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USPS Losing Battle Against the E-mail Age
An anonymous reader writes "An article in the NY Times explains how the United States Postal Service is in dire financial straits, and will need emergency action from Congress to forestall a shutdown later this year. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said simply, 'If Congress doesn't act, we will default.' Labor agreements prohibiting layoffs are preventing one avenue for reducing costs, and laws forbidding postage rates from surpassing inflation rates keep income down. On top of that, the proliferation of e-mail and online bill-paying services have contributed to a 22% reduction in snail-mail volume since 2006. They're currently hoping for legislation that would relax their economic requirements and considering an end to Saturday delivery."
For at least 15 years I've been hearing that various postal services all over the world are "losing battle against e-mail age" while in fact that scary "e-mail age" (or Internet age, as I would call it) should be the best thing they should hope could possible happen. Never before in human history we were buying so many goods from remote locations all over the world to be delivered by ... postal services! And now they want an end to Saturday delivery? They should start Sunday delivery. They missed the opportunity to start the biggest online payment system in the world so they should at least focus on being the best at delivering good bought on the Internet, not being worse still.
The "proliferation of e-mail and online bill-paying services" should have been started by USPS because they already had the infrastructure to do that and the client base. If back in the nineties everyone paying bills at USPS were told that they could do the same faster, cheaper and more conveniently at USPSpal.com then people would do that. The problem is not that the world is not friendly to postal services but that they don't want to change. They missed the train and now they want our help to survive. This has never worked in the long term before.
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The USPS is losing a long, drown-out battle against the impossibility that it's supposed to be both an unsubsidized "private-sector" corporation that's "run like a business", but also is micromanaged by Congress and not permitted to make sane business decisions. They are required to deliver six days a week; have exact stamp prices down to the penny for many services mandated by Congress; are required to provide certain extra-subsidized services, e.g. cheap shipping at "media mail" rates; are not permitted to levy surcharges for delivery to expensive locations (e.g. remote areas); and they even have their pension plan micromanaged by Congress, which is one of the current cash-flow pressures (Congress changed how the pension accounting has to work).
Basically Congress needs to decide if the USPS is going to be a government-mandated service that delivers flat-rate mail to every corner of the country six days a week, and subsidize it accordingly, or if it's going to be a private-sector business that will neither be subsidized nor micromanaged.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To what purpose, I don't know, but making them fund pensions and expenses in a way never budgeted and that no other Government Sponsored/Sourced/Seeded Corporation has to, it is designed to fail.
Anyone know why, other than to break the unions and piss away the pension money?
And this is a surprise?
Lets see:
Can't raise the price of stamps faster than inflation regardless of actual cost to deliver.
Can't layoff employees
Can't reduce the delivery days
Must deliver to everyone
How many people see a positive outcome for this 'business'.
A postal service is simply too important not to have, just like the roads. It is necessary for the smooth running of a country to be able to reliably move physical goods from one point to another in a moderately expedient and cheap fashion. It is so important that the very basic service should be run by the government.
Has the US government done anything to actively sabotage the USPS?
I know that in the UK, the Royal Mail has been sabotaged to the point of being unable to opeate profitably. The Royal Mail has been forced to outsource the only profitable part of mail, which is the bit where you take letters and charge people for the privelige. As a result, there are suite a number of companies who rake in vast amounts of money doing the easy bit. The hard bit is the sorting and delivering which the Royal Mail still has to do and is legally not allowed to charge very much for. In a sane world, the latter part would be funded by the former part. But the government has managed to separate the two so that the Royal Mail simply cannot turn a profit so that it can then be sold off. In general, though mail in the UK is still a profitable venture and the Royal Mail would run itself comfortably if the world was half way sane.
Has the US government done something similar?
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The mail still needs to be moved and processed six (seven?) days a week. Cutting home delivery frequency would save money, but probably a lot less than you think.
Fedex doesn't have a legal mandate to provide service to most addresses 6 days of the week. The comparison isn't particularly useful.
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The problem is (and why I am starting to use epay rather than check+snail mail)... The USPS loses too much stuff
In the four years since I've moved into my current residence, they've lost one mortgage check (eff that, from now on I drop the damn thing off in person), and one electric bill.
That may not seem like a lot, but it is enough for me.
Translation: they aren't losing my service because of competition, rather their own inability to reliably provide their offered service.
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The USPS doesn't want to change, or can't. They are an supertanker with 2 steering wheels- the USPS leadership on one and congress on the other. They already do USPS money orders, why not make them electronic? They feed letters into automatic sorting machines at various points along the delivery route, why can't they have a scannable barcode with tracking information on each piece of first class mail?
One point that I would make is that a first class envelope usually carries a lot more weight than an email. Somebody has to open it up, and read it, and then physically put it in the garbage, or write back. E-mails to companies too often disappear into an abyss or are replied to with a generic form letter. Companies lately have been burying their e-mail addresses too behind e-mail forms, support forums, etc. Their postal address is usually wide open. Sometimes e-mail support is offshore to India or who-knows-where, but will they really forward my postal mail to India? I doubt it.
By the time I write a quick letter, put postage on it, print it out, and walk it out to my mailbox, I would have just found the e-mail address in some cases. While the delivery is slow, the time for me to get it out may be the same or faster. And the response will probably be better.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I send cards to [...] Finland, [...] Germany, [...] Taiwan, [...] Netherlands and [...] Siberia. [...] I live in the UK
That is going to help the USPS how?
... and you think dropping a check off in person will help?
My (previous) mortgage company deposited my mortgage check... and I have no idea whose account got credited for it, but it wasn't mine.
The check cleared, I marked it as such in my bank book, and the only clue something was wrong was when I went from 0 bill collector calls (since I pay all my bills on time) to 4 in one day all about my mortgage. Even after I opened a case, and they started investigating, AND finally credited me back, they STILL had the hounds calling me.
I had to tell them the next call was going to my attorney before they stopped.
So, even dropping that check off in person won't necessarily help. Mistakes can (and do) happen.
"What will replace the USPS?"
Electronic payments instead of sending checks, .... ....
Fax, Email, IRC, FB
DHL, UPS, USA couriers, Bongo, MyUS, FEDEX, Parcel2Go,
Over half a million errand boys and >218000 vehicles don't come cheap these days.
They never did.
But they were always cheaper overall than anything else you listed for physical delivery to the entire country as a whole.
It costs the same to mail a letter anywhere in the US. All the other carriers you listed do not flat rate, and will refuse to deliver to places that aren't profitable.
Everyone in the US can get a letter from the US postal service regardless of where they are. If they've got an address (so any private property and most public parcels) they can get postal drops. But they may not be able to get anything else, including an Internet connection.
The USPS is a socialist service designed to ensure that EVERYONE has SOME form of communication, and reliable communication at that. Nothing else offers that, even if you don't realize it because it doesn't effect you.
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The dirty little secret of those private carriers you named is that, when delivering a package to a rural location, they hand it over to the USPS for delivery. That's why the Postal Service can't compete with Fedex, UPS, et al on cost... they need to maintain a huge workforce and vehicle fleet to cover the 100% of the population, whereas the private carriers only cover the cheapest 90%.
If the Postal Service fails, a lot of people out in the country will suddenly find that ordering a $5 replacement wiper blade from Amazon is gonna cost them $100 in shipping, or won't be available to their location at all.
A significant majority of Congresscritters
Honestly, "Congresscritter" makes you sound just as childish as using "Rethuglican."
In 2006 Bush and the Republicans put a forward funding mandate on the USPS. That payment is due this year, to the tune of $5.5B -- 5,500,000,000.00. Guess how big the shortfall is expected to be in this "crisis."
It's easy to make government fail, just cut revenues below expenditures, then cut expenditures, then repeat -- sooner or later the food isn't safe, the roads fall apart and Medicare can't be sustained any longer. Unfortunately, one party in the U.S. has embraced this as a "policy" of "governance." The other party is full of messaging fail.
-GiH
For mission critical documents like that, yes, I would probably go with FedEx. (Should be noted, however, that FedEx loses stuff too, despite your faith in them.) However, that's not the market I'm talking about. I'm talking about typical bills, letters, small packages, and so forth, that right now are cheap to send via USPS. Right now you can send letters for 44 cents. If FedEx, UPS, and the like were to take over that segment of the market, you can bet your last dollar it won't stay that cheap (at least not for long.) Before you know it, you'll be paying $2 for a first class - level delivery, because the company MUST continually show increasing profits lest they be sued by their stockholders.
Your assumption that "government bureaucracy" can't get anything done is a poor one. They get things done every day, and usually with a high level of quality, just like private industry. In fact, in some segments of the economy, the government is beating the stuffing out of private industry in terms of efficiency. (See Medicare.) Do those programs have problems (fraud, for example)? Sure. Do private industry programs in the same markets have the same issues (like recission, denial of care, poor/slow reimbursement rates, etc.)? You betcha. The difference is that less money goes into overhead with the government program, because it doesn't have to show a profit.
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