U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

yes i don't think it's a business, it's a public service. therefore if it's expensive you do what you can to manage it but ultimately say "huh interesting, here's the check"

they send other stuff, too! not just slips of paper. cheaper than fedex/ups sometimes also!

Do they give away $1 bills in junk mail???

they

'cheaper than fedex/ups' is not actually a good thing if we want to live in a world where the total environmental cost of sending a package across the country gets paid

why on earth would you ask it to 'pay for itself'? does, idk, a district court do that?

per recent foreign affairs article, this gov't is currently spending the GDP of spain to put worthless planes in the air for a few hours a year so the $$ of what's 'worth it' need to be considered in toto

we should start an ilx penpal group, to support the post office and show our support

i remember getting $1 bills as junk mail, once from some local office politician trying to literally buy a vote (the top of the letter read something like "HERE'S A DOLLAR! Now that I've got your attention...") i love this kind of junk mail.

iatee, you should drop the code about "total environmental cost" and just own up to a desire to make rural/semi-rural living less attractive in order to push people out of living that way

UK - Royal Mail

From 60p for mail up to 100g

France - La Poste

1,45 € for 100g

Germany - Deutsche Post

0.90 € for 50 g

'cheaper than fedex/ups' is not actually a good thing
there's no contradiction in raising prices across the board to reflect environmental costs (maybe by taxing fuel?) while still preserving a price advantage. i'm just sayin USPS rocks. I want them to administer health care.

the code about "total environmental cost"

What if it's not code? I can see why the govmt subsidized rural living in the 19th century to secure our new lands and win the frontier from the Indians but why do we have to subsidize it now? I can totally see the benefits of rural electrification and rural delivery on country living but I don't see why everyone shouldn't now be paying their real market costs regardless of what I think of rural living.

voila

like how awesome would it be if your doctor came door to door, did a checkup, then "oh btw, here's an envelope with a dollar in it. no you keep it, it's yours. also here's a coupon for a burger."

From iatee, it's code.

The government subsidizes all kinds of living - rural, suburban, urban. Let's not pretend that the relatively small percentage of rural and semi-rural Americans are getting something no one else does.

uh, you don't have to pretend?

what if we charged people who lived in poorer zip codes more for the cost of police calls into them

If you think we're ever going to get urban and suburban SUV owners to pay $17/gallon for gas just so we can get Mayberry RFD to pay more for first class mail I have some bad news for you.

urban taxpayers pay for "total environmental cost" in ways other than postage ... that's why my highly urbanized state pays more in federal tax dollars than it gets back from Washington.

the subsidy argument only applies if you are willing to say that govt entities should be held to a break even standard which is straight up insane and leads basically to arguments of privitization. i mean unless you want to talk about libraries pulling their own weight then picking and choosing the USPS just because they were dumb enough to actually make some of the money back seems ultraweird to me.

iatee does have a point: even without the bush law, the demand for mail service (outside the bulk-rate business stuff) is declining and likely will continue to decline. this in turn will make the maintenance of non-urban post offices and mail delivery routes increasingly expensive on a per customer basis, with less "service" delivered per dollar spent. some sort of break point will inevitably be reached. figuring out how to manage the transition in the here and now makes more sense than just pretending we can maintain the current delivery model forever.

yeah libraries are institutions where lots of people share resources, the postal service is an institution where millions of pounds of paper gets flown around the country to be thrown away immediately, can you find a difference here

I don't know what's worse, getting mailed a check for 3¢ or getting a nickel stickied to some cardboard flyer.

iatee does have a point: even without the bush law, the demand for mail service (outside the bulk-rate business stuff) is declining and likely will continue to decline. this in turn will make the maintenance of non-urban post offices and mail delivery routes increasingly expensive on a per customer basis, with less "service" delivered per dollar spent. some sort of break point will inevitably be reached. figuring out how to manage the transition in the here and now makes more sense than just pretending we can maintain the current delivery model forever.

― Choc. Clusterman (contenderizer), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:46 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

smart people could have figured this transition out except the other bush law abt non-mail revenue sources kind of fucked that up

doesn't it make more sense to think of the post office as a utility rather than a business

In the coming era of big data, market function may get more and more exact. Inasmuch as that leads to efficiency, I'm for it. In as much as both efficiency and the health and beauty of our environment is concerned, I'm all for it.

anyway i just heard the mailman, gonna go see what came today

iatee how do you feel about rural libraries

You mean like how electric companies are now run by Edison or Entergy?

- alumni magazine
- urban outfitters catalog
- greeting card

there is no such thing as rural libraries because everyone is busy farming

america is nothing but nyc and farmers, farmers everywhere

i've probably filled an entire landfill with alumni magazines and fundraising junkmail which immediately gets shit-canned.

are the declining numbers for mail service including parcels? there's more of a compelling anti-waste/environmental argument to de-privatize UPS/FedEx and return their market back to the USPS if that's the issue.

hey jjj, remember what you posted about "do not feed the iatee"

i know i know

the other bush law abt non-mail revenue sources kind of fucked that up

I don't know exactly how the Royal Mail is doing since it was privatized nor what services it offers, but La Poste famously also provides savings and checking accounts replete w/Carte Bleue, Visa or MC and also 'contingency insurance'.

Alumni mags are at least useful for the momentary pleasure of seeing who from your class you have outlived.

making people pay the "real cost" of their lifestyles makes sense only if we want to entirely deliver rural food production into the hands of a few agribusiness giants. at this point, we do "subsidize" rural living in certain respects, perhaps paying more for on a per-user basis for the maintenance of certain public services in sparsely populated rural areas than we do in more densely-populated urban ones.

if we began to pass this cost along to rural dwellers, we'd very quickly price most of them out of their lifestyles. there just isn't much money out there in the sticks. problem is that we'd in the process annihilate the social support systems on which american agriculture depends. rural roads, post offices and schools would decay and eventually shut down. with them would to rural businesses and communities. all that would be left would be company-sponsored "towns" funded and run according to whims of deep-pockets agribusiness.

this doesn't strike me as an ideal solution, but maybe it's the way things are gonna go eventually, i dunno.

why don't we just skip the middle man and immediately start living our lives like we are characters from Jennifer Government

This is notoriously useful to the poor since the minimum deposit isn't too high.

Actually, I wish the French had a word for entrepreneur since apparently La Poste also hosts websites, runs a mobile phone company (odd), sells retirement accounts, allows you to buy stocks on the Bourse. And also becuase they're a little enamouraché of iatee, they have 'responsible mail', la lettre verte with a carbon footprint 30% lower than normal mail.

america is nothing but nyc and farmers, farmers everywhere

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

farmers and strawmen out standing in their fields

a) the rights that inhere to you as a citizen of the US and b) the sovereignty the US government holds over the country are both irrespective of the physical geography of the continent. each person and each square inch of US space is formally the same. if this makes the mail expensive in some places relative to others, that's a lesser concern.

i know this is not really a thing BUT i don't see how this point holds true. you can't get overnight to the middle of a national park, you get different priority service times depending on where you live. so you're not getting the same service for the same price, which seems to be an arguing point in this conversation.

yeah, "to the best of our ability" has always been built into USPS delivery expectations, and that obviously has to change over time

The American impulse to see any mixed economic model as a fundamental attack on the genius of the free market perplexes me. As Obama pointed out during the health care debate, the existence of the Post Office hasn't unfairly put UPS or FedEx out of business - they can hold their own - it's just providing a service that the market wouldn't otherwise provide.

you can't get overnight to the middle of a national park

Tbf, the Post Office's mail rockets were frightening the bears

well right, geography doesn't disappear, which is why i brought up the fictive/abstract nature of rights among persons and sovereignty over space.

if you break your leg in a national park it takes a little longer for EMS to get there too. there are arguments ongoing about the cost of those services (witness the jokers who do some dumb stunt and the laws allow the county to stick them with the bill if they get hurt) but we're not saying "leave them there"

we're kind of getting into "if a man gets shot in the forest, is it even a murder" territory

Purely hypothetical in my case, of course

good piece about what happened in the netherlands after the postal service was privatized

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office

how hard would mail in the netherlands be? anyplace you can't throw a paper airplane to you can bike to in 25 mins