U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

getting packages in and out of distant & sparsely populated areas is always going to come with greater costs. my opinion is those just have to be borne by the public for social/constitutional reasons. i don't think 'subsidy' is the right way to look at the mail.

exactly how much of the cost - which is going to continue to rise, inevitably w/ transportation costs and the collapse of first-class mail?

another side of this is that 'arguably too cheap' parcel postage to anywhere in the country is basically what's been killing retail

how the fuck should i know!

actually if you want to go after whats been killing local retail it has much more to do with internet exemptions from collecting sales tax than postal rates

As I pointed out upthread postage is more expensive almost everywhere else and rural issues are not just an American issue. Yesterday's presidential debate brought up the ruinous effect of high gas prices on French ppl living in the country.

esp considering that local retail is just as much a beneficiary of inexpensive postal rates wrt incoming product

that's an element too, but that doesn't mean that online retail doesn't benefit from cheap transit to anywhere in the country

xp

goole's point is well-taken. If we just nixed the F-35, the USPS could be easily saved.

its a pretty minor aspect tho, the cost for larger packages (like over a few pounds) shift pretty quickly to UPS vs USPS, which means that the shipping aspect is pretty negligible.

aspect aspect everywhere

esp considering that local retail is just as much a beneficiary of inexpensive postal rates wrt incoming product

nah there's no way you can say 'just as much a beneficiary' - when transit costs are high, it gives a comparative advantages to people who are buying in bulk ie (most of) retail

I mean to have market apologists look askance at mixed economy public sector institutions/public goods like the USPS but not look askance at the train-wreck which is the development of a fighter plane desperately wanted by the military/industrial complex, an example of wrong-headed 'socialism' if ever there was one, is to miss sight of a very important economic and philosophical debate for a shallow political one.

'a comparative advantages' = 'a comparative advantage'

nah there's no way you can say 'just as much a beneficiary' - when transit costs are high, it gives a comparative advantages to people who are buying in bulk ie (most of) retail

but the retail opposition here is between smaller businesses and amazon etc right? so unless you are saying that amazon et al are being crippled by cheap postage i dont get how you can argue that at all

heres a real world example - lets say that some dude is buying a thousand dollar guitar which costs $15 to ship. as someone in a place with approx 7% sales tax, would i rather compete with that, or the fact that the guitar is $70 cheaper from him because i have to charge sales tax?

It really is about storage and delivery to a great extent. Amazon is at a great advantage because their stocking and ordering is far more pinpointed and efficient than a local retailer's is and the cost of delivery, even if slightly higher from an online retailer, is still borne by the buyer.

also note - even if you raise the price of shipping to $69, amazon still has a competetive advantage

somehow I missed M White's French presidential debate thread.

chances of multiplying that shipping cost by 5? so not going to happen

again I don't think sales tax is a non-issue, but the fact that some dude can buy a thousand dollar guitar from *anyone in the country* or increasingly from the amazon-borg which can demand steeper discounts than you get and better shipping prices too, is a bigger problem xp

this btw is def a whole different thread topic and i dont want to derail, but retail survival is a fairly weak argument against low postal rates is all im saying

somehow I missed M White's French presidential debate thread.

I had a Sarko vs Royal thread back last time. This time I just posted 'eugh' on this thread:

J'ecoute le debate entre Sego & Sarko

haha I wanted to watch that is it up somewhere

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

good afternoon! What's the scorecard so far?

I won the debate and then everyone agreed I won

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

it hurts it when it comes to competition w/ fedex/ups for package delivery

chances of multiplying that shipping cost by 5? so not going to happen

Apparently online retail is a viable commercial model, regardless of what we think about what it does locally and I think the consumer's will likely trump the local retailer's interest. Taxes are not presently fair to both sides, though. USPS is still going to be useful to both sides.

Hands, please? Who regularly plans their online orders around shipping or only uses faster shipping, i.e. non-USPS?

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

― fka snush (remy bean), Thursday, May 3, 2012 5:26 PM (4 minutes ago)

well your house might get burned down during the great netflix riots of 2012

It's kind of funny that the stuff that made online retail interesting a decade or more ago, books, music, movies are all going to be largely digital downloads or streaming digital whereas the amazons of the world are now shipping out hair conditioner and mustard and clothes and whatnot.

I think this very germane to this thread. Letters will soon be (if not already so) entirely quaint and soon so will bills and notices. What will we still have to ship and by whom?

I am no more going to learn to download than my mom has learned to use a DVD player.

i'll send you a carrier pigeon with a USB strapped to its leg

you don't have to download, you just go to the netflix site and press 'play'

i dunno if anyone has priced it out yet, but i suspect the overwhelming trash to signal ratio in digital delivery might be a larger eco disaster than our current catalogpocalypse.

I just read all the Patrick Melrose novels on my gf's Kindle and I'm awfully torn over whether to get one or not. It's a really good interface and you can buy and obtain a book in seconds but I'd rather kill the planet, tearing down trees and using up gas (and paying USPS salaries) and waiting to receive and read an actual book, tbh, but how long is that going to be a realistic option?

What are you talking about Philip? My dick is huge and I have a Nigerian fortune and I know a skin care technique that has local dermatologists absolutely livid.

I don't even think the catalogpocalypse element of the postal service and the 10 billion pounds of waste is that important in the big picture, but the fact that we're already at a point where half of every mailtruck is trash does sorta highlight the need for serious reform

or bigger mail trucks

Maybe the USPS could just get into the waste collection business

They could swing by with a truck full of junk mail and you'd have to pay them not to deliver it.

it already is in the waste collection business, it's just a middleman

Admit it, it's super efficient plus I kind of like the idea of putting the mob in charge of a major national government institution, or at least a different mob from the lot we've got now.

http://1010.co.uk/images/WASTE.gif

i'm not sure, but i think the environmental costs of kindles still worse than paper/fuel, at least for now. there's the electronics, etc...

I see that the gif is called waste but in what context? Is there some variant of cuneiform with curves?

xpost

Kindle's environemtnal impact depends...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49 xxp

Lot 49 is largely a meditation on the failure of communication, both in the present, and between generations. As in V, it is impossible to know what really happened in history, or even to distinguish fact from forgery in historical texts. The central mystery in Lot 49 is the symbol of the muted horn, which appears linked to an underground mail system (known as W.A.S.T.E.), and is also associated with a mysterious historical group known as The Trystero. The muted horn (the stoppage of communication) appears on the postage stamp of the W.A.S.T.E. system, but also on old postage stamps—perhaps forged. Oedipa also discovers that the unmuted horn appeared on the stamps of the old Thurn and Taxis courier service, the official mail service of the Holy Roman Empire, until its demise. Lot 49 plays around with the indistinguishable mix of fact and fiction.