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How the USPS Killed Digital Mail
An anonymous reader writes "In 2013, a startup called Outbox drew a lot of attention for its ambitious goal: digitizing everybody's snail mail. It was a nice dream; no more walking down your driveway six days a week to clear out the useless junk it contained. But less than a year later, Outbox shut down. This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. 'We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said Outbox's business model 'will never work anyway. Digital is a fad.' The USPS wouldn't work with Outbox to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business."
Do you like golf, Mr. Kramer?
The postmaster General is right, those 400 junk mailers are paying for the entire system. That letter you send once a year for $.50 doesn't even come close to paying the billions those junk mailers pay that provides the money the USPS needs to have 100K employees and a fleet of vehicles and planes that would dwarf some governments.
Contrary to what some small government people claim, the USPS is the envy of the world. The overhead is near non-existent and the delivery network is world class in efficiency. Private companies can't come near the efficiency of the post office. The reason we have a system so efficient is that the natural monopoly was recognized and non-profit corporation beholden to government was created. It's a good thing that the post office recognizes that the customers paying the bills are the junk mailers. It's also a good thing that the USPS is overseen by government regulators (except of course congresses attempt to kill the USPS by mandating that they contribute 75 years worth of retirement in 10 years). That government regulations guarantees that it's a crime for anyone to open my mail, and that the courts have precedence putting searching the mail as equivalent to breaking into your house and reading your diary. This "service" would be a field day for the NSA because the digital records would not have the same protection that he physical envelope does.
If private run companies like UPS were doing first class mail the delivery charge for a first class letter would be several dollars.
You don't need something like this anyway.
1) get your bills electronically, and/or set them up for automatic payments
2) use dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com to stop virtually all junk mail (former for 'regular' junk mail, latter for the credit card offers). Yes, they're run by the junk mail companies, but they work, and no, I don't work for them.
The USPS has not received a dime in Tax dollars while I've been alive and that's a long fucking time. That $5 billion dollar loss you heard about last year and trumpeted by the small government pinheads was in fact a fake loss created by congress that had no material affect on their operations. It was a failure to deposit $5 billion into a retirement fund for USPS employees that haven't been born yet.
Get your facts straight.
http://postalnews.com/postalne...
If nothing else, TFA doesn't sound like a particularly unbiased source.
No it's not. The problem with USPS is that they have to pre-pay pensions 70 years out. No other Government agency or private company needs to do this, that's purely USPS regulation thanks to Congress. That is their main hurdle, not the unions or employees "getting paid too much" (seriously, do you even know any postal workers?).