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Amazon Looking To Abandon UPS, FedEx In Favor of Its Own Delivery Service (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A report by The Wall Street Journal claims that Amazon is building its own shipping service to replace FedEx and UPS, giving it more control over its packages and possibly allowing it to ship packages from other retailers. Amazon has said its own delivery services would be meant to increase its capacity during busier times of the year, like the upcoming holiday season. However, "current and former Amazon managers and business partners" claim that the company's plans are bigger than that. The initiative dubbed "Consume the City" will eventually let Amazon "haul and deliver" its own packages and those of other retailers and consumers. That delivery network would also directly compete with the likes of UPS and FedEx. It makes sense that Amazon would want to sell, ship, and deliver orders on its own. The report estimates that the company spent $11.5 billion on shipping just last year, amounting to 10.8 percent of sales. The shipping process is currently a bit convoluted: packages from Amazon warehouses get sent to one of two shipping routes, either FedEx or UPS, or to a sorting facility that lumps all packages with similar zip codes together. FedEx and UPS handle its shipments and deliver them to customers, while the packages at the sorting facilities either get delivered via USPS or by Amazon employees themselves. If Amazon were to have control over its shipments over longer distances, it's estimated that the company could save about $3 per package -- about $1.1 billion annually.
These shitty courier companies that don't give a shit about the receiver as long as they keep their big contracts finally have to get off their ass and stop being shitty.
Uber took away the taxi driver jobs, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a taxi driver. ...
Amazon took away independent courier jobs, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a courier.
You know how this ends
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, maybe. You don't save $ by having "control over your shipments", you'd save by making your shipping system more efficient than alternative shippers. FedEx & UPS are pretty darn good at it and have a lot of experience. Trying to break into that game would be costly and maybe foolhardy. Just the fleet management alone could be enough to eat up any "savings". Selling the service to other companies in addition to delivering your own stuff might work albeit not immediately profitable.
It might work out but I think you'd have to throw a lot of money at it to prime the pump.
Seriously, loosing the USPS won't be a good thing in the long run.
It's easy to overlook all the good things the USPS does for this country and it's economic system because we have all grown up with the mail arriving 6 days a week, rain or shine, for nearly nothing. First class postage is still under $1 for a letter picked up and delivered door to door, usually in a few days. It's a huge bargain if you ask me. Priority Mail goes for $4 and gets there in less than 3 days. This kind of service keeps this economy going. I understand that the USPS isn't as necessary as it once was, and that's part of it's financial problems, but I believe it's still a necessary function.
What's UPS going to charge you for a letter? $10? $5? And then they just drop the letter off at the local post office for delivery to your door usually. Same with FedEx. DHL (back from bankruptcy I suppose) doesn't deliver to residential customers and I haven't seen their prices. USPS delivery is a bargain and throwing out all that will only hurt us all.
Perhaps we could scale back delivery days and save labor costs. Say three days a week to the door and only weekday delivery to P.O. boxes? That would drop about half their labor costs, keep service levels high for those who need it, and perhaps allow the USPS to get back to even instead of loosing money all the time.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's already sort of a thing in larger metros. I get a good portion of my Amazon crap delivered by Amazon in Culver City.
Hard to understand how we have not applied historical norms of Monopoly to Amazon
Because there are thousands of mail-order/online-shopping businesses in the country? Amazon isn't anything like a monopoly.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Remember that the only reason the USPS loses money on paper is due to having to pre-fund pensions for employees literally not born yet within 10 years.
Their unprofitability is 100% manufactured by Congress.
That's not _quite_ what the obligation is.
The obligation is that the USPS must set aside _all_ the money that it anticipates to have to pay for healthcare and pensions for _each_ of its current employees (and -obviously- every new employee that it hires) from now until that employee retires, as soon as they hire the employee. They must also set aside all money required to meet their healthcare and pension obligations for all of their retired employees.
To make that a little clearer:
If the USPS hires an 18-year old employee, they must:
* Set aside at _least_ 39 years worth of expected healthcare payments
* Set aside ~21 years of pension payments
I'm unaware of any other organization that is required by law to run in this manner. I'm also unaware of any other organization that _actually_ operates in this manner.
What these requirements _do_ do is let politicians "truthfully" say that the USPS hasn't made a profit in quite some time and _imply_ that the USPS is "just another example of government waste and mismanagement". :(
Disclaimer: I have worked for pretty much all the major package services and a few minor regional ones. /* They cannot die soon enough. 95% of my mail is paper spam that goes straight into the trash. The rest is either packages (that could go by UPS instead) or bills from Luddite companies that are too dumb to figure out how to save money by sending e-bills. */
Most of my mail is "bulk mail", but I assure you that while *you* don't see a use for it, I can assure you that there's plenty of people who continue to clip those coupons and use those flyers to inform their purchasing decisions. Otherwise, they (the bulk mailers) would cease paying for those flyers. If you don't like catalogs, you can usually find a way to unsubscribe from them. I have a few printed magazine subscriptions (shock! horror!) that also have digital editions I get as part of the bargain; I vastly prefer the printed page. I also like to have paper bills for some things. It's hard to hack a paper bank statement or get tricked into opening a malware-laden letter. Email, on the other hand... /* I haven't sent or received a personal letter in over a decade. Why would anyone prefer that over email? */
Good for you, you want a fucking cookie? I write a few a year. Why? Because actually *writing something down* and sending it to someone is so much more meaningful than shooting off a generic email or worse, a text. I sent my girlfriend a letter even though I see her, face-to-face, so she can read my words, in my hand-writing. I also correspond with some folks overseas; it's easier to include actual instax pictures and drawings, etc vs email with attachments. So you might not find this useful; I do. Maybe you need to make some friends. /* How about zero days a week? That would save even more. */
You are aware the USPS is not funded by tax dollars, right? And if it weren't for the asinine requirements created by the GOP in an attempt to submarine the USPS (which, btw, is mandated by the fucking Constitution), the USPS wouldn't be having the issues it's currently having? And how much does it cost to send a parcel via UPS vs the USPS? Let's see: The USPS delivers something like 500 million pieces of mail per day, to EVERY. SINGLE. DELIVERY. POINT. IN. THE. US. No matter how rural you are, the USPS doesn't say "nah, that route isn't profitable, fuck those people." UPS and FedEx? They can discriminate and, like other services, can take the low-lying fruit, i.e. the most profitable routes and tell everyone else to fuck off. but I digress. Think about that: 509 million pieces of mail, 6 days a week. UPS, on its busiest peak day (the lead up to Christmas) doesn't even hit 30 million packages. FedEx Express does less than 3 million (peak is less than 4 million before christmas), and FedEx Ground averages between 4 and 5 million a day. Let's dump 500 million pieces of mail on their systems and see how well they can do. I'll tell you flat out: not very well. Peak was already a nightmare for the few weeks between thanksgiving and christmas.
Let's see this list of countires with no government run postal service, please.
TL;DR: Shut the fuck up, Bill. You're a fucking idiot.
They cannot die soon enough. 95% of my mail is paper spam that goes straight into the trash. The rest is either packages (that could go by UPS instead) or bills from Luddite companies that are too dumb to figure out how to save money by sending e-bills.
USPS is faster and cheaper for 90% of the stuff I ship or receive, I've got no complaints. As for the junk mail, blame the credit card companies.
I haven't sent or received a personal letter in over a decade. Why would anyone prefer that over email?
No cards? No official mail? Not much of a life eh?
Plenty of countries no longer have a government run postal service. They are doing just fine.
Our postal service isn't really government run (well, depending on your definitions I guess). It's a self-financing entity that has a bit of government protection while the employees are considered civil servants. As long as it's self-financing, there's really no reason not to have it around.
There's no law against monopolies.
There are laws that prohibit becoming a monopoly by merging with your competition. That's why mergers have to be approved by the government (many governments in the case of multinational corporations). Often mergers require spinning off divisions or other conditions to maintain some level of competition. Some have complained that regulators have been too lax or have applied the wrong standards in approving deals that lessened competition, but the point is that we do have laws. Amazon in acquired a lot of smaller companies, but most of their dominance has been grown internally.
There are laws that prohibit companies from abusing their dominance to force out competitors or to use their monopoly in one market to force a monopoly in another. These are the rules that led to the AT&T breakup and almost lead to a Microsoft breakup. In retrospect, many people thing the AT&T breakup was the best thing that could have happened to the company, and I would assert that Microsoft would have been a much better off if it had broken up into several separate companies. These are the rules that Google is often accused of breaking, using their dominance in search to gain dominance in other areas. All large companies have to watch out for these rules.
But if a company becomes a monopoly without buying out their competition and doesn't use their position in such a way to block potential competitors, then they are doing nothing illegal.
In short, there are no laws against monopolies in general, only against abusive monopolies.
The USPS is only losing money now because legislators want it to die, so they can wipe out one of the great socialized success stories. There was a time, for a LONG time, where the USPS was profitable and self-sustaining -- at least while I was working there a little over 10 years ago.
First class postage is still under $1 for a letter picked up and delivered door to door, usually in a few days. It's a huge bargain if you ask me.
Of course it is. And it's a huge bargain because the USPS is operating at enormous losses, losing ~$8B per year.
It is worth mentioning that ~$5.5B of that is congressional mandated debt in the form of pension pre-payments for a pension fund that is already 100% funded. The other thing to note is USPS has very little control over their own pricing. They need congressional approval to set pricing and get mandates from congress but no actual funding from congress.
They do get some perks like tax exceptions on property like other government agencies, but I'm not sure if that out weighs the limits of being overseen by a congressional committee.
I get more and more of my Amazon stuff via USPS, and it's a good deal, it seems. for all concerned. The USPS has to drive the route anyway, so why not carry something? On our rural route, UPS, FedEx etc can't make money, UPS in particular has a bad attitude as mentioned elsewhere and a high rate of damage to the product. I'm not sure how Amazon actually gets things to the local USPS so fast - clearly they didn't just mail it, as regular mail is never "two day" around here, but I'm getting the stuff on time. Fedex has been super good from McMaster-Carr, sometimes under 20 hours from mouse click to delivery - in good shape and with good attitude - on *ground* shipping. I also have no clue how they manage that, other than that McMaster has warehouses all over. And they are good the few times Amazon uses them. But really, in my case nothing beats the USPS these days (wasn't always so, they don't like big stuff) "out here". My mail persons are all nice as can be, know where to leave stuff if I'm not home (will even lock it in one of my cars if it seems valuable), don't get fiddly about details and make me go somewhere (at my further cost) to get what I already paid to have delivered to me. One of my mail people is a retired physicist doing it "for fun" and often drops in just to chat about my physics work. It's another world from what most city folk experience. We'd really hate to lose them "out here". No way Amazon is making money off me. A small order every few days on prime - if you figure the UPS rates *I'd* pay, prime pays for itself in a month or two. Maybe that's what's driving them.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
In the boonies, where many of us heat with woodstoves, snail mail spam is called "free fuel". Some of us even write letters (though I tend to print mine as my handwriting isn't great, or maybe even include a gasp - paper check - for record keeping that doesn't have bit-rot and isn't subject to hacking quite the same as e-transfers are. Selection bias much?
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
USPS is by far the best to ship stuff, faster, cheaper, they'll pick stuff up and hand you your mail if you're home at the time since they walked to your front door for the pickup (at least here they goto that effort). Or print your shipping, and go drop it off at one of a bazillion post offices.
The USPS is not losing money as a result of its own operational costs vs income.
All the money the USPS is "losing" is being paid into a fund to pay retiree benefits for employees 75 years into the future - YES, that would include costs for employees that have not even been BORN YET.
http://www.deliveringforameric...
And note that by law, the USPS can NEVER make a profit. "Breaking even" is the absolute BEST it is ever allowed to do.
sweet, could you show me how that lets me send the original signed documents through that? what about my package deliveries? how about my financial records where I need physical copies for tax audit purposes? I am glad you don't do anything of value in life that requires documents, the rest of us do!
Yes it is.
"the Postal Service would have lost $10.8 billion without the prefunding requirement."
- http://townhall.com/columnists...
And the USPS get lots of benefits:
"pays nothing in property tax, nothing in licensing or sales taxes for its vehicles and no state or federal taxes, even on its competitive products. It does pay federal tax on income from those products, but it pays those taxes to itself."
- http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
Completely false.:
"the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees."
- http://www.cnbc.com/id/4501843...
You're welcome.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't understand people that complain about the USPS - it's one of the most impressive logistics operations the world has ever seen.
Can you come up with a better way to get a letter from South Florida to Anchorage, Alaska in a few days for less than $0.50? Neither can anyone else.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Feel free to use "electronic mail" to send me new sway bar end links for my girlfriend's car.
You knew that was ridiculous when you hit 'submit'.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Theoretically, these new entrants could include someone who is not born yet. While they have to account for these future liabilities on their financial statements they do not have to fund them if they are not related to their current or former workforce."
This seems to neatly sum up the differing viewpoints on the matter. From what I gather they don't have to start diverting real cash 75 years ahead (your talking point), but when they report the state of their finances they have to assume the liability 75 years ahead. People not born yet are, by law, affecting USPS financial reports.