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US Postal Service Discontinuing Saturday Mail Delivery
Hugh Pickens writes "The Postal Service has been losing billions of dollars each year as Americans increasingly rely on online communications that drive down mail volumes. Now, Reuters reports that the Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August, saving $2 billion per year. 'The Postal Service is advancing an important new approach to delivery that reflects the strong growth of our package business and responds to the financial realities resulting from America's changing mailing habits,' says Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. But the Postal Service is already facing some pushback for moving forward with delivery schedule changes. 'Today's announcement by Postmaster General Donahoe to eliminate six-day delivery is yet another death knell for the quality service provided by the U.S. Postal Service,' says Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association. 'To erode this service will undermine the Postal Service's core mission and is completely unacceptable.' Package deliveries will continue under the new plan and were a bright spot in a bleak 2012 fiscal year, with package revenue rising 8.7 percent during the year. Donahoe says the changes would allow the Postal Service to continue benefiting from rising package deliveries as Americans order more products from sites such as eBay Inc and Amazon.com Inc."
If only there were some article of the Constitution that could be used as an argument to convince conservatives that the Post Office is a vital national service and that it is okay to pay for it in much the same way as it is okay to pay for a navy.
I guess one can only wish.
most of my mail is paper catalogs i throw in the trash without looking at. bills get paid by computer or smartphone.
i guess the old people will be complaining
It saves money (first-off) and more importantly, makes a weekend feel more like a true weekend.
It doesn't help that Congress is basically stealing $5 billion a year from the post office. They're making the USPS fully fund retirement plans over a very short time, and that money is going into government bonds, which ends up in the general fund. If it wasn't for the budget shenanigans that Congress pulled, the Post Office would be doing fine.
Wow, didn't think it would happen but it looks like they may have actually saved themselves a ton of money without too much inconvenience. This seems like a good thing.
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Now if only Amazon would start letting us choose USPS over UPS for package delivery. As an apartment dweller, this would make my life much easier.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
It never made sense that I could send a letter down the street or Nome Alaska for the same amount of money. Just seems like I shold be paying more. Otherwise why not just deregulate mail delivery? UPS, DHL and/or Fedex may be able to do it more efficiently.
Err - that's the plan. Only first class mail is being stopped on Saturdays. If you want something delivered on a Saturday, you can still send it priority or express, and it will still be delivered on a Saturday. That's the second and eighth lines of the summary above.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Personally I don't really care if the USPS discontinues Saturday delivery, but FTFA the agency was down $16 billion last year and this will only save them $2 billion. $14 billion is a lot to make up each year. I would like to know what they plan to do about that.
We could eliminate the DOJ's yearly anti-terrorism funding and not only save Saturday delivery, but put the USPS back in good shape fiscally.
Somehow I don't think expanding the TSA, buying millions of rounds of hollow-point ammo and giving them automatic assault rifles to fight boogeymen is helping anything.
Article says they're dropping first-class Saturday delivery, no mention of priority or express. If you need something delivered ASAP, you probably aren't sending it first-class.
$5/month if you want it delivered or collect it yourself at the post office.
imagine that, a corporate whoring teabagger repeating the same old lies in an attempt at blaming the victims, yet again.
Robotic mail and package delivery is possible, now that driverless vehicles are being legalized. I can find no downside.
Robots have no interest in reading your mail.
Robots have no need for the contents of your package.
Robots have no need of unions or pensions.
Robots would never be tempted to dump mail in their attic in order to take the day off.
Robots could easily be programmed with alternative delivery instructions in the event that you need your item dropped elsewhere when you're on vacation.
All postal willing postal workers could be retrained as robotic technicians. The transition could be a public works project of the future.
So, I get this note in the mailbox that I have a package that is too big for the mailbox, I have to pick it up at the PO. But, I leave for work before the PO opens, return after it closes, and it's 50 miles away so I can't sneak down there during lunch. Result: If the PO is closed on Saturday too, I have a real problem, having to take off work for yet another thing, getting a package from the PO. If it is open on Saturday, then there will most assuredly be a 2 hour line, out the door and into the snow, because everyone else is going to be doing the same thing.
Here in Canada, we only receive mail on weekdays. It works just fine because the majority of letters in our mailbox are not extremely time-sensitive - the occasional municipal bill, magazines, and periodic greeting cards from around the world. They could reduce letter delivery to M/W/F without really causing any issues. Daily parcel delivery makes sense because they're larger dollar transactions and whenever a parcel is on the way, someone is waiting for it. I cringe every time someone suggests getting rid of the post office and relying on FedEx and UPS instead, because they tend to be far more expensive in Canada. As an example, UPS will charge a brokerage fee for surface packages coming from the USA that easily hits $25. Sending a 2 lb package to the USA by UPS Express (even 3-day) costs about $60. Canada Post runs about 25% of that.
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
Imagine that: emails does decrease demand for actual mail. Shocking huh.
All political BS aside, without saturday delivery wont a lot of people just go over to FedEX or UPS?
Well, yes, if you need Saturday delivery then you'll have to use a different carrier.
It's worth noting that very few shippers will deliver on Sunday, and the world hasn't come to an end. I would think that if getting things delivered on a particular non-business day was that important, somebody would have started offering Sunday delivery to keep ahead of the competition.
Couldn't they charge extra for weekend delivery to make it economical?
The same people who scream when they lose their Saturday delivery would throw an even bigger fit if you raised the postal rates enough to make up the difference.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Yeah. First class mail is really third or fourth class mail.
I bought a plant on ebay. The seller shipped it to me as "media mail" to save money, something that's supposed to be used only for textbooks. I guess it could become a textbook one day so that's alright?
Later, also on ebay, I tried to sell a used game. When I typed in the upc, it told me the shipping information used by other sellers of that item, on average. The average listed weight was 6 oz. The actual weight when I measured it on my scale read 9 oz, not even close. It made a dollar difference in shipping.
Little things like this add up.
Submit your billing on Tuesday.
The post office was forced into this because their unfunded pension fund was a time bomb waiting to happen. They are only paying this increase till 2016 and have had it reduced when it was pressing. As of 2009 it was estimated their unfunded liabilities were over fifty billion dollars.
No, where Congress gets a failing grade is similar to how base closings are done. Just like the military knows which bases are not needed the Post Office can tell you which sorting centers, distribution hubs, and which Post Offices, are not needed. When they go to close them then suddenly every Congressman becomes an expert and you end up with stories about how the PO wanted to close nearly 3000 offices and only got a little over a hundred.
The PO operates under burdensome contracts combined with quickly shrinking sources of income. The number of pieces of mail handled has steadily declined but when the PO tries to downsize Congress interferes or their contracts block them. Trying to hire part time workers is another area they have difficulty with.
So, no their problems don't stem from just having to pay for liabilities they should be paying for; if anything ask Congress why that rule ain't applied to the US as a whole; its from a myriad of items of which two largest are Congress and the unions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why not just do "every other day" delivery for residential service? It seems like it would make for a much bigger savings with a similar impact to the recipient. How many residential delivery points needs to get mail every single day? And if people want their mail every day, charge a hefty fee.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
No more getting two Netflix shipments a week by sending the movie back the day after you receive it.
Why is it that the reason for the post office woes is attributed solely on reductions of first-class mail? While this is true, the post office had no debt as late as 2005. It had a surplus. It would be solvent today if Congress didn't step in.
Congress saw a great way to collect (ie steal) money from the post office and did so. They imposed a requirement on the USPS to pay ~$55 billion dollars per year into an account that can't be touched until Congress lets them. It is conveniently invested in Treasuries.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-morris/usps-budget_b_1545430.html
Now pretend I'm 85 years old, in a wheel chair, no driver's license, very little income, not enough for innernetz access. How do I get my mail now? Or is mail to become something for just the well-to-do?
Mail is supposed to be for EVERYBODY. That means someone in a cabin that is a 10 mile boat-ride - the post office does this sort of stuff. This system is great for the well-monied living in urban or suburban areas, but I don't think it will well-serve everyone.
They offer free tracking if you buy your postage online. Heck, they actually pay you for the tracking since postage rates online are cheaper than if you walk into a post office.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The reason saturday delivery of letters is going to save money is because everyone pays the same for a letter. This means that some delivery guy may have to drive 20 miles and be paid an hour of work to deliver one letter to one person. This is why the rural people are so pissed off. They are going to have to pay scaled delivery charges if they want something on saturday.
Pretty much we could live with monday-Wednesday-friday delivery for first class letters. This would not effect most of us, since increasingly we are not sending mail.
And it would still be competitive with Fedex and UPS. Have dealt with rural delivery, I can tell you the USPS wil drive out a deliver a letter or package. Unless a letter or package is overnight or two day guaranteed, my experience is that UPS and Fedex will keep it int he office until they have a few deliveries in the area.
The reality is that much of the money wasted has to do with rural delivery. At one time in the US history, when much more of us were rural, and mail was a prime way to keep us together, this made sense. Now we just need to adjust and let businesses that need frequent mail delivery pay for it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Senders already pay for mail delivery. If senders aren't paying enough to make delivery viable, then the postal service needs to raise rates.
The post office is Constitutionally-mandated to provide universal service, at least for first-class mail. They could raise rates for junk ("bulk rate") mail, or drop rural service to a few days a week, and still maintain their universal service but save money on gas and salaries. (I say rural only because most suburban and urban service is probably dense enough to still be profitable, assuming the prefunded retirement debacle is fixed.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Does this mean they'll keep delivering junk mail on Saturdays?
You never expect irony, do you?
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It is possible that 5 day service is needed for economic reasons, but let's make sure bulk mail is not subsidized ...
Will Netflix lower the cost of DVD/Blu-ray rentals since I can't view as many movies per month now?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Getting a DVD on Saturday is one of the things I look forward to.
This is the only logical way for a Canadian consumer to buy American. Any other way only leads to extortion in "brokerage fees".
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Imagine that: unions, affirmative action and compliance with well-intentioned government programs do make you anti-competitive after all.
The USPS is the most efficient system for moving things from one place to the other on the planet. Seriously. Its private competitors cost far more to move the same amount of stuff in a similar amount of time, and its international counterparts don't come close to dealing with the kinds of requirements the USPS has to deal with. Their systems and procedures are designed so that practically anybody can get hired, follow the manual, and do the job correctly, and are also capable of working under a wide variety of conditions ranging from tiny towns in the middle of Alaska to lower Manhattan.
It's not that they aren't competitive. It's that the demand for their entire industry has dropped, and their bosses are actively trying to screw them up.
I am officially gone from
Just make stamps $1 each. Then you will not have to change it for a while.
Also stop prefunding your retirement 75 years in advance.
That means someone in a cabin that is a 10 mile boat-ride - the post office does this sort of stuff.
No they don't. You don't have to be too far off the beaten track to require that your mail be picked up at the post office. You haven't lived in a rural area before, have you?
A lot of people are using this as an excuse to complain about all the junk mail they get. Why don't you do something about it? Cancel all the catalogs and crap you're getting.
Start here: http://www.optoutprescreen.com/
If you get stuff with pre-paid return envelopes, send back a note asking to be removed from their mailing list.
Perhaps if they can no longer do their job, Congress should consider allowing private companies to step in and do it for them.
Awesome. One less day per week I have to park my car in a less-than-convenient spot in order to leave room for a dour-looking gentleman to bitterly deposit a six-inch thick stack of garbage in my mailbox. Maybe soon I won't need the freaking mailbox at all.
USPS should be doing something along these lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system But, given that this would carve into the profits of the usurous payday loan pigs (in this 'Christian' country), not to mention the corrupt banks, this will never come to pass.
All political BS aside, without saturday delivery wont a lot of people just go over to FedEX or UPS?
I don't know about where you live but UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays over here. I think FedEx will if you pay extra.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
That's the truth of capitalism. If it is not viable, it can be written off, no matter how unethical or inhumane.
New Economic Perspectives
There's a shortage of P.O. boxes in some areas, proving that the price of renting a box in those areas is too low. As a result, the post office loses money.
There's a surplus of P.O. boxes in other areas, proving that the price is too high, and the post office loses business to Fedex, UPS, and Amazon Lockers.
Clearly, the people in charge of setting prices are destroying the United States Postal Service.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
They would never do that. Sending us spam is how they make their living.
I'm sorry... are you implying that restructuring the USPS would be in some way unethical or inhumane?
As far as I can remember, we never had mail on saturday here(Quebec, Canada) And if they offered it I wouldn't take it, it's not really needed.
Imagine a private messaging network like Apple's iMessage or Blackberry's BBMessage, but with the added legal protections and reliability you get by sending something through the post office. I don't think anyone except the USPS can even offer something like that.
My friends and I all use iMessage since we all have iPhones, but a cross platform service would be better. No, not SMS, something that works across the internet and is accessible on all devices.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Couldn't they charge extra for weekend delivery to make it economical?
Since the postage is paid by the sender, how will the sender know that what he sends will be delivered on the weekend and thus require more money? And what is to stop the post office from simply holding on to all mail until Saturday so they can charge more for delivering it? Cut back on postal workers during the week, rake in the money on Saturday.
If you mean "pay more in advance for weekend delivery", then you'll simply create the same issue that exists in the overnight and two-day delivery system. That is, I've lost count of the number of times that I've paid extra to a company so they'll ship the thing I really need tomorrow by overnight express, and then find out that they weren't going to bother shipping it for a week anyway. In the USPS case, they'll happily accept money for weekend delivery, but claim that the parcel didn't get to the destination postal center until Monday so they couldn't have delivered it on the weekend anyway.
Corporate America used to offer pensions to their employees but as greedy, how-can-we-cash-out-today management thinking took over they stopped funding their pensions adequately, basically doing what USPS was doing, "borrowing" from the future.
As management drains more and more from the company, they eventually file bankruptcy which gives them the green light to unload their pensions "under financial duress" to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, who then takes on the pension obligations.
It sounds like a good idea, except that PBGC gets to meat-axe pension benefits and people who were expecting to live on pensions find that the benefits they were promised as workers are no longer enough to live on.
While the whole story is sordid -- many workers accepted lower wages in exchange for generous pension benefits, and corporations who underfund their benefits for short-term profits get to hand the mess over to someone else, scot-free -- why can't the USPS play by those same rules?
IMHO the USPS can't ever be a success; they have all the handicaps of a government entity, plus burdens that corporate America gets to escape from.
drop mail to 3 days a week.
Allow people to opt out of advertisments.
If they can't make money, then maybe it's time to shut it down.
I say this as as some one who knows the mail service,s is proud of the USPS's work, and understands why we have the best postal system in the world.
But, if not enough people are using it then maybe it's time for a radical change.
In fact, if they got rid of junk, eliminated positions they would no longer need becasue they aren't processing junk, I would have no problem with them getting tax dollars to ensure rural mail service stays in tact.
Allow seniors to pick up a few free mail envelopes a month. Maybe wind the system down for a couple of decades.
alternatively, raise the price of sending advertisements 100 times.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
are that
The market is fixing it
Privatizing improves things
Taxes and government are bad
Forcing the US postal service to act like a regular profit-oriented enterprise is a consequence along those lines.
Can that be? Can a service being obligated to cover every remote side in the country adequately and always be profitable?
What actually happens is diminishing of service quality.
Postal employees apparently are forced to ask _every_ customer if they would like to buy more - stamps, insurance, return receipt, faster delivery. Personnel at the Post Office seems to be reduced with longer lines, delivery errors increase, many smaller communities loose their Mini-Post Offices. If the current trend continues, it will go much worse.
Imagine that: charging 46 cents to send a letter cross-country does make lose you money after all.
Maybe they should lower the cost. They seemed to do okay back when it was a quarter.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Wow! If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.
The monopoly position is one of the reasons it works. If you were to cherry pick the easy to deliver stuff by starting a service without universal coverage, you might be able to do it cheaper, but if you want universal delivery, not so much.
Are there any G20 countries without a monopoly postal system?
Actually, it's a Constitutionally-granted monopoly.
But you knew that. And you know it's not on 'letters', it's on post boxes. The same ones that fall under the universal service obligation.
But, those would be adult arguments, and your tone suggests you want to have a different type of discussion.
They called Congress's bluff and stopped making excess payments - no cash.
Similar with Saturday mail. They got tired of waiting for Congress to approve their two year old restructuring plan, so they are acting unilaterally.
In Canada, we've always had 5-day a week mail delivery service. What doesn't get delivered on a Saturday will be distributed on a Monday instead. Yes, individual postal workers won't get to work as many hours during the week, but you'll all still get your mail. IMHO, Americans will get used to this, and it won't harm the quality of service of mail delivery in any real measurable way.
'To erode this service will undermine the Postal Service's core mission and is completely unacceptable.' I'm sorry, your company is loosing its ass by not evolving and is on the brink of major failure and collapse and you are stating that, essentially, you don't want to try to cut costs to save the business. #FAIL
Saturday delivery is a ridiculous luxury and a complete waste of money. The last thing I need is retail flyers delivered on Saturday. Those can wait.
Get rid of the penny next.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
That is one of the stupidest comments I have read in quite some time. It is comments like that which make me stop reading Slashdot.....sheesh.
Sure. Pick out any US or British annuity company. (a.k.a. the life insurance policy that pays out a monthly check until you die, which is effectively a pension.) (the 2 countries that I do know) . For example, AIG went down in a hail of fire during the finical crisis the fully funded annuity part kept on ticking. While not exactly spot on, state regulators have required this level of discipline from insurance company for decades.
Is it easier to use the more flexible (and I would argue, sloppy) accounting standards most firms use? Yes. Is it easier for a overweight man to eat a jelly donut and promise to eat better tomorrow? Yes. Are these ideas good ideas? Probably not.
Also, to be spot on, The Bank of England. IIRC they spend about 30% to 40% of their payroll buying inflation linked gilts, which is about as conservative as one can be.
Since when did "first class" become the worst? Around when women starting wearing negative sized dresses?
The real problem is that the government is forcing the USPS to do the right thing—to fund their previously-unfunded pension liabilities—for the wrong reasons (ie. to abscond with the money and to replace it with another unfunded liability).
If you follow the money, you will see that the federal government is forcing the USPS to "fund" their pension liabilities *now* and turn that money over to the federal government for "safekeeping". The USPS pension is therefore carried as a liability for the federal government, and the USPS money is used to offset part of the current year's deficit. Yes, that means the money is spent right away, by the federal government, on general budget items.
Thus, the USPS is trading their previous unfunded liability (ie. their pension underfunding) for another (the ability of the federal government to pay out once these postal employees retire). The USPS money is already *gone*.
It's the Social Security Trust Fund debacle in a microcosm. The SS Trust Fund doesn't really exist—it's merely a notional bookkeeping exercise that could vanish with the stroke of a pen. The special-issue Treasury bonds that form the SSTF (the debt the SSA eventually plans to redeem to pay retiree benefits) must be fulfilled by the federal government by raising general tax revenue. Right now, the SSA is rolling over that debt continuously as it matures. Eventually they will stop rolling it over and want it redeemed, which must come from general revenue, or selling more government debt to the Chinese/whoever. It's much the same issue with the USPS, because their pension is now backed by the future, worthless full faith and credit of the United States government.
"We promise we'll give back the money we took from you, just as soon as you need it. It will be there, we swear... even though we currently spend 160% of our income every year and already spent all the money you handed over to us too. Sorry, we just can't trust you to be responsible with that money & responsibility. I'm sure you understand..."
I knew we were on a slippery slope in 1950 when deliveries were reduced to once a day - dadgummit!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If you don't have a plan to pay for your funeral, you're simply irresponsible.
Uhhh, this is fairly dependant on the individual. An healthy 18-20 year old who hasn't planned for a funeral expense is much more of a concern than somebody 50+
I certainly haven't *planned* for my funeral. If I died suddenly then there's enough money in insurance and the bank to cover it and then some, but it's not a plan per-se.
Opt-in won't save money unless everybody opts in or out. If you opt out of mail delivery, but our neighbor doesn't, then the mail still has to run, so they might as well do yours, too. Look at garbage collection. If you don't pay your wast collection bill (often tied to water service), but you put trash out, chances are they will take it. They don't have some computer in the truck telling them to skip this house or that house. It is far cheaper just to pick up everybody that put out garbage than to try to skip the ones who don't have service.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"The congressional notion was that the Postal Service was making lots of money selling its products and services, and so it might be a good idea to put those profits into pre-funding future retiree health care benefits for the next 75 years and do so in a decade. No one else, public or private, does this – but it would put the Postal Service that much more ahead of the game in terms of future liabilities. And so, in 2006, Congress mandated that the USPS do so, at a price tag of about $5.5 billion a year. " (http://www.cnbc.com/id/45049636/Fixing_the_US_Postal_Service039s_Finances).
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Stamps were 25 cents (more than half the current price) in 1988. Cost of gas in 1988? $1.08 - less than 1/3 the current price. The Post Office's costs have been rising much faster than congress allows them to raise their rates. Canada charges ~65 cents for the same service, and the UK ~90 cents (US). Exactly what do you think LOWERING prices will accomplish, when they're already below cost?
Where do you read a monopoly grant in the Constitution? It merely gives Congress the authority to establish Post Offices and Post Roads - nothing about 'post boxes' or monopolies.
Try the postal code (or the Comstock Laws which are only possible under such a monopoly).
My God, it's Full of Source!
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Mo-Ron and Mo-Lasses
How much does the USPS spend per year giving people free shipping supplies for Priority Mail...?
I pulled up their financial reports for 2013, that information is probably buried within other numbers.
I'm willing to bet they could be saving a ton of money by CHARGING small amounts for these materials... But what do I know...?
-Myke
We need a postal service but we don't need one that is cheap or subsidized in anyway. All bills can be sent and paid for using a computer. Ditto letters.
No one is ever happy to pay more, but starting tomorrow they should only charge what it costs to operate the system. They should deliver 4 days a week and anything else should cost even more. They should charge 100% plus 15% of what things cost. The profit should be used to pay back the tax payers all the money we have pumped into the system.
http://www.hawknest.com/
by 1/6 if I can only receive DVD's on weekdays.
Pretty sad that we have gone from RTFA! to RTFS!
love is just extroverted narcissism
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I'm certain that come August I won't be getting a permanent 1/6th reduction of the junk mail that has to be carted off to the local landfill every week...
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
Well there's still media mail, if you want something to get there eventually, maybe.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Well, said junk mail needs to at least cost enough to pay for the expense of delivering said junk mail. If that's not the case, I don't see how it "lubricates" the system at all. Were they able to pay for universal service through junk mail alone, then any remaining first-class service would be profit, as would priority, express, copies, ISP, and any other services they expanded into.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Checks get cut on Thursday, no matter what day I submit the billing.
Kid-proof tablet..
I'm in a situation where I don't have local mail delivery, and I have certain hours I can pick up my mail. My work hours and drive time for work make it so i can ONLY get my mail on saturdays, by going to the post office. I need to make sure this won't effect me greatly, otherwise I am going to be in a TON of trouble when it comes to my bills.
The Postal Service has been losing billions of dollars each year
It is not loosing money, it is just that the user does not pay the full price of the service. The remaining part is subsided through taxes because a cheap postal service was decided to be in the general interest
Wow! If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.
Simple - that is the only way to have people in cities subsidize people who live in the middle of nowhere.
It isn't exactly a bad concept - at least for its day (which I believe has passed). Having half the country be unable to so much as read a newspaper isn't all that good for democracy in the 1800s.
These days I think these goals could be accomplished far more effectively by just having government-issued email addresses for official correspondence. There shouldn't be any kind of monopoly on communication, but rather there should be a set of mailboxes where:
1. Costs of operation are billed to senders.
2. Recipients are legally accountable for messages sent (like summons/bills/etc).
3. Identity of senders/recipients is assured.
4. Individuals can request to not receive bulk mail. Bulk mail would be licensed as it is with regular mail, and the fees would be sufficient to ensure it would not become burdensome.
If you did all this then there is no reason to keep the post office - lots of money could be saved. For packages just use a commercial courier.
I don't know about everyone else but 99.5% of my junk mail is delivered on Wednesdays. I was lucky a few years ago and convinced the postal carrier I had to use my second mailbox that was about 5 feet away from my normal one and was round for all this mail. Now on Wednesdays I get notices posted on my door from the local code inspector because of all the dang spam overflows the box and he calls it litter all over my property. I know it won't happen but it sure would be nice.
the thing is, when you get something from China, the "postage" or shipping cost that you are paying is just the part from China to a US port. Then the USPS is obligated to deliver it from int'l port to your US doorstep for FREE. No doubt sending mail within China is cheaper than within the US... the price of cellphones is cheaper in China too... but you can't simply compare the ebay shipping cost from China>US to US>US... it isn't a Chinese postman that delivers your Chinese pens and knickknacks to your US door...
ditto on the Netflix issue... no more 2 per week... Blockbuster had "solved" this problem in a similar way by allow you to drop off rentals at BB stores and that counts as a return -- new disc is shipped out the next day. I was able to do 3 per week with BB. It would be great if Netflix allowed a similar system, perhaps by the "trusted" method you suggest. But since Netflix is looking to kill its DVD-by-mail service anyways, I doubt they will lift a finger to solve this new problem...
you don't get it... bulk rate (junk mail) mail SUBSIDIZES regular (e.g. 1st class mail), not vice versa. If you reduce or eliminate junk mail, USPS revenue would plummet and 1st class rates would probably have to jump by 5X just to break even...
$0.55, really? Who here is willing to take my letter and deliver it across town for $0.55. Let's extrapolate that even further. Who here is willing to take my letter and deliver it to Alaska for the same price? I know establishing zone regions for regular first class mail would be a pain but there has to be marry better with the real world. But if we're not willing to do that, then at least double the cost of postage to $1.10 and it will be more realistic average cost. It will also reduce the crap spam I get too, I see this as a win-win no brainer.
These days I think these goals could be accomplished far more effectively by just having government-issued email addresses for official correspondence.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan:
1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
I am officially gone from
There's more package traffic than ever. What has dropped is the sending of junk mail (in letter and catalog form). What has increased is the sending of packages. USPS has now upped its rates on those, and can't even do that right. Amazon just changed our local delivery from USPS to Fedex, and according to the user support person I talked to, they'd had a lot of issues with USPS. Packages go missing on a routine basis, where they don't with UPS and FedEx.
In the meantime, let's go down to our local post office. At any hour of the day, there is one person on duty at the desk. Laughter, music and conversation flow from the back room. Checking my PO box, I refile yet another two misdirected envelopes.
The problem with USPS is that it can't reduce its cost. There are many anti-business factors here, but the two biggest are (a) unions and (b) feelgood government regulation.
Here are mainstream published sources that agree with me and which would be voted -1, Troll here on Slashdot by the feelgood social emotions hive mind:
Free the Post Office!, by Joe Nocera
Postal Service To Default On $5.5 Billion Payment As Congress Heads Into Recess, by Dave Jamieson
Notice how these are both consistent with what I posted.
I realize that unions and affirmative action are sacred cows around here, but from a business standpoint, that's nonsense. Unions raise costs and make it impossible to fire employees who need to go. Affirmative action makes it impossible to fire employees who are from any protected group, which includes homosexuals, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gender minorities (women/trans), and probably many more. Attacking affirmative action does not say "these people are incompetent," which would require all of them to be incompetent, but by the same token it says that neither are they all competent, and we need the ability to drop the incompetent ones.
This society does itself a disfavor by producing myths and illusions that are then viewed as an attack on The People if they are broached. This makes us just as much lock-step conformist as a totalitarian regime, and makes us unable to view the realistic solutions we need to in order to save things like our Postal Service.
It's this same monopoly that got them in trouble. Figuring they were Too Big To Fail, they built their business on an inefficient model that required people literally throwing money in the door. Now that this situation has changed, they're unable to do what any functional business would do, which is lower costs.
The details of the monopoly matter less than that it exists, but it's interesting how it was implemented.
I think this whole thread is a non-adult argument. I raised legitimate business concerns, and then the chattering busybodies out there had a tantrum about it because it offended their sacred cows.
Slashdot is a few leaders, and a lot of nobodies who follow around demanding that we keep their illusions intact so they feel good about themselves. If such people died, society would be much healthier.
The Chinese postal system is inexpensive because your packages are delivered by dissidents, who are then executed with a bullet at the base to the skull, and made into delivery food for clueless Westerners.
Try the pork. It's definitely tender. Just watch for fragments of 7.65mm projectiles.
Which victims are being blamed, and what are they victims of?
You call his post trollish because you disagree with it, not that it's any different from the tone in this thread.
Also, most natural monopolies are made into government-subsidized monopolies, and whether that's done by constitutional interpretation or statute is irrelevant for the end-user (or the business dynamics that make those monopolies fail).
In that sense, we should look at the post office as being no different from any other utility. How are other utilities succeeding while the post office fails?
Kind of like how "top secret" isn't the top level of secrecy.
What competition? Does the USPS have competition? Who else will take my postcard from Barrow, Alaska to Tallahassee, Florida for thirty cents? I don't know any other organization that does that.
American libertarians don't want to live in a G20 country. They prefer places like Afghanistan, Darfur, or Antarctica -- you know, small-government self-reliance types of places. So, if you share their vision for an America that looks like Darfur, then by all means support the libertarian platform. Yay for small government!
You live a blessed life if this is the level of concerns you are privileged to worry about. Lucky you. I myself am also blessed to worry about some extremely petty concerns. This is the enviable life of an American! Yay for us!
I'm not sure what the parameters of your check-cutting are, but maybe you could contract with a check-cutter who cuts checks on the day of the week convenient to you. I'm not a check cutter myself, but my understanding is that printers work every day of the week. Also: electronic transfers; use UPS "urgent mail"; budget to wait two more days; apply other creative ideas to your small problem.
All that said, I wonder why they cut service on Saturday? Why go two days in a row without mail? I say cut Thursday service.
Whoa. Eighteen dollars an hour is not a high way, it's a very low wage. That's the kind of wage that high-school graduates should be making for labor which is unskilled but requires sobriety and attention. If it takes a union to get that low-but-livable wage for people, then by all means let's have unions.
Along with that monopoly is a government mandated delivery to all sort of out of the way places. Like delivering letters to extremely isolated communities.
What does it cost to send a letter via Fedex?
...that there is such a thing as a National Rural Letter Carriers' Association. Wow, there's an association for everything, isn't there?
When a big company looses money, they don't react by cutting their services. They adapt by changing their product and cutting their costs internally. The postal service has a huge amount of work to do internally.
When I first started visiting as anonymous, people seemed to have trouble reading TFA, but at least would read the summary. What's next, are people going to start posting based on keywords in the title, without reading the whole title?
I know for a fact that they still do mail delivery by jet boat on the lower Rogue River in Oregon and on the Snake River in Hells Canyon.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan:
1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
I can't believe that the cost of giving everybody a free (low-end) computer and (low-speed) internet connection is higher than the cost of having somebody walk to their house every day to deliver paper. This could of course be means-tested as well.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
This would have guaranteed delivery. The servers would be government-owned - they could issue a token when accepting mail. You could of course not actually check your mail, just as you can with the mailbox, but that doesn't eliminate your legal responsibility. The reliability of a government-run email system would certainly be higher than that of a paper-based system where short of getting delivery confirmation there is no way to know a message was delivered, and you could have that for free on every message with email.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
There is no reason this couldn't be reasonably secure. It would not be sent unencrypted over the internet. Most likely the servers would not accept mail except via authenticated connections from the original sender, and would not deliver except by authenticated connections to the recipient (which might be via a web client/etc in many cases).
This is meant to be a replacement for paper mail, not a replacement for what is defined in the RFCs as email today. It would most likely not be free (to send) either, perhaps with an exception for official government correspondence (you shouldn't have to pay a fee to respond to a summons - like you do today).
With $140 billion in annual cash flow, it doesn't look like the problem is their prices. It looks like their overhead is too high, starting with many of the Congressionally-imposed costs mentioned in the article.
Other companies do not have many of the legal advantages the USPS has that were created specifically to allow it to be solvent but inexpensive.
Look to the causes here, not some comparison of apples and oranges.