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Tech Experts Look To Help Save the Postal Service
An anonymous reader writes "Some of the folks responsible for developing and promoting e-mail, e-commerce and social media are banding together in an attempt to save the US Postal Service, the institution arguably most threatened by the technological developments of the past few years. As mail volume continues to plummet and more Americans use the Internet to pay bills and keep in touch, Google executives, social media experts and some of the most passionate tech evangelists are planning to meet in Crystal City in mid-June to sort out how to save and remake the nation's mail delivery service. The conference, PostalVision 2020, is designed to bring together the people who understand what this technology has done, is doing and will do to digital commerce and communication in America. USPS anticipates losing about $7 billion during the fiscal year that ends in September and is in the process of eliminating 7,500 postmaster and administrative positions to save money."
Every time I've been to the post office, there's been 15+ people in line. I have a hard time believing the mail system is on the way out any time soon. Telegraphs didn't kill it, telephones didn't kill it, why would email kill it?
Because it performs a valuable service that there still isn't any combination of complete substittues for. (Anyone who thinks UPS or FedEx could just step in on the mail or stuff-delivery end doesn't know shit about the shipping industry and should be treated as such.)
For example: Do you like Amazon or Netflix? They wouldn't exist without the USPS.
Even in countries where first class mail costs twice as much as in the US, postal systems have a hard time staying profitable only from mail. In Finland, where I live, post offices have to sell candy, kitsch gifts, and office supplies just to stay in business. In many communities, the post office is just a corner rented in another store (a change I understand has begun in the US too) instead of a separate location.
Here they solved the issue in an elegant way: The Post office has been granted a banking license, and the banking activity is subsidizing the postal activity. Mind you, in the central post office where I live (Turin, pop. 1,000,000 more or less), there are about 20 booths, 15 for banking, two for receiving mail and two for outgoing mail, so the service is mediocre, but banking has effectively stemmed the flow of post office closures.
Mind you, I cannot but wonder....what would have happened if they auctioned off the post service altogether with the general delivery obligations? maybe large banks would have been interested? and think of the multiple conflicts of interest, since the Post is state owned.... no banking licences in the sticks where a post office is present? is there a ban on opening more post offices in rich neighborhoods? After all, banks are after assets, not post traffic...
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
As someone who shipped a lot of packages through USPS, the solution is very simple. Get a real time tracking system in par with UPS and FedEx (not bullshit overnight updates) and make the insurance for package claims less of a joke than UPS and FedEx.
As bills and correspondence mails have gone down, online buying and selling has taken it's place. But, most people are uncomfortable sending their packages through USPS. The tracking is only delivery confirmation and that costs extra at the post office. With cell phone technology, it should be trivial to implement real time updates.
If a package is lost, the insurance system is a joke. It takes forever and you can only correspond by mail. The insurance is ridiculously expensive and when you need it, it's a massive headache.
If they just fix those above issues, then lots of business would come swarming to them from online shippers.
Another thing, their rates are kinda screwed up. For heavy packages, the rates are much much higher than UPS and FedEx. It comes down to only making sense to send packages by USPS for under 4-5 lbs. They probably should also do the sweetheart deals with big companies that UPS and FedEx do - like shipping for pennies on the dollar for large volume shippers.
And, there are some sink holes like in Bell, CA that if packages get there, they come out weeks later (famous for losing Oscar votes). There are a few of them across the country.
I think USPS should move towards being more geared towards packages. But, that's just my end of the pond where I shipped packages through USPS. Maybe junk mail is the cash cow, or certified mail.
Google should just buy the USPS. Then they'd have everyone's name and address, could mount cameras on the carrier's heads for mapping and insert advertising into each batch of mail.
Actually, that's what the USPS should do to raise some cash: sell us out to advertisers. It's not like I don't just throw away 95% of whats in the box anyway. Sifting past a few more dead trees wouldn't really be hard.
>> arguably most threatened by the technological developments of the past few years
I disagree! They are most threatened by gas prices! US Postal was originally transported on trains and hand sorted while the train was going to its' destination. Hand sorting on a train meant that everything was ready to be delivered on arrival rather than sorting at the destination postal facility. Airlines under bid railroads to get mail service but now they are having trouble competing. I see no reason why we shouldn't support our railroads and go back to delivering mail from the rails.
Unlike, say, UPS, the US Postal Service is not and has never been a for-profit corporation. It's an agency of the US Government, required by law to exist, serve all citizens, and is granted a special monopoly status. If it's in the public interest, it can run at a deficit, take up unprofitable jobs like serving the people that live in the middle of nowhere (which many private competitors refuse to ship to), or keep prices lower than they would be in a pure market-driven system.
At worst, if the mail volume drops dramatically, they could move to having fewer delivery days in areas that don't get a lot of mail. And they may well be able to use technology to improve their sorting and delivery system, but as it stands they have processes that put FedEx to shame.
I am officially gone from
Ha, this is a laugh. Google and the other Ph.Ds are going to sit down and dream up some (what seems to them to be) good ideas. Then those ideas will die in a hail of lawsuits when they encounter hard, cold reality. The Ph.Ds write a paper about how people like us are too smart to have our ideas understood, and move on to the next conference, hopefully in Aspen this time (Crystal City, ugh if it were in the midwest it'd be flyover territory).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Perhaps they could climate Saturday delivery for letter mail. Do I really need junk mail and bills six days a week?
Here's my suggestion to make the post office more useful. Let everyone register a postal address that is dissociated from a physical address. Then when I move, instead of filing a change of address form and hoping that everyone who wants to send mail to me ever again sends it in the next year, I can just tell the post office "Yeah, that postal address should now be delivered to this *new* physical address"
The biggest problem is the fundamental issue that individual residents make the flawed assumption that they are the post office's customers, when in fact they are the post office's product. They are a product being sold, and if you want to know who's buying you, just look at the ton of spam in your mailbox. Any demands for better service aren't heard as dissatisfied customers, but as disgruntled products.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
A postal service that serves all Americans equally, even if they live at the end of a dirt road a few hundred miles from civilization, is a founding value of our republic. The founding fathers knew that the free market could do mail, but they didn't trust it and thus they gave the fledgling nation a public (now quasi-public) postal system. Private companies, concerned with profits, cannot guarantee that rural residents will receive mail with the same prices and service as people in the heart of downtown. The USPS can.
Chug along in the black, year over year, without any government $$$.
Not surprising, when you consider what a miserable experience it is to go to the post office. Lines, attitudes, incomprehensible forms, and shlockly-looking people.
It's like the DMV meets Walmart.
Parent's notion is so flat out wrong that it should probably be flagged as "troll".
to virtually every address in the neighborhood. Every day. The UPS guy might stop at one or two houses within eye-shot every day, dropping off large boxes of stuff, for which the sender has paid many, many times what the sender of all those USPS first class letters paid. The USPS could be profitable without losing business to the private carriers. They are tooled up to handle first class and bulk (junk) mail like no one else. They just need to charge a realistic amount for what they do. The problem is that everyone, including Congress, remembers "when it only cost a dime to send a letter to grandma...", so there are extraordinary barriers to them raising rates to a realistic level; barriers that clearly don't exist for FedEx et al.
If it were solely a Government agency, it'd be doing "okay". Unfortunately, like AAFES, it's a Government owned business. It operates off of it's income and typically doesn't get any pork on it's own. Government is shrinking, yes...this, however, isn't going to shrink it in the right places.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The question of interest, I think, is whether the postal service is in the red because they suck, or in the red because their mandate has(with the decline of the letter as a medium) largely shrunk to cover the unprofitable shit work of shipping(Picking up a letter, at your post box, in fucking nowhere, and delivering it to somebody else's postbox in a different fucking nowhere on the other side of the country, for the price of a stamp, is not exactly a lucrative niche...) while FedEx and UPS are free to ignore the low value segments and focus on carrying packages, with an emphasis on larger shippers and aggregated pickups.
In a sense, the real question facing us about the postal service is approximately similar to the real questions behind rural electrification, or telcom access: There are places in the country where providing infrastructure is, per capita, cheap. There are others where providing it is really, really, really expensive. There are areas where the infrastructure customers are relatively wealthy, and ones where they definitely aren't.
We can definitely trust the private sector(as long as they don't gain monopolies or oligopolies) to serve areas where customer willingness to pay is sufficiently high and cost per capita sufficiently low. We then come to the question of what to do about the ones where that isn't the case.
Obviously, this doesn't imply that the postal system is well managed, or that it couldn't do better(and, if improvement is available, it should definitely be undertaken); but, like rural telco and electrification, the fundamental question is not one of wringing out small operational efficiencies; but of whether or not we, as a society, wish to provide a baseline infrastructure to areas where it is not strictly economically justified. Depending on exactly how efficient you are, these areas may be somewhat smaller or somewhat larger; but it will almost always be the case that you could improve financial performance by just writing off your lossy service areas and letting them suck it up.The question is, is that what we want?
I'm guessing you don't live in a rural community.
"Big government" aka the local post office in my central Virginia hamlet consists of a 400 square foot post office built by sectioning off the local country store. Along with the country store, it's the primary place to go to learn or pass along news, or to meet your neighbors. Of course it's kind of insane from a purely economic standpoint to maintain it, with a full-time postmistress, when there is a medium-sized PO five miles away in the next big town and a full-service PO a dozen miles away. But when that branch closes, and I suppose it will, it will mean one less point of human contact for folks around here, and some not insignificant additional burdens for people without a lot of money or with health problems for whom a trip to retrieve a package at a distance is not trivial.
I just went to report this incident since it occurred to me they probably have a form to do so...
Thanks for your email.
A US Postal Services® representative will reply to your email within 2 to 3 business days.
The case number for request is: Problem processing ticket service request
Stay classy, USPS. They don't even listen to their own automated systems, they're not going to listen to a bunch of eggheads.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Private companies, concerned with profits, cannot guarantee that rural residents will receive mail with the same prices and service as people in the heart of downtown. The USPS can.
This is exactly the problem with the USPS. To deliver to my house takes a heck of a lot less effort than to that guy living in the middle of nowhere above the Arctic circle. Why subsidize the rural population? What is it about living from civilization is so great and important that we must pay for it? This isn't 1800, the requirement for vast segments of our population to work the land for food is gone.
SSC
USPS actually did a poorer job than Lysander Spooner's company, the American Letter Mail Company. ALMC provided better service to more people, for cheaper prices than the USPS. Then the government shut him down, and gave the USPS a monopoly. Thus there have been rising prices for over a century for mail.
UPS and Fedex and others don't break the monopoly because they can't - they're forced to pay whatever shipping cost the USPS would have charged the customer to USPS, and then add their own overhead on top of that.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Of course, if you live in the middle of nowhere, "receive mail" is only an "archaic form of communication"; because newer ones are also subsidized for you. Rural telecommunications and electrification are also projects that weren't exactly undertaken because the ROI was enticing to Wall Street.
If the objective is efficiency, you might as well tell any rural areas that aren't totally loaded to shove off and learn to enjoy natural solitude, and let any impecunious urban areas enjoy the newfound feeling of community that comes with being cut off.
I'm not sure that that would be such a popular move; but it definitely would decrease the per-capital cost of infrastructure.
Because it performs a valuable service that there still isn't any combination of complete substittues for.
You mean a service that cannot legally be substituted for?
Armed USPS inspectors raided the company’s Atlanta headquarters to determine whether or not the letters the company had been sending via FedEx were indeed “extremely urgent” as required by the Private Express Statutes. The letters didn’t pass the test, and Equifax ended up having to pay a $30,000 fine.
Countries have a hard time holding on to large amounts of land if there's not some minimum level of habitation. Just look at what's happening to the Russian Far East: in 50 years time, that will probably all be lost to China, along with its water and mineral resources. Encouraging some level of rural habitation and land use is a longterm strategic interest.
The United States Postal Service, while operated by the United States government, is required to be self-sustaining. Yet, it is not allowed to be autonomous. It seems like every time they try to cut costs - closing redundant retail locations, eliminating Saturday delivery, etc. - they face extreme opposition from Congress (often saving because the waste benefits their districts). In addition, they are prevented by law from raising postage rates above the rate of inflation - no matter what their costs do. I'd hate to try to operate a business under those conditions.
That being said, there are some areas where efficiency could be improved. I recently started doing mass mailings for my business, and was appalled by some aspects of their processes - the user interface of their employee-facing software was terrible, for instance (and, perhaps more surprisingly, veteran employees seemed unaware of its quirks).
I think that we (as a country) need to realize that delivering small mailpieces to every household and business in the United States will never be a profitable venture, and be willing to ensure its financial viability through subsidies while also enabling and encouraging efforts to improve efficiency. UPS and Fedex are profitable because they skim off the lucrative parts of the business - large package and express delivery - leaving the rest for the USPS. The USPS serves a very valuable role in this regard, especially for certain less-advantaged populations. We can't expect it to operate like a for-profit business while simultaneously demanding that it fulfill these money-losing - yet necessary - responsibilities.
"The USPS's first incarnation was established by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1775, by decree of the Second Continental Congress. The Post Office Department was created from Franklin's operation in 1792, as part of the United States Cabinet, then was transformed into its current form in 1971, under the Postal Reorganization Act."
It was so important, that the Postmaster General used to be in line for succession to the President. Even in 1775, it was acknowledged that information was one of the most critical functions of a nation. It affects security, commerce, and national unity.
Why does this matter now? Because while paper mail may not seem important, the United States government must ensure information flow. That's why we regulate telephone, radio, television, and the Internet. Rain, sleet, snow or hail, information is arguably the make or break of a nation.
I8-D
Yeah, government can guarantee any and every single thing it wants - it doesn't have to make money. All this is good until it crashes the economy with its weight and then the guarantees will mean nothing. Who cares that you'll get your check and your paper money if they buy nothing?
Let's see how the government 'guarantee' is working out for the housing market and price stability and SS and minimum wage and Medicare/Medicaid and safety and the value of the dollar itself.
What did Ben say when asked by Ron Paul about the definition of the dollar? Oooh, yeah, he said:
My definition of the dollar is what it can buy. Consumers donâ(TM)t want to buy gold; they want to buy food, and gasoline, and clothes and all the other things that are in the consumer basket. It is the buying power of the dollar in terms of those goods and services that is what is important, and thatâ(TM)s what I call price stability.
Right. So the dollar "is what it buys".
However there is an action definition of the dollar, as it was stated by the Coinage Act of 1792, and it's not some hand waiving.
The dollar is supposed to be a unit of weight of gold or silver defined like this:
371 4/16 grain (24.1 g) pure or 416 grain (27.0 g) standard silver.
$10 is 247 4/8 grain (16.0 g) pure or 270 grain (17.5 g) standard gold.
--
So excuse me if I do not believe in any government guarantees.
If you take your dollar to the Federal reserve bank you are NOT going to get 27g of pure silver, and for your 10 dollars you will not get 17.5g standard gold.
Government that prints money and guarantees stuff ends up destroying its economy and society.
You can't handle the truth.
if you really want social contact, then perhaps living in the middle of nowhere isn't ideal
Great advice! Farmers and ranchers better be sociophobes, or they must give up on their businesses and move to cities. Since there are no farms in cities they will be collecting some social security and buying food in grocery stores, where it is made, instead of growing it in fields. After all, benefits of civilization should be available only to city folks, not to some useless rednecks, isn't it so?
Mail is down to a trickle. Every time I see the mail lady drive down my street of about 20 houses, she stops at oh, 5 of them, unless it's a day we all get some junkmail.
So, lets back it down to 3 days a week. Mon, Wed Fri? Mon, Wed, Sat?
And for rural areas, lets limit pickup. I used to live down a 1/2 mile dirt road. We rarely got any mail, however, every day the mail lady drove to the end of the road to see if our flag was up. What a waste. How about we make some community drop boxes that can be checked without getting out, going behind it, and dumping a bag.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I would gladly -- nay, eagerly -- pay a small monthly fee to the USPS in exchange for the mail carrier performing one simple service: spam filtering.
Take all the flyers, coupons, and other advertisements, along with all the mail not addressed to me (I very frequently get mail not only for the previous residents who sold us the home 2+ years ago, but for the residents prior to them, and the residents prior to those residents going back at least a decade), and deliver those items straight to the trash.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
I used to think that the USPS being run as a GSE was a good thing as well. The fact is, though, that running it as a GSE is really not much more sensible than running the defense department as a GSE. That's because both are services mandated by the constitution. If we're going to reduce the size of government, we should be reducing the ones that have NOT been authorized by the constitution: like the department of education, the EPA, the IRS, various federal agencies like the BATF that have been given police powers, etc. I think the founders rightfully believed that the postal service (at least at the time) was as critical for the general welfare-- here I'm using the phrase appropriately-- as defense. It's almost like we corporatized the wrong service just so that beig government progressives could say, "see, capitalism doesn't work!"
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I questioned the USPS on that recently. Tracking tells me that my package has been accepted, then processed, then it leaves point of origin - then it's in limbo for 1 - 6 days. Suddenly, the package has arrived in destination city, and it's out for delivery.
The story is, the package is processed, then it goes into a bin. That bin goes into a truck, and the truck travels without ever having that bin scanned again, until it is offloaded in the destination sorting facility. At that point, it MIGHT be scanned, letting me know that it has arrived in Texarkana. Most often, it's not scanned at that sorting facility, but simply sorted and shipped to my post office. My post office actually scans everything, at which point I learn that it has arrived at my local post office, usually around 6:50 AM, and that I can expect it to arrive at my house around 2:00 PM.
Seems a crummy system. Why have tracking, if the tracking only works at origin and destination?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Maybe it's because I live in NYC, but I've always found USPS service to be, well, excellent.
At the post office, the lines are reasonable, the staff friendly (although I do use the APC for most services.)
I've receive most of my eBay deliveries via regular mail, and it works fine.
The mailperson who works my block knows me by sight.
I actually prefer to use Priority Mail over UPS or Fedex. It's cheap and easy for one, and the post office won't sit on the package if they can deliver it faster than the TOS. If they can do it overnight, they'll deliver it overnight. If it's gonna take three days, they'll deliver it in three days. (UPS? If the deal is to deliver it in two days, its gonna take two days, even if the location is only thirty miles away.)
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Junk mail never bothered me since I always figured the senders were footing the bill. Let them waste their money sending me brochures for crap I'll never buy.
Guess I was wrong :(
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Unlike a lot of government stuff, this case is interesting because post offices and post roads are one of the explicitly enumerated congressional powers (and ipso facto responsibilities) in the US constitution.
Though I would argue that what at the time was "post offices and post roads" is now "communications networks of every type"; there just weren't others at the time.
I'm pretty sure that the per-capital cost of anything is 1. :)
You are 1/3 right
the USPS is a goverment monopoly that provides (roughly) equal service to everyone in the country, rich or poor, NYC or Alaska.
If you go to a private company, it may be cheaper, but aside from cutting wages for rank and file, and greatly boosting wages in the c suite, the main way they will save mmoney is cherry picking - what happens in health insurance.
you live in NYC, in an apt building, doesn't cost anything to deliver mail. You live in Alaska, you outta luck.
just what the health insurance companies do - you sick, no health insurance for you !!
But they're NOT really losing $7 billion a year.
What's actually happening is that a few years back, Congress started making the Postal Service not only make massive pre-payments to their workers' retirement funds, but the Postal Service also was forced to make contributions to the retirement funds of workers who used to be in the military, for the time they were in the military. This shifted a large amount of costs from the military budget, to the Postal Service budget. Gee, I wonder why they did that?
If the Postal Service had to fund its workers retirement funds the same way the other government agencies do, and only had to contribute to the funds for the former military workers the portions that they worked for the Postal Service itself, they'd be in the black.
It ain't the Postal Service that's broken. It's Congress. Want to fix the Postal Service? Either put it completely back under the government as just another agency, or free them from Congress writing their rules.
Is this mentality entirely whole American or is this how everyone in Europe thinks about all their government does for them.
Why subsidize the sick population with healthcare?
Why subsidize kids with schools?
Why subsidize roads for those with cars?
Why subsidize those without cars with public transportation?
Why subsidize those in rural populations with Internet/Postal Service/etc?
Because it's what makes a society function. When I traveled abroad and the topic of healthcare came up, to the people I was with (Dutch) it just seemed unfathomable not to take care of your fellow Americans. Where as if it's breeched with a large part of the population it's "This is mine, you can't have any." I'm not saying either mentality is wrong but it just seems like a fundamental difference in thinking.
We watch CEOs walk away from failing corporations with hundreds millions of dollars in their hands and people go "meh". But try to get the homeless addict into counseling, off the street and into a productive role in society and everyone is up in arms. I was watching a documentary and people allow it because it's the "American Dream" and if they should ever magically win the lottery or become a multi-national CEO, the don't want that dream taken away from them.
And the most best part, we're a "Christian" nation. As my AP government told us. Jesus is the most popular socialist of all time.
Maybe I just need to move to Europe.
Exactly. Nobody can even try to compete with a government-mandated monopoly that loses money. The way to 'save' it is probably to destroy it. I guarantee people will still need to send letters, and people will still pay for the service, and someone will step up and handle the issue.
I don't think we even need to be that drastic, though. Just repeal the law and force USPS to make a profit and the market will take over.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
No, it's not. Not everything should be run like a business; not everything should be subject to the whims of the "free market". To believe such a thing is to not believe in society.
That's exactly it. The USPS does something that, from a profit point of view, is a terrible idea.
Yet that terrible idea provides a huge value to the country, even an economic value in terms of the tax revenue generated by businesses that could not otherwise exist.
That's why the free market can't replace it.