Amazon gets priority while mail gets delayed, say US letter carriers
pressherald.com
pressherald.com
This has little to do with Amazon. Amazon is paying the USPS according to their contract. If the contract from 2013 is unsatisfactory, then it should be renegotiated by USPS. I wouldn't be surprised if it is a 10-year deal, and has hefty fines for late deliveries.
A journalist should be able to request the contract and see why USPS is now overloaded: Is it because USPS is not receiving enough funding from the government, or because the contract with Amazon is really bad for USPS. It sounds like the fact that Amazon is shipping so many parcels is a symptom, not the (systemic) cause of why parcels aren't shipped on time. If the USPS is to blame, then who made this deal and what were their reasons? Was it a national deal? Why is it a problem now? Why wasn't this anticipated? And how can it be avoided in the future?
Aren't contracts of the government with private parties publically accessible? I mean, you, the taxpayer, pay for the contract so you should have access to it, as well be able to check on the government's workings. At least, that's how we do things in europe.
I agree with this, and this attention needs to come in more ways than extra $$. As others said, USPS is stuck in a weird state: need to be self-funded with no authority to set prices. So the gov't needs to either subsidize some things or let USPS compete.
However, to fix USPS some of that attention needs to come in the form of hard kicks and forced reorgs. USPS is a dinosaur with a lot of inertia against improving efficiency and modernization. That causes problems, costs a lot of money and drives customers away. USPS is also notorious for advocating for spam senders (who give USPS a lot of revenue) and against people they are supposed to serve. Those are all problems that external "attention" should resolve.
As an anecdata, I was occasionally involved with field testing campaigns which include significant shipping for next day delivery a couple of thousand miles away (something would break or some new hardware would be needed and will be shipped from home ASAP). This provides a non-insignificant revenue to the shipper. We tried USPS, but it just did not work. With FedEx we get accurate, near real time package tracking, so the minute the package is dumped at our hotel we see it and someone can drive out and pick it up. With USPS, their system was showing delivery at the end of the following day. Maybe something changed in the last few years, but I doubt it.
If they didn't have to prepay pensions (something no other government agency, or private company in the world is required to do, or does), they'd be in great shape.
"The confusion over 75 years may be due to an "accounting" and not an "actuarial or funding" issue. They only have to fund the future liability of their current or former workforce.
That's…not true? https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
The issue for the postal service is that the law was changed so that the USPS would start funding their retirement health care costs since they are promised to the workers and the projected costs had exploded. This was supported by a bipartisan commission, the GAO, and the Postal Service itself:
>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach.
>Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.
https://taxfoundation.org/postal-service-reform-postal-servi...
>...If they didn't have to prepay pensions (something no other government agency, or private company in the world is required to do, or does), they'd be in great shape.
In relation to this, the USPS has posted this as part of a fact sheet:
>...More recently, the USPS Fairness Act was passed by the House. It would eliminate the requirement to prefund retiree health benefits and forgive our current defaulted prefunding payments. However, ultimate passage of the bill will not reduce our underlying retiree health benefits liability, nor improve our cash flow or long-term financial position.
https://about.usps.com/news/delivers-facts/usps-delivers-the...
I haven't seen evidence of this, in fact I think it's just coming back to the lack of funding. USPS is a bit of a dead-end job due to how limited its lifespan is (continued calls to defund it from the right) and in its current state it isn't really attracting talent. If the US cared about its post service it could be revived and greatly improved.
Also, just FYI, you folks have it great. I'm a US expat in Canada and CanadaPost is comparatively terrible - it's slow, expensive, and most package delivery happens through the third party companies (like FedEx, UPS, Purolator, DHL whatnot) which are absolute trash up here - without USPS constantly raising the bar the independent delivery services routinely lie about delivery attempts, refuse to deliver to addresses and re-route packages miles away when they have offices down the street.
Since moving up to Canada I've been pretty wowed by the healthcare, but the mail system up here is terrible. I think there are some intensely dedicated souls in USPS still that have managed to keep everything going on their shoestring budget, but they're eventually going to retire and the defunding will probably be capped with USPS being privatized for "costing the tax payers money".
It's okay though - delivery service in DC will be great. And USPS will be the latest example of "failed socialism" and held up as the Dems mismanaging budgets.
UPS is renting UHauls in my area to replenish delivery trucks in the field. Drivers are working OT as late as 9PM.
USPS isn’t backfilling positions or using OT hours!
Intentional mismanagement due to ideology and greed.
https://fortune.com/2020/07/24/usps-mail-delivery-postmaster...
> The Postal Service is a joke,” said the President in May.
> “Every time we’ve slowed down mail, we’ve lost revenue,” said Dimondstein. The new postmaster general, he said, instituted sweeping policy change after just one month in his position and without consulting any unions or representatives with deep institutional knowledge.
> “These changes are happening because there’s a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.
On the other hand, I hear this used as a fully general explanation for every messed-up public service, including ones in places like the Bay Area, where government-run services are usually run very poorly and Republicans have near-zero influence. And there are so many other reasons why a public service is likely to end up poorly run eventually: bad incentives, otherwise-good incentives that don't incentivize their own preservation, accumulation of increasingly heavyweight bureaucracy and procedures, gradual transfer of power from leaders who know how to do new things to leaders who only know how to do the same things, and so on. Blaming everything on political sabotage doesn't seem like a great fit.
(Maybe in the case of the USPS it really is a case of political sabotage, but this is why I'm skeptical of those claims in general.)
Anecdotal stories should be taken at a grain of salt, but I've heard more complains about package delivery in the last couple weeks from people who didn't know anything about the political rumblings at USPS, and that combined with the recent appointment news makes me doubt that it's just a coincidence.
[1]:https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...
Unions: They're Actually A Good Thing.
They explained it was basically christmas holiday load, without the extra staff, with less staff on a non busy time (people taking covid related time off for sickness and family).
Specifically it's the guy who got $700 million in stimulus loans for a trucking business that was only worth $70 million.
https://www.salon.com/2020/07/01/former-ceo-of-troubled-truc...
As anyone could have easily seen coming, Trump used the stimulus money like a slush fund and this guy was paid to destroy USPS in general and specifically to screw with mail-in ballots during the election.
Not projecting into the future and instead trying to hold the pricing ceteris paribus was either a major oversight or corruption
Yes, you can submit a FOIA request to the USPS requesting the contract.
Understandable reason. Redacting only the "necessary" bits might well render the document unreadable.
I've heard the deal with Amazon is bad, and the new Postmaster General is trying to renegotiate it.
In my experience, no Priority or First Class packages were delayed in favor of Amazon packages, but the flood of Amazon packages did overburden the system causing some delays. From what I understand, USPS is receiving more Amazon, because more people are shopping online (Covid) and because Amazon is (was?) dealing with a labor dispute. A couple weeks back my station got absolutely hammered - received about triple the typical Amazon volume on back-to-back days. The clerks have to sort each package to the appropriate routes, and then the carriers have to deliver all those packages. As they're out delivering, they're picking up packages to bring back to the station, and those are the packages that were subject to delays.
In general, everything goes out every day, and even if one package is left behind, someone has to drive that package to the plant. From a business standpoint, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's part of the service culture at USPS, and clerks and carriers are horrified and mortified to hold up mail, which is why you see complaints like the one from the carrier in the article.
At the same time, USPS was rolling out some new policies, and they're missing a lot of people due to Covid, so a lot of factors converged to make the situation difficult. But, at my station, no mail has been delayed for weeks. I can't speak for the plants, but the vast majority of Amazon packages are delivered to the stations as drop shipments, so if the plants are having issues with volume, it's not because of Amazon.
During Covid, letters and flats had been down in volume (businesses being closed = less advertising) by somewhere between 25% and 40%, but they appear to be back to normal, and parcels had been up something like 60% overall.
I think that's most of the pertinent information. But, I'll say that this is typically the time of year where many USPS employees exhale a bit. The overtime dwindles, and the pace slows. Instead, much of this has felt like Christmas - anyone on the OT list and any non-career employees are working lots of hours to keep up with demand, and sometimes they're even compelling people not on the OT list to work OT. So, it feels like the holiday season never stopped, and we're all pretty exhausted. Of course, we feel lucky to have been able to work through the pandemic, but it's taken its toll, as well.
Possibly, if you shipped a product thru that one individual post office, it might have arrived a day late. Not surprising you haven't noticed the problem, because there isn't one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...
I expect delivery times will go sideways again in Q4.
This is exactly the way a utility works.
Maybe we should make more utilities be prepared like the USPS.
[x] In the west big tech can more or less serve 98% of the population. but there is (approx) 2% of the population who for various reasons are massively uneconomic to serve - mentally, ill, disabled, poor, lacking literacy skills or the wrong language. Hell its probably more than 2%. But the point is Government must serve these people and provide a level playing field. Commercial companies dont have to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
How can it act as both a public service and source of free money? Even if it made a small profit doing so, it would be less than ramping up their most profitable areas and would have an opportunity cost.
(If you mean they should do it purely as a public service, that's a fair point, but you're writing like it's an easy way to improve their financial position, which doesn't make sense.)
Edited to add: Wealthy privileged HN readers would not know this, but poor people who are "unbanked" have to use USPS money orders to pay bills, and the USPS charges a fraction of one percent on money orders. So yes, the USPS is already performing banking functions.
In the past USPS has been evaluated as "thing that should make money" which is silly - if it was profitable to run a reliable service in that space the commercial sector would have forced out the government.
Prime changed from being "We're going to have the package to you in two days" to "We'll get it to you in two days, if we feel like it and it's convenient and inexpensive for us to do so".
Repeatedly, lately, I've bought items based on delivery times only to receive updates a few hours later pushing the delivery times back by days. It's one thing to have an exceptional circumstance during delivery, and quite another to change the committed (was it really?) delivery time within a few hours of the purchase decision.
Yeah, COVID, I get it. But it's not just COVID.
My personal experience is the opposite: times were heavily impacted peak-COVID, but now are returning to the very fast times, and are often same-day (!) or next-day delivery.
The only times I see times being pushed back now is when they ship by UPS via a program where UPS takes it from Amazon and gives it to the USPS for last-mile. These can take 4-5 days.
But if Amazon's delivery drivers are handling it, which is most of the time for me, it's very fast.
This isn't meant to invalidate others' experiences. But I wonder what the difference is. My experience is in an urban area.
I often go out of my way to avoid Amazon for my online purchases now.
In Europe we have this system where public deals above a certain cost are open for everybody. If you meet the requirements best, you win the deal. Problem with this system is that the requirements are rarely written down properly, causing half-baked solutions meeting bare minimums and extra costs to fix them. For example, that is why we Europeans are unable to produce proper governmental IT systems, or buy new trains that won't break down due to cold weather.
Here is an article with more details.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1135699
The point that they are now profit seeking private or not is true.
Tangentially I've heard stories of mail being purposely held back a day, to support that narrative of discontinuing Saturday delivery that was being pushed 5-10 years ago. This agency has been getting politically strangled for quite some time.
1. His last film in 2016 won the Palm d'Or at Cannes if that means anything.
Further, private carriers can search your mail. The USPS can't but FEDEX can...
Why is this even a painpoint ? How much funding does Fedex or UPS get from government to stay operational ?
I find it surprising that USPS remains operational at such massive scale while being a cash sink for American taxpayers. Putting more money in this sinkhole is unlikely to yield better results. If US government makes it legal for other carriers to carry letters (which is illegal at this point) the need for USPS would be much lesser. USPS could then focus more on rural and underserved communities and negotiate contracts with Fedex/UPS etc.
These micromanaging mandates include schedule of delivery, the breadth of service area (which frequently must include the least profitable places to deliver), micromanaging of every price increase, and restrictions that the USPS can't move into other businesses that might encroach on their lobbyist-buddies clients (eg. paycheck cashing, which USPS used to do). I can't make sense of how much the 75-years pension prepay is catching up from insufficient coffers (perhaps justifiable) and how much of it is just punitive to keep the USPS from running efficiently and being able to use more of its debt for capital improvements.
According to WSJ, UPS added delivery surcharges in May due to COVID's impact. The only reason USPS can't do the same to manage the supply/demand curve changes is because Congress is somehow allowed to micromanage USPS price changes.
The government also doesn't set Fedex or UPS's rates, or appoint their chief executives, or pass laws about their pension funding. So it's not a fair comparison.
Maybe it's time to start delivering mail twice a week instead of every day.
The thing is that for priority mail, the truck still has to drive every day. Might as well load it up. Problem I read from the article is that that prio-1 mail is not handled as prio-1, but rather after other, more lucrative, mail.
But to be fair, in my country we had a new mail service competing with the public mail service. The new mail service only provided twice a week, but at a reduced rate. If you didn't care about your package being delivered a week from now, then it was convenient. End result was that the public service no longer could compete with the lower prices and reduced volume, BUT in the meantime was allowed to merge(=take over/take down) with the new mail service, by grace of the government who gave them a get-out-of-antitrust-jail card. Currently the case is at the EU court, which decided the merger has to be reversed, but the damage is already done. Contracts ended, brand damaged.
If you privatise your mail service, don't be surprised if it becomes stupidly expensive to deliver the same quality of service. Competition won't exist because it will be acquired by the main company. And the government will simply pay for that quality of service, as that is what the voters expect.
Everyone I know checks daily, sometimes a couple times a day.
It was suggested many times over the years that the USPS reduce delivery to cut costs, and that didn't seem like a bad idea, but I'd suggest that any changes to the USPS need to come from an aligned perspective and in an orderly fashion, and that's not how the USPS is being treated these days.
Raise prices for shipments? Or make them "free" using covid-19 "free" money
More like if you let your legislature run wild and artificially cripple your own services.
USPS is a service that warrants a bailout, and repealing of these acts. They have been self profitable for a very long time, but cannot sustain their operation in this way.
One facet is reintroducing banking services.
But the claims of unfunded liabilities are far overstated. The worst of them assumes that you have to have the pension fully funded for a new employee on the day they start working which is ridiculous in any business.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
They also have huge retirement —prefunding obligations which is pretty much unprecedented in either private business or government agencies.
All of these public obligations are poorly thought out and largely out of the control of the USPS itself. People bitch about USPS being inefficiently run and that’s true to some extent, but the most fundamental issues they struggle with revolve around factors beyond the control of USPS management.
In other words, they are inefficient.
TL;DR: Deliberate government action to defund them has resulted in them having way less money than you would expect.
1 - Forced to save billions over a short period of time for retirements benefits. 2 - Inability to set their own prices, like a business would.
The extra business from Amazon should have been a massive boon to USPS. But it seems the ridiculously low rate they got into, plus the couple factors above (and I am sure many others - like being required to maintain rural routes at a loss) has put them in a bad situation.
The problem with the mail is the symptom, like a headache. But what is the cause, like a blunt to the head or migraine or a hangover?
First of all, any people outside Germany need to know that "DHL" in Germany refers to the regular parcel post of the former German national post. What other countries outside Germany call "DHL" is actually called "DHL Express" in Germany and they are a separate subsidiary of Deutsche Post World Net. They have their own fleet of delivery cars and also local parcel depots.
Secondly, it's important to note that in Germany, Deutsche Post DHL delivers 95% of all packages within Germany on the next day. This means, that your insinuation that non-Amazon packages are not delivered fast is untrue.
And, thirdly, Amazon pays for their packages being prioritized. Amazon calls this delivery service "Amazon Prime", at DHL, these packages are internally called "PRIO" (it's also on the label) and Amazon actually pays for that. Other types of packages include "VIP" which is used for packages with valuable content.
And since Amazon pays your the prioritization of their packages, every other customer can do that as well with DHL guaranteeing that your package gets delivered on the next day.
However, since 95% of all DHL standard packages in Germany are delivered on the next day anyway, most customers aren't using this particular service. There is simply no gain since a standard parcel ("Paket" as compared to the even cheaper "Päckchen") already comes with tracking and insurance up to 500 Euros.
Please keep in mind that in the US, regular packages take 2-3 days which is why choosing priority shipment in the US makes a huge difference as compared to when ordering from Amazon Germany.
So to recap, DHL has created a specific service that it offered exclusively to Amazon (and now a few other retail giants) which prioritizes their packages. I can't buy that service as a regular Joe or small retailer, so my stuff gets deprioritized as compared to Amazon. In my personal experience I have witnessed that many times when sending or receiving packages, as my stuff from Amazon always arrives on time while my own packages take days or (in rare cases) even weeks to get delivered.
What exactly is misleading about that?
DHL Prio is limited to a a few source distribution centers and larger customers.
Maybe DHL claims to have attempted a delivery for 95% of packages within a day (even that does not match my experience, average is more like 2+ business days) but that doesn't mean that the package was delivered or that a delivery was attempted.
I have had DHL claim to attempt delivery while I was home waiting for the package. No one rang the doorbell that day. No, this hasn't been a single occurence. Yes I have complained. No, this hasn't stopped happening.
I have had DHL send back international packages because they supposedly had made one delivery attempt (with no notification left behind) and then given up.
I have had DHL lose packages for months, only delivering after complaints and with no explanation of what had gone wrong.
Every international package I received had detailed online tracking until the moment it reached Germany where all updates stop until the package is delivered (if it is delivered).
DHL stopped making multiple delivery attempts for most packages and instead of stashing the packages at the Postfiliale around the corner they send all undelivered pacakges for the city to one or two places, causing literally hour long queues of people trying to get their stuff (not to mention the wasted time getting there in the first place).
I have had DHL claim a package was dropped of at a Postfiliale only to have the people there not find any records of the package even days later. And worse, they didn't launch an internal investigation but just directed me to the public DHL service hotline which is good for only one thing and that is wasting your time.
DHL / Deutsche Post is complete garbage and badly needs oversight that actually holds them accountable.
Maybe more.
I know from first hand experience of the DHL Express Service center in my town, they are not happy to be associated with DHL Parcel.
But hey, how can the consumer know? It is yellow and red and says 'DHL'.
The real issue is if Amazon gets that service at a discounted rate. They probably do, and I can see arguments for why we wouldn't want them to be able to. But I can't see arguments against service tiers.
Besides, service tiers exist under net neutrality. I can choose to buy a 1Mbps connection, or a 1Gbps connection. The latter gives me a clear advantage. Yet that's allowed under net neutrality because _anyone_ can buy those tiers of service.
Anybody who wishes to compete with Amazon will also have to pay additional fees to offer an equivalent service, and if high QoS delivery channels become over-subscribed, prices for them will increase. Further discriminating against competition.
> So, if Amazon wants to pay extra for that service tier like everyone else ... what's the problem?
What’s the problem with an ISP creating a seperate QoS tier for people who require it, and charging more for it? It’s exactly the same thing.
Net neutrality is supposed to prohibit a company from slowing down a competitor or slowing down things the company disagrees with - so, for example, Comcast shouldn't be slowing down Netflix. For the post office, this would be prioritizing packages from one carrier in the same class of mail over another. Now, there is no saying that the mail is neutral, though, nor that the contracts allow them to be (I really don't know: Maybe they need to prioritize just to keep from having fees that bankrupt them).
There’s not an analogue in this instance for the two sides of a network connection; DHL picks up the packages and drops them off. If you want to argue against price discrimination in general, you’re going to need a stronger argument than an analogy to net neutrality.
In the UK it's been a very long time since I got many parcels from Amazon that weren't delivered by Amazon Logistics.
DPD, Royal Mail and other deliveries happen once in a blue moon but Amazon is mostly things on its own now in my experience.
Where I am Amazon seem to use an independent contractor, and they're brilliant. It's always one of a couple of people I recognise, they have a nice van branded as their own company. It's a great service.
It usually depends on the location of the recipient.
That’s probably because Canada Post is just so terrible and expensive here that it’s worth it.
However, giving them a better deal than a regular citizen with a nationalized service is just bullshit.
Of course, businesses are going to go to extra lengths for their best customers. That's just expected and normal.
It's just that Amazon pays DHL extra money that they guarantee next day delivery. It's just that Amazon can tell their customers that the shipment will arrive on a certain date.
However, as I said, since 95% of DHL standard packages arrive on the next day in Germany anyway, there is no point trying to scandalize Amazon's prioritized treatment (which they also pay for, btw).
Source: A close family member of mine works at DHL Germany so I have some insight on their business.
Amazon might make up 20-30% of volume, but they also pay only 20-30% of the normal price for delivery. Which is crazy when you consider that most of the cost for delivery comes from the actual delivery to your door. That doesn't magically scale and get cheaper per unit because Amazon hands over a large amount of packages.
If that happens, there will not be any delivery company that is required to bring mail to everyone, no matter where they live. Let's give the USPS the ability to survive so people in rural areas can still get mail.
But is this not a case of an underfunded agency, that is trying to do its best in a bad time, with no money, and trying to placate those who shout loudest?
I'd wager that packages (not just Amazon) make up a lot more post than actual letters nowadays - I know I rarely have any post (although UK) as everything is online - but if people aren't getting their next/same day delivery on time, then they kick off and shout about it - which isn't going to please Amazon, and the USPS don't/can't lose that contract
It's just a normal service like any other. Normal companies do that just fine. As evidenced in lots of history and in other countries around the globe.
No, they don't. Like others have mentioned USPS delivers to anyone in the extended U.S. with sane prices. They also provide sane international shipping prices. USPS also provides other services like free shipping materials and free pickup. Hiding these and the other services they provide behind companies who only care about the bottom line would hurt people who couldn't afford the services or simply have services they're used to dropped.
They are able to do this by overcharging for local mail and absurdly undercharging for rural mail. Just another in the never ending list of ways that dense areas subsidize less dense areas.
But the kicker is the less dense areas are the ones who would vote to privatize the USPS. So I say give them what they want.
I love how people on HN complain about monopolies in tech but find it absolutely OK to have monopolies in other walks of life.
In Japan you have heavy competition for package deliveries and the former National post gets trashed when it comes to reliability and speed vs Sagawa or Yamato.
Instead of a hodge-podge that's financed by city dwellers who need to send a lot of letters, and assists people who chose to live in the middle of nowhere even if they are filthy rich.
Yes, charging more to people who cause more costs would be exactly the point.
(The poor people could use the targeted help I talked about to afford the higher price. Or they could use that help to buy something they need more than sending letters. Like food or nice clothing for an interview etc. Or whatever they fancy.)
The government has an obligation to send every citizen voter registration cards, census forms, driving licenses, tax forms, firearms registration forms, passports and so on.
The alternatives - an IRS office in every backwater town, denying a vote to people living in remote areas, ATF agents delivering gun permits in person, denying driving licenses to people without a home internet connection - would either be more expensive, or less constitutional.
Unless UPS or FedEx wanted to take on a universal service obligation, of course...
Most original postal systems (and I’m primarily thinking of Royal Mail) started by charging depending on distance a letter would travel.
I’m not sure your system of progressive taxes and rebates, and the needed administrative infrastructure would be cheaper than operating a flat price system. Especially in a country like the US which doesn’t have a large well developed welfare system that already performs these types of assessments.
It’s far more important that the lowest income residents can send and receive mail.
Also, the same people who want to privatize USPS are the ones who don’t want subsidies or payments to the poor at all. Killing this would be done in exchange for nothing, not as part of a reform bill that targets help toward those that need it.
The second part of your post is a fine argument and I'm not complaining about that, but "it's okay to recognize something is a social good" is not fine. It is likely everybody in this thread thinks a cheap, great logistic system is desirable. No impugning of motives, thank you very much.
There are food stamps and government grants to private charities charities. And there people who donate millions of hours to food distribution to the poor and vulnerable.
Private businesses do not handle food distribution just fine.
This is not the case in the US where millions of people don't have convenient access to food.
I don't know about Australia, but in the US food is propped up by massive taxpayer subsidy and relies on an undocumented immigrant workforce paid low wages with no recourse against employer abuse.
The guy I responded to later advocated for privatization of roads.
I'm perfectly fine with impugning the motives of a person who has arrived at that being a sane policy decision. Before that? I'm perfectly fine with impugning the motives of a person who believes it's okay to privatize the means of voting for an entire state.
Also, even if we accept that the government doing mail delivery is good, why does it need to be a federal agency? Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
But I guess you don't have subsidiarity in the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
This is how a lot of subsidies work in the US. City-dwellers subsidize rural communities.
> you think USPS is more efficient than a private sector alternative would be?
Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.
> Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier: whenever some state either mismanages their postal service or simply can't keep it afloat, we'll be at the cutting block again. Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network. The "decentralization" here just necessitates more communication overhead, potentially different laws requiring re-sorting, and a bunch of other potential headaches.
If each state did postal service piecemeal you'd have all sorts of nightmare state-specific pricing, size regulations, delivery schedules, etc. Nobody would benefit from that. Each state would also have to bargain individually with foreign nations about international shipping.
What makes you think USPS is inefficient? If it wasn’t for the ludicrous pension constraints applied to them of funding all pensions out to 2056 upfront, a requirement that no other federal agency or private company has. USPS would be returning almost a billion dollars of profit every year.
I would call that pretty good going for a public service.
So yeah, based on how cheap it is to send mail in the US, and the fact that USPS would be profitable venture if they weren’t screwed over by horrible laws (pension prefunding, etc.), the USPS is very efficient and shouldn’t be parceled out to states.
Cause it’s constitutionally mandated.
Essentially, a private company has the option to not provide certain services to you or even decline to serve you at your address entirely. The USPS does not. In many cases a carrier like UPS or FedEx hands things off to the USPS to do last-mile delivery in an area their delivery network doesn't cover, because the USPS is already built out to handle it.
Normal companies cannot do this "just fine" because it's a money-losing proposition. That's why the postal service has to be an agency instead of a for-profit company traded on stock exchanges, it is necessary to have universal service even if the country loses money doing it. Essential things like vote-by-mail, mail-order pharmacies, etc become impossible without it.
Many foods and ingredients can be stocked up on intermittently - say, once a week - and will last for a good amount of time in the fridge or freezer. So you can take a trip to a grocery store or other distribution facility a few times a month, even if it's far from you. You can also pretty safely and legally have a friend pick up groceries for you if you don't have a car or are unable to leave the house, but having someone go deal with your mail would be considerably more difficult (for legal reasons and otherwise).
Lots of mail is time sensitive - even if that ballot you're being mailed won't melt in the distribution center like a neglected package of chocolates would, there's a fixed deadline for you to fill out the ballot and a fixed deadline for it to make it to the processing facility. If delivery of that ballot - or the pick-up and return delivery - is delayed, it's worthless. As such, daily mail delivery is essential in many ways even if people don't receive mail every day. Incidentally, we've had widespread issues with ballot delivery and postmarking in the last year or so, so it's a real problem and not a hypothetical.
On that note, the government has to send mail to every citizen multiple times a year, they're going to have to pay private mailing services for it anyway... How much taxpayer money is actually being saved by privatizing it?
We've already seen elections with ballot invalidation rates of 25% in NYC with some of the primaries. A lot had to do with postmark dates and signatures.
My anecdotal observation is that the majority of people use the drop boxes, but that was also pre-pandemic.
An example recently is some of the New York primaries where up to 25% of ballots were rejected - https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1287416969231302658
On it's face that sounds like an incredibly onerous requirement. Not being a US resident though, it's quite possible it makes sense and my ignorance simply can't tell. Could someone with more insight provide additional context here?
This is a strategy called "Starving the beast". Basically, they impose incredibly harsh financial burdens on the company, and then argue that it's unprofitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...
https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...
The rhetoric about paying for the next 50 years sounds like somehow the post office is being charged at more than the amount necessary to maintain a steady state. Is it that they would be paying $5500/year/employee, but they have to pay double that for 50 years?
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what exactly is the problem and where the unreasonableness lies. I'm sure a Republican would say that the problem is the amount of benefits, and I can imagine that might be disingenuous, but I don't honestly understand what's really going on despite hearing about it for years and years.
Maybe someone can ELI5 why or how there's a gap between the long run average cost of the retirees and the payments.
[1]https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/employees-s...
i.e. you assume your investments will growth faster than they do, and you assume people will die earlier than they do, then you don't even put in enough to fund the scheme based on your optimistic assumptions.
In the US, state pension schemes tend to use more aggressive growth assumptions than private ones: the government holds private companies to strict standards, but does not impose them on itself.
Typically you'd target a result in the future and work backwards off of an average return rate (over years/decades, not months!) to ballpark a "this is what we need now to fund (with interest/returns) our pension obligations in the future".
As one can see from many pensions today though, this setup often falls prey to politics or other mismanagement. I think the "other side" sees it as an attempt to say "USPS can't stay solvent, time to chuck it over to the private sector." while ignoring that other comparable businesses do not and will not have such an explicit cash requirement, which by definition makes them looks better.
As far as I know, that is exactly the problem. I don't think any private corporation would be paying $11k per year for each employee for retirement benefits right now. Unless the base salaries are much lower, this is a pretty difficult requirement.
Head to your favorite search engine, pick any city or state in the US, and then follow it with “pension crisis.”
USPS retirees will be better off than virtually any other non-military government employee.
So I expect pensions to be bailed out. Especially government pensions.
USPS is just forced to already confront reality early, instead of waiting for the bailout later.
And of course because this is America, we are going to end up giving GE some welfare.
See: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
They’re required to fund the present value of employee retirement benefits.
All pension benefits in well-operated schemes are, by definition, pre-funded. You can't have a pay-as-you-go type of system because, if your company went bankrupt tomorrow, you might have retirees that still have a life expectancy in the decades.
You get an actuary to look at your current and future obligations based on your workforce, schedule of entitlements etc. and they work out how much you need to contribute to the scheme today to make sure that it is funded. The idea is that some disaster could befall your company at any time and retirees would not be out of pocket.
This is what pre-funded means. It doesn't mean "when I join the USPS at age 21 they have to assume I'm going to retire with 40 years of service and immediately put aside cash for that".
Now, typically, retiree health benefits are not included in this setup because they're not guaranteed. i.e. there is nothing in the law that requires them to be maintained.
On the other hand, the USPS is required to provide those retiree health benefits. It can't stop paying them unless Congress passes a law. It does at least seem consistent with the treatment of pension benefits on this basis.
There’s a Federal fund setup specifically to help pay pensions for companies that go bankrupt.
It's funded by insurance premiums paid by companies that offer pensions, not by taxes, and it cuts benefits when it takes over a pension plan.
It's not much different than the post office itself in that regard. It's losing money every year. At some point congress will step in and bail them out. Any time a company goes bankrupt and forces them to take over pension obligations they lose more money.
If they were on a defined contribution plan like most of the rest of the economy, this provision would just mean that they actually need to make contributions on time.
Naively, you might want to keep track only of money that flows in and out of your business.
But that can be rather misleading. So typically account for expenses when they are incurred. That means for example that in your accounting you set aside a bit of money for your rent every day, even if the physical cash only leaves your wallet once a month or even once a year.
That way your accounting reflects the economic reality of your business, even if it doesn't reflect how much cash is in your wallet.
The economic reality is important, because even if you have cash on hand now, but predictably won't earn enough money to pay back a debt that's coming due at the end of the year, you better panic early instead of acting all surprised.
See https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/when-are-expenses-i... for more details.
Well, when you promise people a pension dependent on how long they worked for you, it makes sense to make a provision every day they work for you, for the predictable outflow of cash you will have in a few decades.
Typically you build up a fund or some kind of reserve to meet these predictable future outflows. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_(accounting)
In the special case of pensions, you might even go one step further: instead of just having a reserve on your books, you might want to ring fence a specific amount of money and put that part of your balance sheet in a separate investment vehicle or fund. So that for example bankruptcy of the parent company wouldn't imperil pensions already promised.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis
The opposite of having such reserves is called 'unfunded liabilities'. Sounds nasty, doesn't it?
From the Pension Crisis article:
> In addition to states, U.S. cities and municipalities also have pension programs. There are 220 state pension plans and approximately 3,200 locally administered plans. By one measure, the unfunded liabilities for these programs are as high as $574 billion. The term unfunded liability represents the amount of money that would have to be set aside today such that interest and principal would cover the gap between program cash inflows and outflows over a long period of time.
At the time the requirement to fund pensions through 2050ish was passed it got support from republicans who wanted to make life financially harder for USPS and democrats who wanted to guarantee that employees (union employees, so making sure they get a good deal is even more important) would be provided for and that USPS couldn't weasel out of it's obligations as part of a future bailout, perhaps by a congress that would have given employees the shaft.
It doesn’t make particular sense.
A given politician might have their own reasons for wanting to privatize everything (profit, ideology, etc) but it's pretty consistent across the whole party that they aren't fond of any of these programs - I wouldn't actually attribute this to key donors.
The more reactionary donors have a real generational hatred of civil service in general and the post office in particular. Alot of fringe thinking from the 1960s and 70s is front and center today.
Goal is to get the public to perceive it as a money-losing, inefficient operation which should be destroyed and outsourced to private companies (who will immediately hugely raise postage rates, reduce letter carrier pay, reduce delivery speed, and so on).
Amazon has a private contract with the USPS that presumably puts it in its own unique category regardless of other labels, and the USPS likely loses money for late delivery, so this is just things operating how they're intended to operate.
The real problem is politics that doesn't give the USPS the flexibility to expand. I live in Brooklyn and haven't gotten a single package delivered on time by the USPS in the past 3 months, always 1-3 days late.
Any normal business hires more employees as business booms, and remember the USPS makes money off Amazon. Unfortunately, the USPS is so hamstrung by politicians that it can't simply expand to meet demand, the way e.g. Amazon Fresh has.
One can't help but wonder if Amazon wants to pull up the ladder behind them.
I figure, reducing the load in my mailbox (my actual goal; I haaaaate dead-tree mail) will have the collateral benefit of reducing the load on the carrier's shoulder.
I've enjoyed partial success so far, but just fired another volley of unsubscribes yesterday. We'll see.
My grandma, who passed a bit less than two years ago is still receiving all sorts of junk mail. I have tried unsubscribing normal ways from some of it (online forms, etc) and none of that seems to work at all.
I do use the "do not mail" junk mail opt-outs which has reduced the volume that comes in both her name and mine, but there's still loads of "previously accepted/subscribed-to mail" that I can't seem to put a stop to- even if I use the publisher/sender's preferred opt-out method.
So I'd call the various companies and ask them to stop. And one miraculous time, I ended up talking with a rep who told me The Secret. Paraphrasing: "I can remove him from our database, but he'll be back in a few weeks when we do our next import from the credit brokers. That's where you need to focus your effort, try Equifax."
Funny thing was, I could not find a form for "My name is Alice and I swear Bob no longer lives at 123 Main", but I could find a form for "My name is Bob and I swear I no longer live at 123 Main". So I filled that out, didn't sign it, and sent it in.
It slowed to a trickle within a month or two, and all but stopped within a year after that.
I just filled out https://pc2.mypreferences.com/Comcast/OptOut/Default.aspx so we'll see if that stems the deluge of Xfinity mailers...
This I think is the interesting part of the news.
They should go to 3 days per week, then cut back to 2, and maybe even just 1 per week. Since the pandemic, I have been leaving my mail in the box and getting it Sunday night. You know what I'm missing? Nothing! There may be 2-3 pieces of mail plus some junk mail, and I don't get email delivery of any bills: it's all physical mail.
Most people do not care if they get junk mail plus a few bills every day or once a week. They do care if they get their Amazon packages delivered. So to me, it's perfectly reasonable to delay 1st-class mail and prioritize, uh, "priority mail".
Amazon is mostly packages people ordered that they want.
Mail is mostly junk mailers that people didn't order.
Customer satisfaction is optimized by getting the Amazon packages routed higher priority.
This is the time you want more deliveries over in person interactions, of course people will ship more, but they are expected to roll with the support of a time without such a spike in demand. Essentially these are holiday level volume numbers with regular time funding.
As a taxpayer, I want money I pay going to the USPS, it is extremely valuable infrastructure for the last mile, small business and big business as seen here with Amazon.
Without the USPS, and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) [1], shipping would be much more expensive. It really is a sort of loss leader service that fuels so many other economic network effects. The UPU and USPS are some of the best ever public services created and one area where the world gets along, anyone attacking it should be immediately ejected from power.
Any infrastructure bill should include shoring up the USPS and expanding it, possibly including banking again and financial services that can be attained by the unbankable. USPS is required infrastructure, the lack of care about it is short-sighted and inexcusable.
Amazon is not the only ecommerce company in existence.
The article clearly states in its 3rd paragraph that packages (not junk mail) from other senders are being delayed in favor of Amazon packages:
"...willfully delaying thousands of first-class and priority parcels so that fourth-class Amazon parcels can go out for delivery instead"
USPS is, unfortunately, operated like a private company, and their bottom line gets hit harder if Amazon switches most of its business to FedEx than if other, much smaller firms decide 1st class isn't a reliable enough guarantee and stop paying for it.
Your comment would be just fine without those bits.
My understanding was that "Overtime" was meant to be used sparingly for short term circumstances - not for months on end - to avoid burnout.
From a labour cost point of view, most places pay penalty rates for overtime. Often 20% to 50%. Or maybe that is my naive view here in Australia.
So wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire more employees/daytime contractors? Plenty of people looking for work I hear.
In fact, they even have a partnership now and text you when an Amazon package arrived ("a package has arrived from Amazon") but not always when another vendor's package arrives, even if there's a phone number attached to it.
A lot of USPS is via trucks, but what about planes? Don’t they do freight via commercial airlines? Could it be a backlog that’s just increasing?
The reasons this is a fatal stance in a functional first-world democracy are identical.
Completely screwed people over. Our organization has now dropped USPS entirely for international shipments, and we spend a few million annually on shipping.
There was also a massive rate increase recently, particularly to the UK, that has made USPS far less competitive compared to other shippers.
First people are told that vote by mail leads to fraud and secondly that Amazon is deeply political and against the current power in Washington. Throw in ownership of the Washington Post, and you a suddenly have a good recipe for a fake news conspiracy to rile up the base with in an election year.
Benjamin Franklin knew the power of the post office in the 1700s. They were smart enough back then to know that people spread out to different geographic areas needed a legitimate way to vote and communicate.
He also knew that this system should retain some form of government control because the amount of information moving around inside the post office could be used by private parties to influence government affairs.
Other than the political angle, the attacks you see against the USPS are simply about money. Over the years, in the rush to privatize, the USPS was set on the path to be a private company.
Their idea was you remove funding from USPS, make insane capital requirements for future commitments that no other company has to do, then wait until they have massive capital expenditures.
The old mail trucks we are are familiar with have supposedly been catching on fire because they are way past their service dates. As far as I know, the USPS does not have a plan for replacements for these outdated vehicles, and even if they did, where is the money going to come from?
Last point in my rant is that you could ask probably half the country or more if Amazon helped bankrupt USPS. I bet many would say yes because that is what they have heard or read in articles. Amazons contract likely provided needed capital to keep USPS going since 2013.
Instead, the people who have been actively trying to bankrupt the USPS for more than 30 years are now trying to blame the main private sector company that supports it.
It's all lies, as usual. The post office has some of the best main street real estate all across the country. Any political crony knows that if they can get their hands on that after being privatized, the control over information in the mail system, and the value of the land all across the country, would turn that crony into quite an oligarch.
TLDR; Support your local post office if you care about democracy
Are there things that can be changed at USPS? Certainly, but they are not the primary cause of distress for this institution. See also: The current assault against the NHS in the U.K.
Do you believe Russia is involved in this too?
He has tweets ranting about them.
Millions of incarcerated, an entire state for mail-in-ballots--these are very typical use-cases.
> I suspect if you asked people to vote, they'd prefer Amazon packages get priority.
We've never voted on allowing anti-competitive behavior before, why start now?
You just really want your gadgets, don't you?
Amazon are things I needed delivered.
Whereas other USPS users just pay to have it delivered 'probably' tomorrow.
The way to fix this is to align the incentives... Let any company pay only if delivered by a deadline, and let USPS decide what to deliver first.
Medications and paychecks needed by other people are being held up intentionally to make way for Amazon packages. This isn't right, it isn't okay with me, and it shouldn't be okay with you either. Compassion for other humans and their need for paychecks and medicine should absolutely factor into a person's opinion on mail priority. IMO.
It's stuff I have ordered that is the real priority. Terms and conditions changes from my bank I know the law requires them to send me, but I don't really care how long it takes to arrive.
> The delivery of first-class and priority mail is being intentionally delayed so that letter carriers can prioritize the delivery of Amazon packages
it's priority and first-class mail that is being delayed in favour of (fourth-class) Amazon packages.
This is just the USPS giving service to what people care about most. They have no obligation to treat all sources of mail equally.
Non-Amazon retailers are of course free to pay for better service, and if they can't afford it, then they don't deserve it. If they were as good as Amazon they could afford it, as a result of customers paying for what they want.
Yes they do, they have a legal monopoly on certain kinds of delivery and that comes with corresponding obligations.