It seems nobody at esquire even bothered to read the wikipedia article on the USPS as they would have crossed the section titled Universal service obligation and monopoly status[1]. This brings me to 2 things; 1) Monopoly: The USPS has a legal monopoly on letter carrying. You're not legally allowed to compete with them and that, simply, is why mailing a letter through UPS is so expensive. 2) Universal Service: One problem with completely privatizing as that you would have to legally mandate private companies to deliver to everyone.
I think the USPS could be a profitable company, they've just royally screwed up customer service. Screwed it up so bad that most people actually resent it. Not only is going to the post office comparable to a bad visit to the dentist but just try to make sense of their services [2]. They're incomprehensible. If I just want to mail a letter with a tracking number I should be able to go to the post office and say, "I would like to mail this with a tracking number." Actually forget that, I should be able to go to a vending machine, put in $1 and have it print me a tracking number that I can slap on the envelope. Instead I have to wait 30 minutes in a slightly dilapidated room, with service change signs dated back to 2004 and ask for "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation". Every time, I say "I just want a tracking number" and they have to ask me 10 questions. Just give me a damn tracking number and clean your office.
Yes, they have those. They are called "Automated Postal Center"(APC).
> "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation" and they have to ask me 10 questions.
These two things never existed together. There was delivery confirmation, which is not tracking. USPS did not previously provide tracking on First class mail.
Over the past few years they have been improving their tracking of delivery conf #s, and today it's similar to UPS/FedEx tracking.. so recently they renamed it to "USPS Tracking" (in mid-Jan 2013).
On the other hand, my address is weird. Because of historical reasons, the address is on 14th Ave., but the house isn't actually physically located on 14th Ave. Sometimes when I get an Amazon package, UPS or FedEx can't find where I live. Sometimes they even deliver to the same house number on 13th Ave. (I've never met whoever lives there, but I believe they've hand-delivered packages to me a few times. Thanks, stranger!)
However, USPS has never failed to deliver correctly. And I think there's something to be said for their reliability in general.
I can't think of too many things that would make me happier than the Post Office shutting down service. Dumping piles of junk in my mailbox 6 days/week? No thanks.
Oh how I loath going through piles of coupons and other physical spam to make sure I haven't missed some vital bill. Which, as an added benefit, would be delivered to me by a much more manageable method if the post office quit offering their service.
About two years ago I had to send a iPod Touch from Portland, OR to Akron. I stopped by Fedex and they wanted 11 bucks to ship it. USPS was a block away and they did it for under 3 bucks. And it arrived in two days.
Do you have any idea how much cheaper USPS is? Domestically AND internationally. How important it is to e-commerce? Online stores. Small businesses. My online store (http://www.dayonepp.com) shameless plug.
Do you realize that without it your ass would still be driving to Best Buy to pay for an overpriced TV? You'd have to pay $20 to mail your brother his PS2 that he forgot while visiting you. Without the postal service UPS and Fedex would probably do backdoor deals to inflate the cost of shipping since they wouldn't have to compete with the USPS.
It's not even costing you anything other than throwing away junk mail. Recycle it. But don't wish death on something so important.
Other than a few academic journals and a couple of trade magazines, I get essentially nothing by snail mail that I actually want. Everything in my mailbox is junk mail, unsolicited credit-card applications, political crap that I don't care about, bills that are redundant because I pay them online anyway, etc. Conversely, I can barely remember the last time I had any call to mail something snail mail.
Basically, if I weren't something of a luddite when it comes to reading (I still prefer to read some things on paper), I'd have absolutely no use for the USPS at all. As it is, if they closed down tomorrow, I'm pretty sure IEEE and ACM would find another way to get my journals to me, or I'd finally bite the bullet and switch to reading that stuff exclusively in digital form as well.
What, exactly, is your point? Are you actually using anecdotal evidence to try to state generally that people don't need the mail? I certainly hope not, because I thought the level of discourse was at least a little bit higher here than that kind of absurdity. If not, it seems like you're just telling a story with no real purpose.
Nice sympathy piece full of heartstring-tugging stories of rural Americana. But...
Want to send a letter to Talkeetna, Alaska, from New York? It will cost you fifty dollars by UPS.
That's because it's thousands of miles away and freaking in the middle of NOWHERE. Why, rationally, should it cost the same as sending a letter across town?
That's because it's thousands of miles away and freaking in the middle of NOWHERE. Why, rationally, should it cost the same as sending a letter across town?
That was the point of it; to socialize the cost of mail delivery. Now why would we want to be doing that in this day and age? I don't know...
Because people should be able to send things through the mail affordably regardless of where they live. That is a value that we used to hold as a country. Admittedly, that was back when at least a few of us actually viewed ourselves cohesively and cared about people other than ourselves.
Hey! I lived in Talkeetna! ...and you're completely right. It is in the middle of freaking nowhere.
Back on topic, I think you're right (despite the fact that it would make letters much more expensive where I live). There's no reason why someone in New York sending a letter to their friend in Albany should have to subsidize my 6-year-old self sending a letter to Idaho.
That said, if they allowed competition, I would have far less of a problem, as the New York->Albany people could just go with another option. I'm not sure the post office could survive competition, but I don't really care - IMO, it's fundamentally economically unsound to prohibit competition in the marketplace (with a reasonable view of what the marketplace actually is).
Well, let's give it a try. A better question is, who did the Postal Workers Union pay to get this tripe published?
"What it is is a miracle of high technology and human touch. It's what binds us together as a country."
Really?
Would it even be in the best interest for UPS or FedEx to compete in the letter mailing service sector? It seems to be more of a cursed Monopoly than anything else which is why USPS is now aggressively pursing the package delivery business. I think the post office is doing a great job with innovating and outsourcing some of their business to private sector companies. For brick and mortar's they've become much better in offering opportunities such as UPS and FedEx franchise stores. They now have computer kiosks at most post offices allowing you to easily print labels and ship a package. They've teamed up with many online postage vendors such as mail.com and endicia.com. A big part of eBay's business and ecommerce in general for small items comes from USPS flat rate shipments which tend to be a substantial discount in comparison to UPS or FedEx. Even if money is lost in order to continue first-class, it's still a necessity. In total, people are not ready to go completely paperless anytime soon. By the time that happens I see USPS being just as robust if not more so than the private sector carriers. I'm a major advocate for private sector business as its nature is to turn a profit thus requiring innovation and motivation to do so but these days it seems that gov. sector entities are getting smarter by allowing partnerships with private sector entities. They're almost becoming hybrid models (Gov/Private).
If an article ever needed a TL;DR, it would be this one.
For perspective, the way post works in my country is that there's a company which is owned by the state and is forced to provide a postal service in all cities. The post office can still make a profit (and usually does). While courier firms like UPS compete with it, the post office probably delivers most packages in the country.
A post office near me was slated for closure, but the citizens who would have been affected by this closure raised a stink and it was rescinded. This particular community is composed of fairly wealthy people who felt that it was a hardship to drive an extra 3 miles to the nearest post office, but interestingly, don't think it's a hardship to drive 10 miles to get groceries. (This town has no grocery stores.) As long as the post office leadership is overridden by whiners and their congressmen, no progress will be made.
The postal system was devised back when it was a major, all day hassle to visit the closest village. Now it takes 5 minutes and you can pick up a coffee on the way.
If you answered this question "yes", you've never been a hiker. Most people probably don't know about the idea of General Delivery[1], but if you're going to be without a fixed address for 6 months and passing through a bunch of tiny towns that don't have a Fedex or UPS store, you quickly learn 1) How awesome it is that most towns in the country have a post office, and 2) That USPS Priority Mail is both inexpensive and reliable.
The idea of General Delivery is that instead of having an address in the second line, you write "General Delivery", and fill in the third line as usual. The main post office in the area holds the mail for 30 days after receiving it. In a small town there's only one post office, and that's the one you go to to collect it. In conjunction with Priority Mail packages, this is an awfully convenient way to get resupplied with things you can't find in small towns when you're traveling through.
I've done mail drops on the Appalachian Trail using Priority Mail, and while it would be possible to do a thru-hike without mail drops, you'd have much more limited food options. If you had any kind of non-standard dietary requirements, you'd be hard pressed to meet them in most of the towns along the trail.
The AT is unusual in that there are hostels and outfitters along the way that will receive and hold packages on the behalf of hikers, and they're well publicized in the guidebooks. I've also bicycle toured through the US, and being able to pick nearly any town, confirm that it had a post office, and pick something up there 3-4 days later greatly eases getting stuff to you. I couldn't get a replacement derailleur hanger before I left, and wanted a spare (because a hanger is usually specific to a manufacturer, or even a frame), and I picked it up somewhere in Montana after my local bike shop was finally able to get one in.
By the end of the trip I had used up a set of bottom bracket bearings (the ones that make the pedals go around smoothly), and if I hadn't been ending the trip, I would have needed a new set. Since mine were pretty uncommon at the time (external BB in 2006), I would have had a hard time getting replacements from a random bike shop, and I would have relied on General Delivery to get a set from either the manufacturer or a higher-end bike shop.
It's probably easy to underestimate the reliability, efficiency, and convenience of the Post Office. Most people will probably never be in a town of 70 people [2] that doesn't have any sort of store but does have a post office, and if they do they probably won't be there without a car. Those of us who have been know that the ability to get a box sent there from the other side of the country in a couple of days is nothing short of miraculous.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caratunk,_Maine (I was through in 2010. In 2012 the Post Office was apparently still open, but Fontana Dam, which has only marginally better services, lost theirs.)
[+] [-] newishuser|13 years ago|reply
I think the USPS could be a profitable company, they've just royally screwed up customer service. Screwed it up so bad that most people actually resent it. Not only is going to the post office comparable to a bad visit to the dentist but just try to make sense of their services [2]. They're incomprehensible. If I just want to mail a letter with a tracking number I should be able to go to the post office and say, "I would like to mail this with a tracking number." Actually forget that, I should be able to go to a vending machine, put in $1 and have it print me a tracking number that I can slap on the envelope. Instead I have to wait 30 minutes in a slightly dilapidated room, with service change signs dated back to 2004 and ask for "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation". Every time, I say "I just want a tracking number" and they have to ask me 10 questions. Just give me a damn tracking number and clean your office.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usps#Universal_service_obligat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usps#Service_level_choices
[+] [-] rgbrenner|13 years ago|reply
>I should be able to go to a vending machine ...
Yes, they have those. They are called "Automated Postal Center"(APC).
> "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation" and they have to ask me 10 questions.
These two things never existed together. There was delivery confirmation, which is not tracking. USPS did not previously provide tracking on First class mail.
Over the past few years they have been improving their tracking of delivery conf #s, and today it's similar to UPS/FedEx tracking.. so recently they renamed it to "USPS Tracking" (in mid-Jan 2013).
[+] [-] eurleif|13 years ago|reply
However, USPS has never failed to deliver correctly. And I think there's something to be said for their reliability in general.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_economist|13 years ago|reply
Oh how I loath going through piles of coupons and other physical spam to make sure I haven't missed some vital bill. Which, as an added benefit, would be delivered to me by a much more manageable method if the post office quit offering their service.
Note: The Pony Express was pretty cool, though.
[+] [-] johnpowell|13 years ago|reply
About two years ago I had to send a iPod Touch from Portland, OR to Akron. I stopped by Fedex and they wanted 11 bucks to ship it. USPS was a block away and they did it for under 3 bucks. And it arrived in two days.
Blame the people that sent you unwanted shit.
[+] [-] devicenull|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|13 years ago|reply
Do you have any idea how much cheaper USPS is? Domestically AND internationally. How important it is to e-commerce? Online stores. Small businesses. My online store (http://www.dayonepp.com) shameless plug.
Do you realize that without it your ass would still be driving to Best Buy to pay for an overpriced TV? You'd have to pay $20 to mail your brother his PS2 that he forgot while visiting you. Without the postal service UPS and Fedex would probably do backdoor deals to inflate the cost of shipping since they wouldn't have to compete with the USPS.
It's not even costing you anything other than throwing away junk mail. Recycle it. But don't wish death on something so important.
[+] [-] mindcrime|13 years ago|reply
Basically, if I weren't something of a luddite when it comes to reading (I still prefer to read some things on paper), I'd have absolutely no use for the USPS at all. As it is, if they closed down tomorrow, I'm pretty sure IEEE and ACM would find another way to get my journals to me, or I'd finally bite the bullet and switch to reading that stuff exclusively in digital form as well.
[+] [-] nbouscal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
Want to send a letter to Talkeetna, Alaska, from New York? It will cost you fifty dollars by UPS.
That's because it's thousands of miles away and freaking in the middle of NOWHERE. Why, rationally, should it cost the same as sending a letter across town?
[+] [-] skylan_q|13 years ago|reply
That was the point of it; to socialize the cost of mail delivery. Now why would we want to be doing that in this day and age? I don't know...
[+] [-] nbouscal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benaiah|13 years ago|reply
Back on topic, I think you're right (despite the fact that it would make letters much more expensive where I live). There's no reason why someone in New York sending a letter to their friend in Albany should have to subsidize my 6-year-old self sending a letter to Idaho.
That said, if they allowed competition, I would have far less of a problem, as the New York->Albany people could just go with another option. I'm not sure the post office could survive competition, but I don't really care - IMO, it's fundamentally economically unsound to prohibit competition in the marketplace (with a reasonable view of what the marketplace actually is).
[+] [-] WalterBright|13 years ago|reply
It's explicitly illegal for companies to compete with first class mail. This is why you see such prices.
[+] [-] pravda|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PAULHANNA84|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nawitus|13 years ago|reply
For perspective, the way post works in my country is that there's a company which is owned by the state and is forced to provide a postal service in all cities. The post office can still make a profit (and usually does). While courier firms like UPS compete with it, the post office probably delivers most packages in the country.
[+] [-] expralitemonk|13 years ago|reply
The postal system was devised back when it was a major, all day hassle to visit the closest village. Now it takes 5 minutes and you can pick up a coffee on the way.
[+] [-] mauvehaus|13 years ago|reply
The idea of General Delivery is that instead of having an address in the second line, you write "General Delivery", and fill in the third line as usual. The main post office in the area holds the mail for 30 days after receiving it. In a small town there's only one post office, and that's the one you go to to collect it. In conjunction with Priority Mail packages, this is an awfully convenient way to get resupplied with things you can't find in small towns when you're traveling through.
I've done mail drops on the Appalachian Trail using Priority Mail, and while it would be possible to do a thru-hike without mail drops, you'd have much more limited food options. If you had any kind of non-standard dietary requirements, you'd be hard pressed to meet them in most of the towns along the trail.
The AT is unusual in that there are hostels and outfitters along the way that will receive and hold packages on the behalf of hikers, and they're well publicized in the guidebooks. I've also bicycle toured through the US, and being able to pick nearly any town, confirm that it had a post office, and pick something up there 3-4 days later greatly eases getting stuff to you. I couldn't get a replacement derailleur hanger before I left, and wanted a spare (because a hanger is usually specific to a manufacturer, or even a frame), and I picked it up somewhere in Montana after my local bike shop was finally able to get one in.
By the end of the trip I had used up a set of bottom bracket bearings (the ones that make the pedals go around smoothly), and if I hadn't been ending the trip, I would have needed a new set. Since mine were pretty uncommon at the time (external BB in 2006), I would have had a hard time getting replacements from a random bike shop, and I would have relied on General Delivery to get a set from either the manufacturer or a higher-end bike shop.
It's probably easy to underestimate the reliability, efficiency, and convenience of the Post Office. Most people will probably never be in a town of 70 people [2] that doesn't have any sort of store but does have a post office, and if they do they probably won't be there without a car. Those of us who have been know that the ability to get a box sent there from the other side of the country in a couple of days is nothing short of miraculous.
[1] https://www.usps.com/manage/forward-mail.htm#3
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caratunk,_Maine (I was through in 2010. In 2012 the Post Office was apparently still open, but Fontana Dam, which has only marginally better services, lost theirs.)
[+] [-] joshuaheard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drucken|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|13 years ago|reply
So you can take it away when you give up your guns, I'll make that trade.
Until then, congress needs to stop messing with USPS.
They don't use any tax dollars, why is this even an issue.
[+] [-] streptomycin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatswrong0|13 years ago|reply
Yes, except the right to be a monopoly is not. I'm fine with the USPS existing, but you must let private couriers exist as well.
[+] [-] jack9|13 years ago|reply
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