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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"
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?).
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.