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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."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/03/the-cost-difference-in-mailing-netflx-vs-gamefly-all-of-gameflys-profits/
The reason GameFly pays more is because their mailers weigh more. Netflix keeps the mailer at 1 ounce and pays 44 cents each. GameFly's mailer is 2 ounces and they pay the two ounce price. The big giant clue in the linked article is that the USPS is considering changing the price of the 2 ounce mailer to the price of a 1 ounce mailer.
So the real story is that GameFly wants a discount with zero actual justification.
The packaging for GameFly costs more. Work it into your business model or reduce the packaging weight.
I don't do business with GameFly but if I did, I'd cancel. They actually have the nerve to pretend Netflix is getting some kind of special treatment while they are the ones seeking it.
There is nothing unfair about what the USPS is doing. The rest of us have to pay by the ounce for our mail.
Work Safe Porn
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.
Because then I couldn't send it back just by sticking it in my mailbox at the curb.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
> Every business should be required to actually fund their pension plans
I'll do you one better: employer pension plans should be outlawed. You want a pension plan? It has to be managed by a outside entity, and the employer is never allowed to touch the money once it goes in.
Yes, it makes sense to pay up your pension fund in advance...not 75 years in advance though! By paying into your pension fund 75 years in advance, you are funding the pensions of employees who haven't even been born yet. I can see requiring that the next 25 years worth of pensions are funded in advance but 75 years is insanity and for most businesses would be completely untenable.
Both offer "last mile" USPS delivery to ANY address in the US for reduced costs. FedEx calls is "SmartPost" and UPS calls it "SurePost". Your package is still shipped via the parcel company's network, but instead of being delivered directly to your door, it gets dropped off at the local USPS distribution center where they take care of the rest of the delivery. The trade off is that it usually takes longer for your package to arrive. The only perk is that you get Saturday delivery (for now).
Okay, here's the deal. You have until your 30th birthday to fully fund a retirement account that must last until you turn 95. If you can't, you must declare bankruptcy and lose everything. Sound fair?
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).
That's pretty difficult, actually, at least if you dropped the dvd's at the post office. The back room of a post office is pretty well secured to protect such things, with cameras everywhere. I've worked at a small/medium sized post office and have toured a processing plant, and there is quite a bit of interesting things going on to prevent stealing of mail. I especially liked the closed in catwalks with one way mirrors for the postal inspectors that go all the way around the processing plant. Even at my post office, there was a separate entrance with its own key going to a secured room for a postal inspector to enter only. The joke of the whole thing is though that outside of the post office/processing plants, there's pretty much no security. Most of the rural carriers drive their own vehicles, and there's no inspections to make sure you cleared out all the mail in your car. And for the postal trucks, there's no cameras or gps to track where you're going, but they at least check the truck to make sure everything is out. So, how difficult is it to take mail while on route? Sadly, incredibly easy. And many carriers have went to prison for it because of doing even more incredibly stupid things, like stealing tracked packages. Now, here is a possible reason why those dvds got there at different times. I was told that I needed to separate all netflix dvd's I picked up from the regular outgoing mail. The clerks then did something different with them compared to the regular outgoing mail, but I'm not sure what. I would happen to guess that they are sent through different channels. So, maybe some of your dvd's were separated, but not all. So some got there faster than others.
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.