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E-Commerce's Biggest Obstacle May Be Slow Postal Services (thestreet.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader rudy_wayne writes:
J.C. Penney CEO Marvin Ellison recently said that e-commerce companies' biggest challenge is that they are all expanding their businesses and pushing for faster delivery, but UPS, Fedex and especially the United States Postal Service aren't able to keep up, at least not at same cost that exists today, because they're not increasing their delivery capacity at the same rate e-commerce is growing, He said this will cause a supply and demand issue "that's going to be apparent here pretty soon."
If you would comment on the article instead of spewing non-related political flame-bait, perhaps you wouldn't be downmodded. Also, the "moderators" on this site aren't some demi-gods, they are users like you and me. The only difference is that they have a good standing in the community and thus are awarded points to moderate the site.
Posting as an AC and not being on topic will ensure that you never get to moderate.
TL;DR: You are not being censored because of your political views. You are being downmodded because you express them in the wrong forum.
All the major private carriers UPS / FEDEX/ DHL operated in the country in question, but they did so only in a few major cities and even in those cities their fees were too high for doing things like simple billing. The USPS could very easily become "profitable" if it moved to geographic area, variable pricing to cut back on service to high cost routes, of course that will put yet another roadblock towards the development of underdeveloped areas of the country and hurt GDP growth
Every day they deliver billions of pieces of junk mail at a loss.
Citation? I can find no evidence backing this claim. Every article I find about USPS financial losses points back to the Congressional pension funding mandate previously mentioned by others -- nothing that is intrinsically related to junk mail. Seriously, if you have a link, please post it because I'd be interested to see it.
Bear in mind that modern junk mail like Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is not individually addressed to the recipients, versus 1st Class Mail which is. There's a huge amount of overhead related to reading those individual addresses, forwarding / routing them, handling exceptions like people that moved / Return To Sender or Wrong Address, etc. None of that overhead is there with EDDM (which literally is bulk mail which gets delivered to every residence on the route -- hence the name), which is a very large percentage of modern junk mail and part of the reason why it's so much cheaper than 1st Class. EDDM junk mail also must be delivered by the sender to the local post offices prior to final delivery on the local routes (though most folks use a 3rd party to do this part for them). But all of these things knock the cost per piece way down versus a 1st Class letter.