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Post Office Proposes Special Rate For Mailing DVDs
An anonymous reader writes "The United States Postal Service is seeking to implement a special postage rate for companies such as Netflix, GameFly and Blockbuster (PDF), which send DVDs to their customers and then receive them back. This proposal for special rates for two-way mailers of optical disks follows a protracted legal complaint from GameFly, which argued that Netflix was receiving special handling by the Postal Service while paying a cheaper postage rate."
I have to wonder if this law getting passed couldn't be traced back to Fed Ex and UPS wanting the business that USPS was doing so found a way to stick them with a bill that they could never pay while remaining able to compete.
USPS is also not allowed to raise prices beyond some (official/fudged) price index increase.
It lets them tie a boat anchor to USPS so that USPS ends up in a bind and either has to cut service or raise prices, both of which benefits UPS and Fed Ex.
UPS/FedEx constantly use USPS on "unprofitable" routes, because USPS is also required to keep prices relatively constant. So if the package is going to the middle of nowhere, UPS and FedEx will gladly outsource it to USPS which will deliver it at a loss. USPS cannot actually raise prices, but if they cut services, that may actually harm their competitors.
Because unlike every other business on the planet Dubya passed a law that says the USPS has to have the ENTIRE retirement plan, to the very last penny for every single employee, funded for something like 40 years?
It's worse than that. The law gives the USPS 10 years to come up with 100% of the money needed to fund all of its pension requirements for the next 75 years.
It's designed to destroy the USPS so Republican lawmakers can bemoan how government has once again failed to deliver. Except that they're the ones who have failed us.
It's from a government site. NSA paranoia aside, a Postal Regulatory Commission complaint is not going to contain some ridiculous scripts or other executable bits.
You always have the option of opening it with the built-in PDF reader on Firefox, which would only be able to open the plain document portion of it if there is anything else embedded.
And, as a former rural carrier, I can tell you that arrangement is quite profitable for the post office. The rural carriers have to go their routes anyway, so the extra package load costs quite little. The only costs are some time for the clerks/management to sort the incoming packages in the morning, and the slightly higher evaluations for the routes (which translates to a small bit more money to the carriers).
Digital Versatile Disc is a cost-efficient medium for moving 4 to 8 GB packets of data in and out of geographic areas not served by a wired broadband provider. Cellular ISPs in the United States charge on the order of $10 per GB for microwave data transmission; satellite ISPs aren't much cheaper.