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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If they only made those catalogs soft, absorbent and with dye that doesn't run then at least it would be possible to save money on toilet paper.
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.
Or people waiting for the next Netflix DVD...
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.
No more getting two Netflix shipments a week by sending the movie back the day after you receive it.
It does if the cost of the unusual (sending to Nome) is lowered because the cost of sending the usual (sending locally) is slightly increased.
And yet they don't. Both UPS and FedEx use USPS for local delivery often because they're better at it. UPS and FedEx are a coin toss if they can find my house (2 miles from nearest town, 1 mile from highway, not exactly a mountain man), USPS gets it right every time. Unless it needs to be sent next day or so, USPS is far more reliable and cost effective.
UPS and FedEx also don't deliver everywhere USPS does.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
My father remembers that in the outhouse back on the farm, the black-and-white pages in the Sears Roebuck catalog always went first!
There's really not much they can do about it. The main reason the USPS is down $16 billion is because Congress is intentionally trying to bankrupt them.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Do what they do in Canada. Place your "Post-Office" inside a pharmacy, and staff it as long as the pharmacy is open (usually pretty late). The staff of the post office is actually the staff of the pharmacy, who can do things like stock shelves during the times when nobody needs the post office services. The post office pays the pharmacy to run the service, but still saves a bunch of money, because they don't have to rent their own space, and pay employees full time when most of the time there's nothing for them to do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, some of us actually read the whole summary, and thus see that Saturday package deliveries aren't being cut out. So it's not going to affect getting packages at all.
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
Cost to send a letter via UPS: $30
Cost to send a letter via USPS: $0.46
One of them's certainly more efficient, but it isn't UPS.
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
https://www.catalogchoice.org/ - I've been using the free part of the service for a while now and I get vastly less junk mail than I used to. Not having the extra volume to deal with is worth the time it takes to use the website.
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?
I did http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and it stopped the majority of the most annoying junk mail. The kind that might let someone start a credit card in my name if they intercept it....
More options are here: http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email
I have yet to try dmachoice, has anyone tried it?
That's probably because you were being kind of a dick. If you don't want the mail, then you opt out. Most of them have opt outs online, for credit card offers, I've found that using the return mail envelops to send them my junk mail works brilliantly in getting me off their lists. Do that a few times and they get the picture that you didn't want to be contacted. I don't generally do that unless they've really offended me, like that outfit that was too lazy to even verify that my name was spelled correctly on the envelop.
But, most of the time, something like https://www.catalogchoice.org/ will get you off the lists. They don't want to waste money sending to people who are less likely to buy their whatever as a result of getting the publication than if they sent nothing.
Right. I like to spend random hours opting out of things I never heard of in the first place. Sounds like a great plan to give my email / phone to people that I neither like nor trust.
Any more clever thoughts?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
You can send a lot of stuff electronically if you have electronics. And an Internet connection.
The Post Office is not "in business" any more than the US Navy is "in business". It's a Constitutionally authorized function of the Government.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Plenty of them. And they all have the same 50 movies.
Actually, the people who have tried anyway had a rate half that of the USPS. Of course the government shut them down, because monopolies are efficient and virtuous.
Actually in that article the "American Letter Mail Company" did exactly what UPS, FedEx or any other private company would do if allowed to compete - pick large cities and only serve that market. USPS has the mandate of serving any address in the country for the same cost, regardless of whether it is the middle of Alaska or downtown Manhattan.
It is easy to undercut USPS if you only serve New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.