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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.
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
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". :(
I have no complaints with FedEx, but UPS has always been a shitty vendor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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