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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."
All /. posters should commit to mail their comments for one week to make up the difference.
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This system is so brilliant, I may even patent it.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
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.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Weekly delivery of bills, junk mail, offers etc is enough. Lay off 60% of the delivery workforce, the other 20% will be needed for daily "express" deliveries.
Alternatively, deliver 3 days a week. Does anyone really need mail delivery daily?
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'.
From everything I have seen over the years they are between a rock and a hard place. They either need to be set free to be a private corporation or be yanked back in to be a complete government service. Both political parties over the years have successfully pushed the USPA into a situation where it has the worst traits of a government organization and a private corporation.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
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?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I joined Postcrossing last month. I liked the idea of sending random people postcards, and in return receiving cards from other random people.
I send cards to a child in Finland, a girl in Germany, a student in Taiwan, a recent-graduate lawyer in the Netherlands and a woman in Siberia. So far, only the first two have received my cards, and I've not received one in return yet -- but it's only been two or three days. (I live in the UK, so it's no surprise that the cards to Finland and Germany arrived quickly.)
I like travelling and meeting people from other countries, so hopefully I'll like reading the cards I receive too.
Strange that /. is missing the real crux of the problem; a bad 2006 law:
>In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to wholly pre-fund its retirement health package – that is, cover the health care costs of future retirees, in advance, at 100%.
most organizations are allowed to fund retirement and pension funds in a graduated manner that provides funding at the time of need rather than decades in advance. Its almost like this crisis has been engineered...
Source:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/18/is-benefits-law-dragging-down-the-postal-service/
Fedex doesn't have a legal mandate to provide service to most addresses 6 days of the week. The comparison isn't particularly useful.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
It's much easier to get evidence of delivery in if it's USPS ("official records" don't need the testimony of a custodian of records in, e.g., California state courts, unlike FedEx/UPS "business records"); that, and statutes requiring USPS (e.g., CCP section 1013), are pretty much the only reason I use the postal service anymore...
geek. lawyer.
They've got a delivery route to every single household in America every single day, and yet they can't seem to track a package through their system or guarantee a delivery day. Even their "Next Day" service is "We'll do our best, but it's not really a guarantee, and even then there are some places where we charge you the "next day" rate but we know it will be two days."
Fedex and UPS do essentially a semi-custom route each day, and they drivers are pretty well taken care of (though they have long hours certain times of the year), and they can track and guarantee your delivery dates, for essentially the same price as USPS. USPS needs to be a value option, or a better/more reliable service. Right now they're neither, and they cannot compete.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Neat idea. Should have called it Post Roulette.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
FedEx pays much more per package for labor. But as a percentage FedEx' labor costs are lower because FedEx delivers $18 packages, while the USPS delivers 15-30 cent letters.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
As long as each house is getting at least one piece of mail per day, the carrier is already going to the effort to visit each house. Is delivering four pieces of mail to a given house that much more effort than delivering two?
Only a few short years ago, the USPS was boasting of profits and windfalls. It's present demise is clearly not due to email, but rather it is due to mismanagement.
Yep. Now if only Congress would stop passing laws telling it what to do and how to do it, it might be able to manage itself. Bonus points if Congress repeals the laws they already passed.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
At my prior address, I'd had in the course of three years, two packages (not even letters) undelivered, or delivered to the wrong address), and on 6 occasions gotten letters and packages for other addresses, even on different streets. I stopped ordering online from places unless UPS or FedEx delivery are used.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Fedex labor cost is 32%, USPS is 80%.
There are so many things that Fedex isn't required to do that the USPS is that it doesn't seem useful to look at just labor costs as a percentage of operating expenses. Fedex isn't required by law to deliver packages six days a week. Fedex isn't required by law to maintain an office in every dippy little town in the US. Fedex isn't required by law to investigate cases of mail fraud, they leave that the the USPS. Fedex doesn't hold packages and mail when people are away from their residences. Fedex isn't required by law to fully fund 30 years of pensions and medical expense for retirees in a ten year time span as the USPS is. The USPS actually makes a profit on its operations. There are estimates that the USPS has been overcharged $75 billion in contributions to the Civil Service Retirement System pension fund. If it weren't for a 2006 law requiring it to over fund it's retiree pension and medical expenses it likely wouldn't be in the financial mess it's in.
I send cards to [...] Finland, [...] Germany, [...] Taiwan, [...] Netherlands and [...] Siberia. [...] I live in the UK
That is going to help the USPS how?
In the whole scale of everything, it probably won't. Although 14% of Postcrossing members are from the USA (36k users) between them sending over a million postcards.
My next two cards, which I will write this evening, are to be sent to Washington, USA and Austria. Me sending the card to Washington is a result of the person in Washington sending one to someone else, so that has helped the USPS in a tiny way.
... 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.
A colleague of mine calls this Government Cheese Syndrome. To whit: the US would never do something like, eg, France or Switzerland and regulate the production of cheese to ensure quality and regional branding. That would be socialism and Interfering With The Free Market. On the other hand, they have to have something to sell to fill in a spot on the food pyramid and the dairy boards have a strong lobby, so they legislate a lowest-common-denominator product.
And this is why Europe has Gruyère, Emmental or Jarlsberg, and the US has American Government Cheese.
Sales tax gathering is my personal favourite. Other countries have a flat VAT; the US has a balkanized mess of city, county and state taxes, all with their own administrative boards, all of which American businesses have to deal with. Objectively the US sales tax system is insane---it costs more to run and returns less---but a Federal VAT would go over like a lead balloon because somehow it's worse to have a hundred thousand curtain-twitchers and pencil pushers at every level of government than just one central group.
--srj/mmv
"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.
In fact, we personally have discussed that we wouldn't be put out if mail delivery stopped entirely - we could stop by the post office on the way home from work 1/week.
My wife is a rural postmaster's daughter, and lets just say the local retailers loved him and his post office... Guaranteed the entire village walked past their storefront at least once per week, if not daily. I'm told the "new urbanist" types have a similar line of thinking, to encourage downtown walking foot traffic.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
) Cable companies would prefer to not provide cable to all people in a state, only providing cable to those who will buy premium services and in highest concentration areas so it's most profitable, but states general have laws stating "no, cable for everyone or you ain't in business." So the USPS should not provide mail service to absolutely everyone in the US?
I wonder when this nonsense started. We used to have the ability to make progress in an economically sensible and viable direction.
Imagine if New York hadn't been allowed to have paved roads until there was a plan in place to pave the entire Western frontier. No rail roads in California until Louisiana has a direct line to Idaho. No canal to the Great Lakes until the government builds a canal for North Carolina.
At some point we lost the idea that progress has to start somewhere. Now it's all or nothing which usually devolves to the nothing side of things.
And when the Democrats had all 3 branches including 60 in the Senate throughout 2009 and 2010 what did they do to fix this problem?
Since every major democratic party initiative since 2009 was held up or killed by the threat of a republican filibuster, I'm not sure they could have done anything about it. The democrats never really had a filibuster proof majority in the senate. The death of Kennedy and the interminable series of re-counts in Minnesota effectively kept the democrats from controlling the senate for most of 2009 and all of 2010. Since all legislation has to pass through the senate it's difficult to argue that the democrats had free reign to pass whatever they wanted in 2009 and 2010.
So, even dropping that check off in person won't necessarily help. Mistakes can (and do) happen.
True. However, you can reduce the probability of an issue arising by reducing the complexity of the system. By trusting USPS with your cheque, you give USPS the chance to lose it. If you don't send it by mail, they can't lose it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
IMHO I think it is time for private industry to start bidding on mail regions.
Capital idea. Then I'll just have to travel 50 miles to get my mail like I do whenever stupid companies ship via Fedex.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't generally dislike the use of epithets like "Rethuglican" and "Democrap" because it just makes you sound childish, no matter how important your point.
It also obscures the fundamental issue: A significant majority of Congresscritters and Presidents, and at least a few Supreme Court justices, regardless of party, are making it very clear that they can be bribed to wreck the US government. How they wreck it varies, who bribes them varies, but that's the problem in a nutshell.
I am officially gone from
The idea behind the USPS is that everybody in the US, no matter if they live in Manhattan, or the wilds of Alaska, has access to mail service. "Let the market decide" will leave many poor people hurting, badly, and will severely limit where people can comfortably live. It's not a monopoly or a "handout". It's a government service.
I don't respond to AC's.
In cases like that you send a registered letter to the agency requesting proof that you owe the debt. That will stop them dead in their tracks, especially given that lately even legitimate mortgage debt often can't be proven to be owed to the party wanting to collect.
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.
The web and electronic services offered by the USPS are certainly part of their problem. You would think that by now, almost everyone would be logging into USPS.com to print POSTNET/IM barcoded prepaid envelopes and labels with inexpensive tracking and delivery confirmation options. You would also expect USPS.com to contain complete information and offer every service your local post office offers.
Instead, USPS.com has not changed much at all in the past 10 years. You cannot print out an envelope with delivery confirmation from your PC. Delivery confirmation is not even available for the first-class envelope you use to pay your electric bill, unless you stick in a couple of styrofoam peanuts to make the envelope 1/4" thick to convert it from a flat to a parcel. The post office does offer a certificate-of-mailing service, and their legacy certified and registered mail services, both of which require you visit a post office and handwrite all the information out on paper forms.
The USPS offers a bloated Windows desktop "Shipping Assistant" application, which still cannot print out a simple envelope.
They updated the USPS.com website about a month ago, but that was barely more than a homepage redesign. click a few times and you're back to their old web apps.
It's such a stagnant situation that the only viable fix is to have the federal government just sign a contract with stamps.com and make it a free service for everyone.
I live in Orlando, FL. Sending a letter to Tampa is the same price with USPS as sending a letter to Nome Alaska. The USPS still wins in a lot of areas.
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A significant majority of Congresscritters
Honestly, "Congresscritter" makes you sound just as childish as using "Rethuglican."
Point being, if an area of the country has low enough population density that delivering there is unprofitable, FedEx doesn't. (Or, rather, they'll turn the package over to the local USPS for final delivery.)
Whereas the USPS isn't allowed to say: "Fuck Montana. We're losing money delivering mail there. Let's just focus on cities instead."
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
Currently you can get shipping materials for free https://shop.usps.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10052&catalogId=10001&categoryId=10000036&parent_category_rn=10000002&top_category=10000002 which is ludicrous. They need to stop giving away shipping materials and charge for it like everyone else does. Countless times I have known of folks to hoard the materials, and use them for shipping using other carriers, or for personal storage. This needs to stop NOW.
Raise the rates on the bulk mail, even if it requires congressional approval to do so. Bulk mail companies already pay way less than the general public to send their spam direct to your box, and at times they receive hefty discounts as well ( http://www.dmnews.com/usps-provides-more-details-on-summer-sale/article/131151/ ) which should be stopped. The First Class postage we pay subsidizes junk mail. It is high time they pay their own way. The ridiculous threat that bulk mail companies will stop using USPS if rates for them are increased is pure bullshit. Call their bluff, and raise their rates, for they can afford it. Do you really think they will start using FedEx or UPS to deliver their junk? The US mail is a government monopoly they must use, due to the cheapness of it when compared to other options. A friend of mine who works in the sorting of US mail told me that bulk mail has steadily increased every year.
Additionally, the Postal Regulatory Commission believes that bulk mailers do not pay their fair share, and that their rates should be increased roughly 22% overall. An audit found that the current rates bulk mailers pay run afoul of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act http://www.prc.gov/PRC-DOCS/UploadedDocuments/ACD%202010_1697.pdf , which is hotly contested by the lobbyists in the bulk mail industry. The current Postmaster General caters to the whims of the bulk mail industry, and needs to be gone.
Create a Do Not Mail registry, which works similar to the Do Not Call registry. Currently I have no way to stop all the loose-leaf flyers/advertisements from infiltrating my mailbox. The sorting and delivery of this bulk-junk takes up a considerable amount of time, including mine. The junk mail problem alone has me flirting with the idea of eliminating my mailbox entirely, for I can pay all my bills, and do all my banking electronically now. Granted, this may cost money initially, but I can dream, can't I?
Granted, there are many problems leading to the current crisis, and I have only touched the tip of the issue. We have to start somewhere.
STOP! You're bankrupting the USPS. They *lose* money on these items.
Do you have a source for that claim and in particular does that source distinguish between overall profit/loss (apportioning some part of the fixed costs to each delivery) and marginal profit/loss?
They'll have to charge the true cost of delivery if they want to actually solve the problem.
As I understand it the real problem with a "postal service"* is that their costs are more related to the size of the service area and the frequency of service than the volume of post. Sending a postman down a street costs about the same regardless of how much mail he puts in each box.
So as mail volumes naturally go down due to competition from electronic communication the average cost of a delivery rises. The governments that own and/or regulate them must choose betwen subsidising them, raising prices or reducing service. None of theese are lightly to be popular and the latter two options run the risk of driving down mail volumes further. Unions add to the problem of course as they are resistant to downsizing.
I suspect in the long run we will end up with an infrequent and possiblly subsidised delivery to everyone, commerical postal services in areas with high mail volume and expensive courior services for the few items that absoloutely must be delivered physically and quickly to an address in the middle of nowhere.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why do you assume that the government "cares" about quality? A profit motive gives a reason to care about quality. A guaranteed monopoly does not.
You're thinking like an American tax planner: penny-wise and pound (dollar?) foolish because you're spending more trying to figure out how to precisely make it fair than if you just made blanket policy.
In most nations, the central authority (sometimes state/province, sometimes federal, often both) doles out funds as needed using a known and documented process (eg, region B needs roads this year, etc, whereas A might need a hospital ten years from now) and/or uses transfers and/or equalization payments. Yes, this ends up being redistributive, but so what? Redistribution is at least effective, whereas redundant administration just wastes time and money.
Local tax gathering is just plain nuts. It makes some sense for property taxation, but for sales or income the inefficiency ends up wiping out anything saved through fairness.
--srj/mmv
The real reason for USPS problems is not e-mail or online bill pay. The real reason is the Postal Act of 2006 which requires USPS to pre-fund 80% of future retiree health-care obligations by 2016. This costs USPS 5.5 billion $ per year. If not for this, USPS would have shown a 600 Million $ profit over the last 4 years.
None of the USPS competitors (or for that matter any other company) has this burden. It's very likely this was lobbied for by USPS competitors - No lobbyist left behind.
the probability that you get mugged (small as it is) is probably greater than the odds of the USPS losing an envelope.
At least you will know that you were mugged in a timely fashion. You dont know that the USPS lost your mail for a long time that often has financial consequences.
"His name was James Damore."
But let's get real, such an effort even if successful may fund one postal worker. The USPS is one of the biggest employers out there.
I think they should do several measures:
-Alternating day service. Route 1 gets Mo-We-Fr delivery, and Route 2 gets Tu-Th-Sa delivery. Mail carriers cut in 1/2. Express Mail already is handled by a different special carrier (I'm told) so that's unaffected.
-Cut down all underperforming post offices that are within a certain radius of other, more successful, USPS locations. I'm close to such a one, that is in a shack of a location, and within 7 minutes drive of it's main branch. It has one guy working there, less than 75 PO Boxes, half of them unrented (the next most rural place I know has at least 300 boxes, 90% rented). USPS has been trying to close it down for years but the union is resisting, even if the worker is taken to the main branch. Hard to understand.
-Open up automated kiosks to serve as advanced versions of blue mailboxes in malls/supermarkets/what_have_you. Emulate redbox, except for packages. Try a trial run. (All the USPS advertising is for flat rate boxes, they WANT the package business. Might as well try something novel.)
-Back in WW2, Post Office has Vmail. It's mail on special sized letters, shrunk to microfiche, and reprinted. Save many cargo ships for other purposes - they used to be pioneers. They should have an email to mail service - afterall laywers and a ton of businesses need to send out certified mail all the time. But why should they have to print it, run someplace to mail it, and keep track of slips of "certified" this and that? Send it to the USPS server, let a central place print it out, and mail automatically, for postage plus a small fee. The software keeps track of what was sent.
Just a few ideas. The USPS has to change and fast. It has to reduce their workforce. It has to do a lot of things. But ceasing to exist should not be an options, lot of online and offline commerce depends on them and will do so until perfect replicas of objects can simply be generated, like in Star Trek, just like computers can copy data files. Then they can call it quits.
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.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Oh, and right now I will tell you where USPS absolutely lags behind where it could get an easy jump. For ebay, it absolutely sucks right now making international shipments for things under $300. You see, UPS and FedEx for a small guy will cost around $100 overseas (not something a buyer is likely to pay) to send a package. With USPS it costs 4-5 for really small items to, say $30 for something under 4lbs. The problem is that USPS lacks tracking - buyer says he never got it, Paypal will side with the buyer every time. Many sellers have given up selling overseas.
And forget registration (that's insured to 45 some odd dollars to many countries) -- many customs offices became absolutely anal retentive about packages. So if it's from the post office, it can get held... and held... and held.... months at a time even. But by paypal/ebay rules, if they don't get it within 21 days (or 28?) internationally , the seller is boned. If you declare the real value, the buyer gets to pay 30% of it or something mindboggling stupid in may places... they refuse, and the sender somehow never gets his package back. UPS and FedEx somehow managed to zip these items through customs, and if there are problems, often the item get back to you. (I swear, this shit was easier 10 years ago...)
Even if it gets through, if it's registers, the other PO system just doesn't know what to do with it. I got a registered package from China. The mail clerk tried to scan it in, and it just wouldn't work. He had me sign for it on a slip of paper because he couldn't understand the other PO system code (I'm sure they'd never find the signature again if I contested it).
So the weak point of the USPS system are the foreign post offices, which UPS and FedEx obviously don't have. Plus customs. USPS is trying to mitigate that with Global Express Guaranteed, which basically uses FedEx's system after it leaves our borders and is quite a bit cheaper than FedEx.
But if USPS could convene an international Congress, get the various customs offices to back off on the nickel and diming average people (good luck with that), work out an agreement with the foreign POs on a bunch of these issues, use universal forms that rely on easily recognizable symbols for registered mail (+ other services) that would be used in all countries, and have a universal scan code, they could really pick up business if they offered cheap, reliable package tracking on 1st class international parcels. Right now tracking even for a small business costs $0.17 or so. They could charge as much as $3 per package for 1st class intl tracking (as an option on top of the postage), and the the total postage would still be 10% of FedEx/UPS for 0-4 lb packages. They could earn a TON of intl business away from FedEx/UPS and generate a lot more from businesses that aren't willing or quit some time in the past.
I'm not in favor of unions, but I'll say they may not be bad in all cases.
I don't, however, think they should be allowed in in PUBLIC jobs...as that the rules, pay, etc...are voted by and should be dictated by the public for those jobs.
And not to mention...govt. is inefficient enough as it is inherently....due to difficulty of getting civil servants out when they aren't effective...laws and regulations, etc.
You add in union on top of that, and it goes downhill fast into a money sucking entity that returns little if any effective service to the public that funds it with their taxes.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why would I go to the DMV to renew my license plate or drivers license? That's what they have the Internet for.
Because the private sector has done such a bang up job.....
No, probably more likely that not all unions are necessarily good. It's sort of like police misconduct: "Well, yes there's police misconduct, just not here."
It's alright for others to lay off employees, or close locations, just not here.
Governments, corporations, and unions all cause problems. They just cause different problems. Pointing out the problems one causes does not imply that the problems another causes do not exist.
I'm kind of confused too. Company A makes a deal with Union. Company A is running a profit on their operations with the union workers. Company A's competitors complain to congress members they contribute loads of money to that Company A needs to fund its employee pensions better or they won't be able to compete against it. Company A is required by congress to fund it's pension at an unrealistically high level, amounting to an overpayment that exceeds the losses the company is running. By some estimates as much as $25 billion. What confuses me is why some people think most of the problem is the union and not the congress members who did the bidding of Company A's competitors.