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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."
They left out the part where the Postmaster General had SEAL Team Six round up the executive team, waterboard them and remand them to the guantanamo detention center where they could learn the error of their ways.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Do you like golf, Mr. Kramer?
Frankly, the idea of a company opening my private mail for me, reading it, scanning it in, then making it available to me bugs the crap out of me.
Were these guys trying to get a contract with the NSA? Or did they just want to read my stuff themselves?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Think about it -- for $n/year, USPS would filter out your junk mail for you. People would pay for this.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
WRONG.
USPS does have such a service. It's called click-n-ship.
https://www.usps.com/business/...
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.
Ahem...
http://officeofstrategicinflue...
Rather than continuing to bitch about how your darling child idea didn't work out, maybe you should just come up with something else and move on?
This is getting a bit old...
I'm part of a clinical study. When it started up, one of the techs at the study faxed the details of what was going on to my regular doctor. I offered to hand-carry them, as it wasn't out of my way home, but I was told that he was required to fax them. Why? Because that way he had a record from the fax machine that the documents were sent and received.
Faxes are also used quite a bit with legal documents because it's been ruled by the courts that sending a fax (and having it received) counts for meeting a deadline, as long as the hardcopy is also sent over in a timely manner. There is no such ruling for email, so it's no good for this type of thing.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
You can't print stamps using that service. You need to actually purchase stamps, or have an account from somewhere like Stamps.com or Pitney Bowes.
And stamps.com and Pitney Bowes are simply the Post Office outsourcing the collection of postage in a way that eliminates the inconvenience of having to drop by the post office.
Realistically, you can't just arbitrarily print out a stamp on your Epson printer any more than you can draw one on with crayons. The whole point of stamps or meter marks is to affirm that someone, somewhere has paid applicable postage fees. So Stamps.com provides software that certifies that the fee is (or will be) paid, and in exchange they generate and render an accepted postal meter mark that attest to the fact.
Sorry this really seemed like it had to be inserted in here some place...
e-mail, i like. i don't really like the use of the word mail in e-mail. using the same term that we're using for the postal service. i don't see a lot of overlap between these two systems. one of them occurring in digital fiber optic hyperspace. the other a dazed and confused distant branch of the cub scouts. [ laughter and applause ] bumbling around the street in embarrassing shorts and jackets with meaningless patches and victory medals. driving four miles an hour, 20 feet at a time on the wrong side of a mentally handicapped jeep. [ laughter ] i love how the postal system has this financial emotional meltdown every three to five years that their business model from 1630 isn't working anymore. i can't understand how a a 21st century information system based on licking, walking and a random number of pennies is struggling to compete. what is the reason? [ laughter and applause ] so, they always sent the postmaster general -- he always have to make a big speech about what a tough time that they're having. and he comes out and he's freaked out. he's got rings under the eyes, no shave, pulling all-nighters. we can't do it anymore! we've got to go up a penny on the stamps! there's no way ad ! [ laughter ] we're trying to get some breathing room. the cost and the infrastructure. and we're all like -- hey, dude, do whatever you've got to do. we don't give a damn. what is a stamp anyway? we don't even know what it costs. 43, 48, make it a buck. you're going to get there. you have some money left over, buy yourself some pants and a a real car. [ cheers and applause ] it's like, if i could talk to the post office, if i could say if you really want to be helpful to us, just open the letters. read them and e-mail us what it says! thank you very much!
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
"several years"? I was getting my Social Security survivor's benefits in college (after my father died) direct deposited in the early 1970s. I think they were pioneers of direct deposit, even more than the then-fledgeling payroll companies.
I agree completely. Were the founders of this startup really that naive? I could have told them this was a stupid idea years ago. The USPS has two main revenue streams: 1) junk mail, and 2) small packages (they're a big fan of Ebay; they're also working with Amazon now to do Sunday deliveries in some places). They also are a fan of Netflix, and work with them to ship movies faster (the USPS scans the returned movies before Netflix gets them, so Netflix can send your next queued DVD before they get the old one back).
What ever gave them the idea that the USPS would be in favor of screwing over one of their main customers (the junk mailers)?
If you don't like junk mail, think about it this way: the junk mailers are keeping the USPS afloat, and basically subsidizing cheap First Class delivery for everyone.
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?).
That is an outright lie. The USPS has NEVER failed to meet retirement fund contributions and has never been in the situation you describe. The reality is Congress required the USPS to PREPAY 75 YEARS worth of retirement over 10 years. They are being forced to put retirement funds in for employees that have NOT even been born and under the assumption that they will grow employment at 3% per annum for those years. This requirement also does NOT allow the USPS to reduce hours, post offices, delivery or increase stamp prices. It's a deliberate attempt to fool idiots like you into thinking the most efficient business in the US is a failure so the people will allow congress to sell the USPS to fedex and ups for major kickbacks to the republicans. Without that utterly stupid retirement prefunding requirement the USPS was in the black almost 100 million dollars last year.
After wiping away the flecks of foam sprayed by the article's writer, I had a few thoughts.
* The US Postal Service is a lifeline service provided by our government. Without a reliable source of communication, it would be hard to sustain such a large country.
* Yes, the junk-mailers have been the major profit center of the USPS for a few decades.
* Vast and long-established laws and rulings forbidding tampering with mail (e.g., opening it) protect this basic form of communication. Such legal protections do not (yet) exist for digital communications. Your email is like a postcard.
* Tons of other companies provide the same "digital mail" service. I use them when I travel. Emailed pics of all letters, they open and scan any that I request, or just send everything to me in a big envelope every week or so.
The article kind of smelled like an ad.
The problem you're having is that you don't understand how memory works. Your brain isn't a tape-recorder. You remember some of the ideas expressed, and then use those to reconstruct the conversation after the fact. Everything you remember is paraphrased. It's not creative license, nor is it a lie. You simply don't remember the precise details.
The USPS has a complete monopoly on delivering mail to people that it is unprofitable to deliver mail to in the USA. Of course, that's not really the kind of monopoly that most companies covet...
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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.
You guys keep saying this but its not accurate.
The law merely required the USPS to calculate their unfunded liability and then go ahead and start funding it. They calculate that unfunded liability based on a 75 year projection (a non-arbitrary duration given by Office of Personnel Management guidelines.) They do not have to fund the retirements of anyone who isnt employed by them yet. If it was based on a 200 year projection their unfunded liability wouldnt change because it continues to be based on the existing promises to existing people, not speculation about future promises to future people.
They were doing pay-as-you-go to cover their unfunded liabilities, which usually works fine so long as their revenue never experiences long term declines. However, demand for postal services has been declining worldwide. Its down 25% globally over the past 7 years alone.
Other government entities that used pay-as-you-go included Detroit, San Bernardino, Stockton, and Central Falls. What you are witnessing is just the tip of the iceberg and its not like you werent warned. Unfunded liabilities in this country will continue to be front page news, and no amount of dishonest hand waving by you makes those liabilities go away.
"His name was James Damore."