikek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kadin|14 years ago|reply
Add this to the Mephistophelean bargains that they have made with their unions over the years (because they too are politically powerful) and you can start to see the predicament. They're being squeezed dry.
[+] [-] mhb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
Also, it needs to stop the practice of employees purposely retiring early and then being hired back by friends as contractors. So they get both retirement benefits and then a second paycheck. If they leave, make it so they cannot be a contractor, would solve an expensive labor abuse.
I mail and receive small packages weekly that would be unaffordable (and mishandled) by UPS. I'd hate to lose Saturday delivery but it would be a bearable compromise among alternatives.
[+] [-] ja30278|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
The USPS could raise the price of delivering mail to match the costs. BUT THEY CAN'T! Even though the Government does NOT provide any funding to the USPS, the Government (specifically, the Congress) keeps thwarting the USPS' efforts to operate like a business.
You want to fix the USPS? Take away the Congress's ability to interfere with it. The USPS' only mandate should be to deliver mail to every physical address. That's it. Just let them fix their rates, their benefits, etc. and I'm willing to bet they'd be just fine.
[+] [-] michaels0620|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xsmasher|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpatru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
A lot of clueless people throw in the "p" word (privatization, or private competition) without really thinking things through.
The USPS is based on the idea of cross-subsidies. The fact that it's easy to deliver mail to, say, 100 addresses in San Francisco (a carrier can just walk a block and do it), subsidies the fact that in, say, Nebraska they would have to drive 100 miles to deliver to the same number of addresses. No private company would do this; they would just deliver in the cities, and tell the rural folks to fuck off. The private operators would just cherry-pick the profitable routers, and dump the rest. Is that what you want to see happen?
[+] [-] kakashi_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kyrce|14 years ago|reply
And here I thought Terry Pratchett's Going Postal was fiction.
[+] [-] jeffjarvis|14 years ago|reply
I got involved in the question of the future of postal, oddly, because of my book, What Would Google Do? [sorry for the plug], when postal execs asked what the USPS would be if Google ran it. Hmmm. You guys could help answer that.
A consultant in the industry organized an event in DC, PostalVision 2020, and we had Vint Cerf come keynote. I'd like the next phase to focus on how to disrupt postal entirely.
First class will die and with it its subsidy for media and other mail. Parcels will take off but the private sector can handle that. (If we need to guarantee universal service, that can be done with subsidies -- a la, phones -- better than by owning the infrastructure). There are entrepreneurial ventures such as Manilla aiming to disrupt physical bill delivery..... It's an area ripe for innovation and investment.
A few of my earlier posts: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/18/why-do-we-need-a-posta... http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/03/23/post-postal/
[+] [-] drallison|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kadin|14 years ago|reply
All they can do is let it blow up and then hope Congress gives them enough leeway to put the pieces back together into something better and more sustainable ... hopefully using profitable semi-privatized Western European services as a model.
[+] [-] amorphid|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drallison|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crizCraig|14 years ago|reply