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."

Comments

Re:why?

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.

The problem with USPS is ...

[mochan_s]

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.

Re:The problem with USPS is ...

[fahrbot-bot]

The USPS is redundant and perhaps, as the weaker candidate with little to offer the general public, it should be eliminated.

Except that the USPS delivers to, and picks up from, every address in the US and is required to do so. UPS and FedEx do not and do not have to. In addition, the USPS delivers a first-class letter anywhere in the US for 44 cents. Not everything can be handled electronically. Want to try sending all your physical letters via UPS or FedEx? Yes, I pay most of my bills electronically, but a few I cannot or there is a service charge that far exceeds the price of a stamp.

Perhaps there are efficiencies to be gained at the USPS and perhaps the prices are actually too low, but their mandate far exceeds the services only offered by UPS and FedEx. The problem with the USPS is that most people don't understand all they have to actually do, yet bitch about the inexpensive and universal services they do provide.

Why not Railroads?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 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.

So what if it's losing money?

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:So what if it's losing money?

[jedidiah]

What he said. The Postal Service should not be treated like a private business. It serves a basic public need for everyone.

If you want to let something die, let GM or American Airlines die. Quit propping up entities that are actually supposed to be private companies.

Re:So what if it's losing money?

[GKThursday]

The USPS is actually in the very unenviable position of being required to lose money to subsidize the rest of the Federal Govt. Several examples:

Congress sets the amount of money that the USPS has to pay into its pension and healthcare funds. This money is "held is trust" by congress (i.e. was spent 5 years before it came in.). The USPS has been forced to over pay for pension and retiree healthcare costs by over $80,000,000,000.00. Most of the $7,000,000,000.00 loss this year comes from an $5,000,000,000.000 payment into the retiree health benefits fund. In fact the USPS would have been profitable in the last 8 out of 10 years if it wasn't forced to subsidize congress's spending binges.

Congress requires the USPS to give rates to Non-profits that are below cost. Theoretically, congress is supposed to pay the difference, but hasn't for 17 years.

Periodicals (Time, WSJ, People ect) get preferential rates because of the lobbying power of the press. If I mail a 2.1 oz flat at presort standard rates (after putting the data through the national change of address database, something not required of periodicals) the lowest rate I could possible get is $0.194 per piece. I only get that rate if I bring it to the Sectional Center Facility where the mail will be sorted, and I presort it to the sequence the carrier walks in, and have pieces going to 90% of the residents on the route. That same piece going periodical rate only pays $0.16 for faster service.

I'm not denying that the USPS has problems of its own making it needs to deal with. It caved to the unions far to much in the past, giving it a very expensive workforce that thinks it constantly battling the evil management.

All of this comes from many years in the mail service provider industry. I'm not Aunt Edna that mails 3 birthday cards a year, and thinks that entitles her to complain that the Post Office in town is closing, even though it is within 2 miles of other Post Offices. I do multi-million dollar postage amounts every year. I am on first name basis with several USPS VPs.

Re:So what if it's losing money?

[GKThursday]

It is former Postal Employees, however it is a very muddy situation. The United State Postal Service used to be the United State Post Office Dept. At that point the Postmaster General was a cabinet position. During the 90s and ending in 2001, Congress passed postal "reform," which made the United States Postal Service, a private company with a government monopoly on letter mail. The USPS is governed by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), who interpret the postal reform passed by congress.

I posted all that as background for this next part.
Because of all these changes, some employees are under different pensions and healthcare systems than others. The first pension system is over funded (by govt. mandate) by around $70,000,000.00. This money was put into the general govt. retiree pension fund, which was spent by congress years ago. Newer USPS employees are part of a different pension/healthcare fund. Congress mandated that this fund be fully funded before 2020. That meant the USPS had to set aside about $5,500,000.00 a year for a decade to fund retirees that won't retire until 2040. Because the money goes to congress, the budget deficit seems smaller every year the USPS pays. So the USPS has 2 pension funds (more than that really, but this is the simple explanation). One is massively over funded, but stolen by congress. The other has an unsustainable funding schedule to make congress's budget deficit seem smaller.

Here's a suggestion for them

[lazlo]

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.

Re:why?

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:And FedEx and UPS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

Re:USPS

[Creosote]

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.

Re:why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Worst kind of government "agency"

[csnydermvpsoft]

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.

Re:why?

[0100010001010011]

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.