U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

hahaha what a moron

sullying the wozniak name

I would support privatization, albeit with some regulation to ensure rural areas get decent and affordable postal service even though its not profitable, and ending the USPS monopoly on mailbox use (or at least allowing/encouraging a second mailbox of the type once common for newspaper delivery if necessary to avoid confusion). The growth and success of the private shipping business (which was nonexistent when the USPS was established) has rendered the once-essential government-provided postal service largely redundant. UPS does a far better job IME than USPS for reliability and decent shipment tracking.

privatization, albeit with some regulation to ensure rural areas get decent and affordable postal service even though its not profitable

This is basically what the USPS in its present form is supposed to be.

'decent and affordable' can mean a lot of things

basically i meant it not costing more for postage to or from rural areas than urban ones, at least for envelopes, by urban customers essentially subsidizing rural customers so every pays the same price. This could be made law for private mail delivery too.

well then yeah that's basically the way things are now

The growth and success of the private shipping business (which was nonexistent when the USPS was established) has rendered the once-essential government-provided postal service largely redundant. UPS does a far better job IME than USPS for reliability and decent shipment tracking.

Then ALL of my mail could not be delivered to me when I'm at work. Looking forward to finding the UPS slip on the floor next to my door letting me know I can take the train to their nearest office to pick up that wedding invite my friend payed more to have delivered to somewhere within a couple miles of my apartment.

It's not just rural housing, but apartment buildings, and all sorts of other locations that private companies just can't reach.

I live in the city. Does my landlord hand out keys to every asshole with a muted horn patch on his jacket? Or to we just put cubbies on the outside of the building and cross our fingers? Maybe my landlord could contract with a mail receptacle service that will work with all the competing private postal services to collect the mail and get it into a secure place that I can access. Efficiency!

that's not some impossible problem that can't be solved but the usps's long-term problems aren't due to the govt being inefficient at delivering mail so its a nonstarter

the usps long term problems could be solved by congress fixing the idiocy of their pension requirement

those are its short-term problems

nope

i mean i guess its other long term problem is idiots thinking that govt agencies that are public goods should somehow be required to turn a profit but hey until we force all the republicans to get gay married and realize that they like it that isnt prob going to happen

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/01/USPS%20Volume.jpg

long-term problems

wouldn't be a problem if the USPS went back to being subsidized by the American taxpayer

until when? for how much?

I dunno, forever? Why not? It's cheaper than tanks.

we just have email now

handwritten letters are cool but i'm pretty sure if god gave adam and eve email we wouldn't be so attached to snail mail

would support USPS being repurposed as our nationalized broadband provider

I said upthread we just need it to be a national bank

bank+broadband also works tho

bank+broadband+capsule hotels

+juice bar

don't see why less mail means usps has a long term problem. it can just ramp down slowly. also stamped, first-class is probably not its key profit center?

like that's def the category of mail that is disappearing most thanks to internet stuff, but is the decline in that particular category key to the ability of the postal service so sustain itself?

first class mail totally was its profit center, now it's shifting to junk mail

the usps is profitable were it not for the pension funding requirement which was basically designed to kill the usps

it still has the best package delivery system around, given the ubiquity of online commerce I say we should save the usps

the problem with a slow ramp down is that your mail carrier bringing you one letter a day isn't half as cheap as your mail carrier bringing you two. it was benefitting from huge economies of scale and a monopoly on a certain service and it's losing both.

what seems most likely is delivery service keeps gets chopped down one day at a time. this limits its ability to compete for parcel delivery, which is where the business is gonna be. ie saving the post office (saving it...from operating as a competitive business) just means killing it slowly.

xp

...or getting rid of the pension requirement and restoring those appropriated funds to the post office

again it's only making money because it's an advertising company now

http://business.time.com/2012/03/22/why-the-post-office-loves-junk-mail/

or a 'jobs mail' company I guess

who cares

i don't really care that it sends me junk mail as long as it also sends me packages and provides me with a way to send packages for cheaper than UPS and also lets me pick up packages at the many convenient post offices located near the places I live

who cares that the government is currently running a program to send 100 billion pieces of junk mail out?

i don't really see what the concern is

The USPS is created as a government agency under Title 39, Section 101.1 of the United States Code which states, in part:

(a) The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.

Under paragraph (d) of Title 39, Section 101.1, "Postal rates shall be established to apportion the costs of all postal operations to all users of the mail on a fair and equitable basis."

i mean thats pretty clear

and again any benefit compared to ups/fedex is gonna be going away as this advertising company ends up operating on 4 and 3 day schedules

that's not some impossible problem that can't be solved

get rid of the pension funding requirement and it can remain an advertising company that delivers 5-6 days a week

ya for example we could turn it into a bank, but that's not gonna happen

i don't see what the connection is

that was an xp

currently the taxpayer input into the postal service is about $100 million, which pays for free mailing service for the blind and mail in ballots. good luck getting fedex or ups to take that on for that kind of money.

there are alternatives such as blind people using computers and also voters using computers

yes of course it would cost way less than $100 million dollars a year to ensure that everyone who is blind and every overseas absentee voter has full access to a computerized system that can do everything the postal service does, great point

well as the 3-day-a-week-advertising company post office continues to collapse into irrelevance the costs of replacing its remaining capabilities will certainly go down

lol u r so dumb

yes one could get rid of the free mail for the blind and mail-in ballot services (not that i advocate it but whatever) and at that point it would have a fractional impact on the revenue of the postal service and wouldn't matter about the viability of it one way or the other.

post office is fine. it ships packages good. i like my mail. its year-over-year volume + revenues are actually increasing in "competitive sectors" (i.e. its services that go head-to-head vs. ups etc are gaining). its structurally the "market dominant sectors" that are in a decline. but the extent of the decline remains to be seen. things that go up don't keep going up. things going down don't necessarily go down forever. sometimes they just... adjust.

but fuckit we should all pay landlords half our income and pay the rest to private enterprise because the goverment is just the... worst, man.