Slashdot Mirror
Adapting the Post Office To the Digital Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui write in the Washington Post that with projected deficits through 2020 of $238 billion, the debate over potential changes at the US Postal Service is like a fight over the dessert bar on the Titanic: email has already supplanted letters, more people will send money via PayPal rather than mail checks, people will download their movies and books, check their bills online, and receive information about their investments electronically. Delivery volume for first-class mail fell 22 percent from 1998 through 2007, tumbled an additional 13 percent last year and was down 3 percent in the first half of this year despite heavy mailings from the Census Bureau. USPS's future lies in things that need to be delivered physically: shoes, computers and other objects, and the USPS has assets that could let it take on UPS and FedEx. 'USPS needs to start with the future and work backward to the present,' write Carroll and Mui. 'It needs to forecast volumes for all types of its business five, 10 and 15 years out and design a business model that will thrive under those scenarios. Only then can it figure out what radical changes need to be made now.'"
A lot of that "inefficiency" is that mailing a letter from a rural village in the south to a similar village in Alaska costs the same (and has roughly the same quality of service) as mailing a letter from one side of a major city to the other. If you break up the monopoly and allow USPS to exit markets it finds unprofitable, a whole lot of places will stop getting mail. If you break up the monopoly but do not allow USPS to exit markets, then their revenue will reduce even further as the popular ones are taken by competitors.
Also as far as USPS is concerned, a county made up mostly of farms that sees 15 pieces of legitimate mail a month is not worth their time. But when those 15 pieces of legitimate mail are vital to our food supply...