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Comment by nomercy400 | Hacker News Reader

The real issue here is the fact that the USPS is overloaded and requires extra government attention. If you don't properly fund and support you public postal service, you don't get on-time mail deliveries. Maybe that is the issue.

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.

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> The real issue here is the fact that the USPS is overloaded and requires extra government attention.

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.

There was huge consolidation “for efficiency” in the past decade. They shut down lots of distribution centers. Local mail that used to be delivered over night wis now delivered in 3 days at best.

USPS is efficient and self-sufficient, congress has just done everything possible to make it look like they're failing.

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.

> 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)

That's…not true? https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...

In fairness, pension pre-funding should be an expectation of all government agencies and private companies with pensions. But the way it was introduced was absurd, IIRC USPS had 10 years in which to pre-fund 50 years of pensions.

75 years. USPS is congressionally mandated to fund the pensions of postal workers who have not yet been born.

It doesn't matter if it's 500 years. The farther it is into the future, the greater the time discount to fund it now. "75 years" just sounds inflammatory as a soundbite, but it's completely reasonable. If you're promising it, you should book the expense's present discounted value.

Why aren't other federal agencies subject to similar requirements? Why isn't such a practice standard in the corporate world?

> If you're promising it, you should book the expense's present discounted value.

Your argument proves way too much. There is no "promise" here. To whom is the commitment made? The beneficiaries of such pensions do not even exist at this time. The most you can say is that there is an expected future expense. But if your claim is that an entity should be presently setting aside money for all anticipatable expenses, no matter how far in the future, then I think you'll find very few CFOs to agree with you.

>Why aren't other federal agencies subject to similar requirements? Why isn't such a practice standard in the corporate world?

It is absolutely standard for corporations to be required to fund their pensions, and to include liabilities on their balance sheet that aren't due for 80 years (in what few cases those actually happen in). Edit: Do you know of a rule whereby e.g. such bonds can be left off the balance sheet? I don't.

If other federal agencies (which are different in many other ways) aren't required to fund pensions, they should be -- I agree.

>Your argument proves way too much. There is no "promise" here. To whom is the commitment made?

The workers, to provide pensions for their dependents.

>The most you can say is that there is an expected future expense. But if your claim is that an entity should be presently setting aside money for all anticipatable expenses, no matter how far in the future, then I think you'll find very few CFOs to agree with you.

It's not an "anticipatable" expense, it's one that you have specifically committed to as compensation for labor, every bit as "anticipatable" as having to make this month's payroll. Do you know a CFO that thinks it's fine not to have allocated money for that?

>Do you know a CFO that thinks it's fine not to have allocated money for that?

I can't know the state of mind of any CFO. What can I do is look at the record and find companies that have failed allocate money for that. There's no shortage of them in the USA.

This is from 2003, but is fairly indicative of the games played:

https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/underfunded-pension-plans-a-...

Here's a 2017 summary of state public pension funds

https://taxfoundation.org/state-public-pension-plan-funding-...

Here's some 2019 reporting on corporate pension shortfall and congressional efforts (!) to help mitigate the damage to individual pensioners:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/12/these-pension-plans-are-at-r...

So regardless of whether or not it is "absolutely standard for corporations to be required to fund their pensions" (and I don't believe that it is anywhere near as standard or required as you portray it), the facts on the ground are that there are many, many pension funds that are underfunded by many different metrics.

I can also look at the record of corporate bankruptcy proceedings, and note how the obligations towards pensions are handled in comparison with those towards other types of debtors. TLDR: not well.

Finally, there is no specific committment by corporations to pay into a pension fund, only to pay out. They are at liberty to play whatever games they want regarding paying in. The simplest is to declare assumptions about future revenue, and pay in less (or nothing) in the present.

Yes, there is an epidemic of this problem in state/local public pensions. I was speaking of for-profit corporations, for which we collectively have gotten our act together and required it. I totally agree it needs to be fixed for state/local pensions similarly to how it's being fixed for the USPS.

>I can also look at the record of corporate bankruptcy proceedings, and note how the obligations towards pensions are handled in comparison with those towards other types of debtors. TLDR: not well.

Well, yes, that's a reason to require the pensions to be funded (at present discounted value), as the benefits are accrued -- why are you bringing this up to oppose that requirement on the USPS, except to condemn those workers to that possible fate?

>Finally, there is no specific committment by corporations to pay into a pension fund, only to pay out. They are at liberty to play whatever games they want regarding paying in.

This is false; among other places, see the Forbes overview. Many reforms have been enacted and the PBGC has requirements. This isn't the 50s anymore.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...

Sure, ERISA has led to a series of rules about minimum contributions.

But there are bunch of games corporations can play to reduce or avoid minimum contributions. Principle among them is to fund too much of the plan via contributions of the company's own stock (limited in scope but large enough to underfund the plan). If the underfunding is limited to 90% of the fund's liabilities, it can take 3 years before an increase in funding is required.

But rather than focus on the rules, I prefer to look at the actual on-the-ground situation. Many corporate DB plans are underfunded. It's not enough to say "the rules say they must fund liabilities as they are accrued" when many corporations demonstrably fail to do this.

Anyway, most people recognize that corporate DB plans are more or less over, so the comparison between corporate pension provisioning and public versions is going to get less and less relevant (probably).

This is completely not true.

"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.

https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432

I've seen this claim elsewhere but IMO it's ridiculously misleading. It's technically true that USPS is mandated to fund pensions for people that aren't alive yet. However, they're not required to actually start putting the finds away until those people grow up and start working for USPS.

The absurdity is that it’s not required of any other agency or private company.

EVERY company (either private or publicly traded) in the US that offers a pension is legally required to do one of two things:

1. Pre-fund the pensions of employees who aren't born yet

2. Stop offering the pension before they hire the people who haven't been born yet

Some companies chose to do 2, but without an act of congress the USPS is locked into option #1. This is tautological for any long lived pension plan. It will eventually serve people who haven't been born yet. I don't see why people are so surprised by it.

The pension pre-payment period ended in 2016. It's been 4 years since that was relevant.

They also can't set their own postage rates. They're operating in the free market with both hands tied behind their backs.

They do have the advantage that all competitors must charge 6x higher postage for items weighing less than 12.5 ounces.

And they should be allowed to bank again.

Literally every single private company in the US is required to prepay their pension obligations. When MAP-21 changed the formula for how much prepayment is necessary, FedEx stopped offering pensions to new hires. I think UPS only offers pensions to union employees now. I think the sticking point for USPS was that they were also required to prepay the retiree medical benefits that they offer

USPS pension funding gets brought up quite a bit as some kind of a conspiracy, but that doesn't appear to be accurate.

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...

It's also something we did in Canada as well. There were good reasons to make sure that the postal office had their pensions well funded. They're most likely to be disrupted by technology. We expected email to eviscerate traditional post, and it has, but for now package delivery and spam mail are making up the shortfall. Even so, it isn't too hard to imaging a post office that runs at a fifth of the workforce once we get more competition from autonomous devices.

> 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.

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.

You could do all of that, or you could take note that USPS halted overtime during one of the busiest periods of business in recent history.

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!

This is at the direction of a Trump appointee. Career USPS workers are not happy about it and their union is exploring options, last I heard.

Unions: They're Actually A Good Thing.

We're 4 months into the pandemic and their workload is only going to get worse if we have nationwide mail in ballots. If they're going to do something, they should get on it instead of letting their members suffer.

Not sure about USPS specifically, but our canada post is just finally catching up now.

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).

While I definitely had a couple packages arrive late in the April/May timeframe, since June I've had a couple packages actually show up before the delivery date Canada Post gave.

Yea since June definately been better.

Seems they caught up on international (from china) customs backlog.

Ordered in March, came early June.

Recent ordered in July, got china package in 2 weeks

You'd have to be pretty crazy to actually mail your mail-in ballot. What is the only way to expose every election in the country to the meddling of the federal executive branch? Interpose the USPS between the voter and local election officials! Whether by incompetence or malice they'll find a way to fuck it up. I intend to carry my own ballot to the county election office.

That's fine for you but that's not saying much because that approach is not at all scalable.

Wait, why? It scales at least as well as in-person voting.

Welp, I'm an out-of-country voter personally. I can't really walk 3000 miles.

When I lived abroad I delivered my ballot to my nearest consulate. I understand they are just putting it in the mail, of course.

Except in areas that use more polling stations than they have county election offices.

In California at least, you can drop your mail-in ballot off at a polling station.

I don't think that mail in ballots will significantly affect the USPS. They do about half a billion mail items per day. Ballots for everyone who is registered to vote is mabye 200 million. Ballots are also small. Packages take much more time to handle by the mail carrier.

Critically, mail in ballots are generally not accepted late. USPS will get everything where it's going eventually - but if the Trump appointee announces an impromtu postal holiday the week before the election then

1. Probably nothing technically illegal has happened

2. Nobody's mail-in-vote will arrive in time to be counted

This coupled with the fact that those rabid Trump fans will be showing up at the polls in person might[1] be enough to tip it in his favor.

1. It still might not be enough though, he is doing hilariously abysmally in polls.

As Wisconsin demonstrated, the attempts at voter suppression will likely backfire. If the Republicans had agreed to mail-in balloting or a delayed primary, they might have held on to the state supreme court seat they lost, but what they ended up doing kept Republican voters home (why go vote in person in a pandemic when there's no top of the ballot choice to make) while the Democrats stood in line (between the obvious attempt to make them stay home [Streisand effect] and the real impact of their top of the ballot choice). I'm just some schmuck in another state and I could see the likely outcome of the attempt at voting suppression before it happened, but Republicans seem to have only two tools in their toolbox anymore: tax cuts and voter suppression, and those tools aren't doing the job now and hurt more than help.

Doesn't your mail in ballot just need to be postmarked by election day to count? Its not the day its received, its the day its sent that counts.

probably depends on the state?

The point is that mail-in ballots are time-sensitive and the USPS has already fallen behind on its current workload.

I've seen tweets of e-tailers saying some packages (very small+light first class... the kind that are only cost effective thru USPS) are taking weeks when they used to take 1-4 days.

Unless USPS magically becomes more efficient in the next 100 days, their backlog of work will grow and non-prioritized deliveries will fall further behind. It will especially hurt voting is Amazon (or other packages) have higher delivery priority than ballots and ballot materials (usually 4+ items per voter per election).

Delivery is based on routes, which are designed to take 8 hours to fulfill on average. If there's a heavy parcel day, bad weather, coverage for sick workers, etc, the 8 hours may be 11 hours.

Now, they stop working after 8 hours in most cases and leave whatever is left in a pile to be done later. Just like with computers, when you develop a backlog in a system optimized for throughput, things tend to get worse.

You shouldn't be downvoted for stating the fact that this changed drastically under the new Trump appointee, who has donated millions to his and other republican campaigns.

The down votes are probably more along the unnecessary line about unions.

But wasn’t Canada Post also having some overload and delays? Blaming Trump for absolutely everything is getting to be a tied old canard.

The new head of the USPS is a big campaign donor and made specific changes in how the post office works that are bad. I'm blaming the literal choices of Trump's appointment, that appear to help Trump.

https://fortune.com/2020/07/24/usps-mail-delivery-postmaster...

Ah, Canada does a lot of things right - post isn't one of them. Even pre-COVID the two post systems operated on quite different levels.

Which appointee?

DeJoy

Yep! Republicans want to privatize the USPS. This is just one more step in that direction to get the public pissed off with USPS and blame them.

Correct. Trump gave the USPS a new head a few months ago, it's a guy with no postal expertise either.

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.

Pretty clear this is an intentional move by the Trump appointee DeJoy. It's a classic Republican tactic. Appoint someone to screw up a public service. Use that as an argument that it doesn't work. Privatize it so your rich friends can make a killing. It also has the added benefit of complicating mail in voting which might help the Republicans keep the senate and presidency. While I agree the postal service has some issues the current problems are entirely artificial.

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.

I was inclined to correct your spelling of 'du jour' before I realized I just don't know the name of the Postmaster General.

On the one hand, that sounds plausible on the face of it. Underhanded political shenanigans aren't rare.

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.)

I totally get your concern, and I'm sure people tire of having partisan politics used as explanation too often for issues of the day, but that seems pretty darn explicit in the case of the USPS[1]

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...

Who said only republicans do this? Defunding public services is basically a bipartisan agreement in the US since the clinton days. And the overton windows of the parties are not the same in California as they are in Alabama, anyways.

As far as I can tell, before the deal USPS did math along the lines of “10% of our trucks deliver packages and 90% letters” so then they laid out the pricing for packages. But then did a deal with Amazon so that now the trucks are 30% packages.

Not projecting into the future and instead trying to hold the pricing ceteris paribus was either a major oversight or corruption

> Aren't contracts of the government with private parties publically accessible?

Yes, you can submit a FOIA request to the USPS requesting the contract.

https://www.foia.gov/

since 2013 that contract must have been foia'd by now

You know what they say about assumptions...

The request was denied. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ama...

> The release of the existence of such a relationship or of the material terms of any such agreement, should it exist, with a particular business entity could harm the Postal Service's commercial interests in obtaining competitive rates with a variety of business partners in the future.

Understandable reason. Redacting only the "necessary" bits might well render the document unreadable.

Except for bailouts - like the one currently being proposed - USPS is self-funded and does not receive money from taxes. One problem is that USPS is meant to be a service (congress has to approve rate increases), but it's treated like a business. This wouldn't be such an issue if people weren't trying to sabotage it so that they could privatize it.

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.

USA should eat the loss, or let USPS run itself as a business (no deliveries for 55 cents to Alaska for one). Of course they can't since entire USA runs on it: bills, tax notices, communications, e-commerce etc etc. So what it loses $10 Billion a year? Call it a loss leader.

Or let it provide banking services... It would add another revenue stream and provide a service that is currently very hard to access in many areas.

Banking services for rural Alaskans / people without internet access / anyone else in the 2% [x] lose about as much as postal services.

[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.

Those are already challenges the USPS has to deal with. They have infrastructure in place to address those challenges. If they're paying those costs anyway, they might as well add services that can take advantage of that investment in exchange for more revenue.

There certainly would be an additional marginal cost, but it would be much, much less than an entity trying to start that from zero.

I believe something like 10% of NYC is unbanked.

Of hand, I believe it is a lot higher than that. I listen to an NPR (Or was it NYTimes?) podcast that interviewed working poor people and the number thrown around was that something like 40% of Americans working poor are unbanked with some areas of the country upwards of 60% (I think they said certain zip codes in Queens) are unbanked. What really stings working poor people from using banks are the hidden fees. There needs to be cheap and no frills banking for the poor.

Banks are required to offer such accounts by law in NY:

https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/banking_money/basic_bank_ac...

Do you mean even cheaper and less frills than that?

It's not for lack of banking locations.

They did something like this at one time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

The USPS should provide local health care services. An interesting deployment strategy for socialized medicine. It would be everything everyone expects from both right and left wing perspectives.

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.

So it would make a profit providing a service no one else finds profitable (offering services to these unbanked), and will also take a loss to serve this underserved marked?

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.)

I don't think it's a given that just because no one else finds it profitable means that the USPS couldn't operate it in a profitable way.

Most of the reasons that it isn't profitable relate to problems that the USPS already has to solve as part of their core function. It doesn't make sense for a bank to invest in physical infrastructure in the middle of nowhere, the cost of the building would erase any potential profit. The post office already has a building there though (and staff, etc). A significant amount of the up front expense, as well as a decent chunk of the ongoing expenses, is already going to be spent anyway.

Yes, but that means you're saying the USPS has some kind of advantage locating where there are disproportionate unbanked and also a dearth of banks. But I keep hearing about the unbanked as being an issue of large urban areas, which don't have any shortage of bank locations.

So for these five or six people in rural areas that can't get a bank account, and aren't complete deadbeats, and can't get to a bank as easily as they can get to a post office, the USPS has a cost advantage in serving them. Okay. I just don't see numbers that make this a big source of free money.

Loss leader is fine, but they still need to retain accountability.

You can't really evaluate a public service's accountability based on its balance sheet alone. It's a public service and is there to... provide a service.

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.

I run a mail order business. I haven't noticed any delays.

Its important to note that the purpose of the article is to take an isolated incident of one strangely misguided manager and/or management labor dispute turning into false accusations, and turn that isolated incident into a stage for national policy discussion. By doing that the source becomes a propaganda outlet instead of a journalist outlet, unfortunately.

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.

I've noticed delays in getting items shipped to me via USPS. One shipment took several months. Just because you do not perceive an issue does not mean one does not exist.

Having something take several months is not what is being discussed though. That is not an example of slow shipping, that is an example of something being lost or misdirected.

While the article is simply a local report about a local issue, it got reported because the USPS is intentionally slowing down mail delivery nationally, under a new boss who was appointed to wreck the agency:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...

The stop of overtime at USPS, in the middle of a surge in online shopping, is real. The lack of staff right now due to COVID but also due to lack of hiring, is real. Every other carriers is hiring like crazy, but not USPS. The problem is real. The fact that the OP anecdata did not experience any delays is totally irrelevant to the conversation.

Is there any inherent problem with the USPS over-hiring now and needing to let people go later? Is it somehow not possible for them to easily reduce the workforce after this, temporary, surge?

I also run a mail order business with "statistically significant" order quantity sent USPS. I've been tracking delivery times. For several weeks around July 4 more than 10% of packages were seeing >2 week delivery times. However it has since returned to normal.

I expect delivery times will go sideways again in Q4.

> meant to be a service (congress has to approve rate increases), but it's treated like a business.

This is exactly the way a utility works.

The difference is that utilities don't also have their liabilities defined in law. No electric company has a standing mandate to stuff $110 billion under a mattress so that they can pay pensions to people who won't be born until the next century.

If they did PG&E couldn't just run to bankruptcy court and get away with all the fire and destruction they caused.

Maybe we should make more utilities be prepared like the USPS.

I've had a Prime membership forever, originating from when it actually meant something to have it.

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.

Do they still refund your month's prime if you complain about this, or is Amazon at the point where it will happily tell the customer to pound sand?

I often go out of my way to avoid Amazon for my online purchases now.

Not recently, they just blame covid.

Why keep paying for Prime, then? You can also blame COVID for why you are cancelling.

Personally I’m not. I’ll subscribe for a month and make all the orders I need then.

The excuse I've seen is that Amazon points out that the shipping time was still 2 days, it just took them a week to start the shipping process. It seems like they're trying to minimize time in transit as opposed to trying to get the package to my doorstep ASAP

I see a number of reports regarding slow delivery times from Amazon.

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.

This has been my experience as well. Also, anything coming from the nearest distribution center always arrives on time, but anything else is a crapshoot.

We're the polar opposite from you: Amazon deliveries here never arrive in less than 3 days, before covid or after (rural New Mexico). The pandemic seems to have had essentially no impact on delivery times here. It was "sort of fast/sort of slow" (depending on your baseline) before and it's the same now.

In Australia often contracts between Government and a private-entity are declared commercial-in-confidence to prevent disclosure of information that could affect the private entity. I wouldn't be surprised if this is common in the US as well.

In Australia (and in Canada) the government's post office has been corporatized (in Canada, closer to privatized) in a way which tends to have it set postage such that it covers its own costs. The USPS is complicated in this respect, it is partially corporatized, but it often runs deficits.

Canada Post is still a Crown Corporation, as it has been since it was "corporatized" the early 80's; so "closer to privatized" doesn't really make any sense.

You have to understand the difference between a crown corporation and part of the government. A crown corp has government representives on the board. A crown corp could get funding from the government but it also could act privately and get it from profit. The books are not open the same way (annual review vs always accessible)

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.

I totally understand how Crown Corporations work, please do not accuse me of ignorance here.

There is a massive difference between a Crown Corporation running as a for profit enterprise where any profits return to the Crown and a privately owned company, especially one that was "spun off" and privatized at pennies on the dollar.

Protecting the rates and fines made through a bulk deal as 'affecting private entity' sounds a bit hypocritical as that same deal 'affects' that private entity massively in a positive way for being the only one with that big government-type of deal. Wouldn't you, as a taxpayer, like to know why that private entity got the deal, and how it is affecting society?

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.

Such contracts are negotiated modulo the principal agent problem. The person agreeing to the contract has incentive to make themselves look good and otherwise personally benefit, and little incentive to make it so that the organization doesn't suffer in the long rung. That the USPS has insisted on keeping this contract private is evidence of Amazon getting a special deal that would not survive scrutiny by the public or by other market participants (UPS/Fedex/DHL). In other words, corruption.

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.

He is no Adam Curtis and HN readers probably dislike him^1, but Ken Loach's most recent film (2019) is about delivery services and the "gig economy". It is called "Sorry We Missed You".

1. His last film in 2016 won the Palm d'Or at Cannes if that means anything.

The GOP wants to kill anything related to the government that's functional. They want to turn it over so that private industry can have it.

Further, private carriers can search your mail. The USPS can't but FEDEX can...

> Is it because USPS is not receiving enough funding from the government

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.

> How much funding does Fedex or UPS get from government to stay operational ?

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.

This comment completely misunderstands the USPS's problems. The USPS doesn't get public funding, but its pursestrings and business model is micromanaged by Congress (which has no business placing most of the mandates on the USPS that it does). This is roughly equivalent to having an environmental conservation group being given a majority of board seats on a real estate developer.

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.

USPS is understaffed from COVID and the new Postmaster (installed by Trump) tells people to not work overtime and just leave the route when their shift is over, which means more mail gets backed up.

Is there really an issue though? Almost everyone I know only checks their mail about once a week anyway. USPS/mail is still important but not as critical as it was 20+ years ago, especially when it comes to delivery frquency.

Maybe it's time to start delivering mail twice a week instead of every day.

Where are you located?

Everyone I know checks daily, sometimes a couple times a day.

I check my mail about once/week, but I have packages directed to an Amazon hub.

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.

It could be an issue for people who expect medication that could expire.

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.

For me checking the mail when I’m not expecting something (so, 50 weeks out of the year) most closely resembles emptying a small trash bin every so often so it doesn’t overflow. I’m generally pro-USPS for other reasons but yeah, checking the mail is a kinda worthless chore. Do it so they don’t suspend delivery in case I need something. Not to read anything that showed up.

> If you don't properly fund and support you public postal service

Raise prices for shipments? Or make them "free" using covid-19 "free" money

Or fund it with an increased level of taxpayer revenue, the same way other public services are funded?

John Oliver did an informative segment on why the USPS no longer makes a profit, and what can be done about it.

One facet is reintroducing banking services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_En...

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.

If the USPS is getting lots of business, why would they need more funding? The issue here is simply a temporary Coronavirus situation combined with how the USPS runs their business.

John Oliver did an interesting video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ&t=4s

TL;DR: Deliberate government action to defund them has resulted in them having way less money than you would expect.

It has been a while since I have seen that one, but if I recall the two main points were

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.

They should just spin off the USPS as a purely private enterprise—no more monopoly on letter delivery or bureaucratic micromanagement regarding prices—and instead periodically solicit bids from all the carriers (including the former USPS) for the core services. Whoever wins the bid would commit to flat-rate nationwide delivery of first-class letters and receive a negotiated subsidy for each delivery depending on the route.

Did you not read the part about how they have to fund their retirees health program up through 2054? That's millions to billions of dollars that they have to set aside for potential future costs decades away. No other government program or service is required to do this.

Did you not read the part where they only have to prefund accrued benefits? Oh wait, the article didn't include that part, did it.

Source?

The bill itself describes the funding schedule: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407

Regardless, the “pre-funding” period is over and the fund is running a deficit as retirees are currently paid from it, so it’s a moot point.

“ Establishes in the Treasury the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund, to be administered by OPM. Requires the Postal Service, beginning in 2007, to compute the net present value of the future payments required and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year”

Compute the net present value of future payments does not sound like “accrued” benefits at all. It sounds like future payments which is the opposite of accrued benefits.

I don’t know the details of USPS’s finances, but reading that bill it seems they basically got rid of pensions around 2007

“ Postal Civil Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding Amendments of 2006 - (Sec. 802) Relieves the Postal Service of an obligation to contribute matching amounts to its employees' civil service retirement.”

but required that all existing pensions be prefunded.

That’s an extremely onerous requirement and whether the fund has been funded or not, it will still affect service drastically. Even if the fund has been paid off it’s not a moot point because that’s potentially billions of dollars that they cannot use to fund service and instead is waiting in an account somewhere to be used decades from now.

> ... net present value of the future payments required and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year

This means you calculate the total amount of added expected additional pension payments earned over the last year of work.

So, if last year you could have retired with a pension estimated to pay out $100k, and this year your pension would be estimated to pay out $120k due to the additional year of service, then that number would be $20k.

Since that $20k is not paid out all at once, but over a period of time in the future, you calculate the net present value which reduces the amount based on a “discount” rate which is the expected rate of return on your cash. So, $20k paid out over 10 years starting 10 years from now is discounted to, e.g. $14k, which is how much money you need invested today to fully fund that liability in the future.

To sum it up, in that hypothetical example, the USPS is supposed to be banking that additional $14k to find the future liability.

It’s actually exactly what anyone running a pension program absolutely should be doing.

>it’s not a moot point because that’s potentially billions of dollars that they cannot use to fund service

In fact, it is somewhat of a moot point - the USPS has been accruing, but not paying. Service is being funded.

The USPS actually stopped paying meaningfully to PSRHBF back in 2011. At this point, they're somewhat over $47bn behind in payments.

Please take a look at the USPS 10-K to get the fine detail here.

The other commenters did will to address your misconceptions but I want to further elaborate on this one.

> Even if the fund has been paid off it’s not a moot point because that’s potentially billions of dollars that they cannot use to fund service and instead is waiting in an account somewhere to be used decades from now

The fund is not paid off as the Post Office never actually made the vast majority of its payments. It's also not in an account waiting to be used. It is being used right now to fund current retirees and it's running deficits. The reason it's a moot point is because even if this requirement were removed today it would operate in the same way i.e. pay as you go.

Maybe all cities and states should have to do this? We have a massive pension crisis in the US. Many cities and states are not even 50% funded. It’s a looming disaster.

Do you not see what it's going to do with the USPS? Why would you want it done with cities and states, unless your goal is to privatize entire cities and states.

The argument here is that it's all shell games otherwise if the money isn't set aside - e.g. look at the broader trend with social security's solvency. With the way public funding has trended, it would not surprise me if any unfunded programs simply ran out of cash at some point.

There isn't an easy answer to balance the needs of existing liabilities (pension commitments) with financial operations - the problem with the USPS was (I believe) the catch-up funding required to meet funding requirements, and not the actual funding itself.

Social Security is insolvent because congress keeps borrowing from the trust fund that we pay into to cover obligations in the general budget. It has nothing to do with shell games. Fundamentally the problem is that the congressional budgets are stealing money from my generation and then blaming the Social Security Administration for mismanaging the trust fund.

If you're going to offer a pension, a guaranteed amount of money in the future, then you should be making sure you can pay it; guaranteed. If making sure you can keep that promise is too burdensome, then you should not be making that promise.

It's absurd to say this and honestly I don't know how anyone who understands the scale of the numbers here and the impact these programs have on society could think this.

Pensions are funded by the next generation, just like Social Security and Welfare.

You pay for the previous generation in exchange for the next generation paying for you.

Without this kind of offset, you end up with as much as 10-15% of your population as indigent elderly, homeless and starving, who become MAJOR financial burdens on their children (and I mean MAJOR -- ask someone from China or a similar country about it) or who become homeless or die.

It's unfeasible to set aside the money all at once, and in fact hoovering that much money out of the economy and into investments would have a noticable effect on the economy. You're basically suggesting something outrageous like 5% of GDP stop being transfer payments to poor people who spend it immediately and start being investments into government treasuries and corporate bonds.

Actually, pensions are paid for by returns to investing funds, not the next generation-- at least that was the idea. The problem is that:

1. Governments don't put even the actuarially required amounts into pension funds that assume 7-9% rates of return on fund investments. 2. Governments have been slow to adjust their expectations on returns, since 7-9% is far less achievable than it was in the 80s and 90s when interest rates were much higher.

Permanent low interest rates, economic downturns, and underfunding pension funds together have created an untenable environment. The cash isn't there in many municipal and state pension funds, and earning that much in returns is laughably difficult or requires an inordinate amount of payments now.

Now, it's absolutely true that the USPS is being held to a ridiculous and overcorrected standard in this case. But it's not the case that our current pension obligations, in many of these local and state retirement funds, can be paid for through current employee cash receipts.

It's ironic that you cite social security, which is a giant unfunded liability. Pensions don't actually have to be funded by the next generation. That's just the asinine way we have it set up here in the US. It relies on a never ending baby boom and economic expansion. Surprise surprise, it doesn't really work all that well. Hence social security funded at 70% and many city and state pensions funded at less than 50%.

What we should actually be doing is pay as you go. You pay into the pension and you get out what you paid, plus growth. We could have switched to this model at any point over the last 70 years if American society wasn't so addicted to endlessly kicking shit down the road and punting on problems.

> It's ironic that you cite social security, which is a giant unfunded liability.

Social security is not an unfunded liability. If you look at your paycheck you will see a line that explicitly goes toward funding social security. It is currently underfunded due to (1) Congressional malfeasance; and (2) the $120K cap on paying into the fund.

Even the underfunding is nowhere near as bad as advertised - current funding is sufficient to pay full benefits through 2035 and about 80% of benefits from 2035-2094. If we pay back the borrowed money and remove the income cap the funding issue would resolve.

Yes, but how are we going to prevent further congressional malfeasance between now and 2094? One of the two parties is not going to stop trying to undermine social security every chance it gets in over the next 75 years...

We either take responsibility for it as citizens or we get what we deserve.

Social security is not underfunded.

It is only underfunded due to these two reasons.

Well, which is it? If it were simple to make social security solvent at full promised benefits then surely we would?

You claimed it was unfunded, not underfunded. Please read more carefully.

And no, surely we wouldn't. The Republican Party wants to destroy Social Security, they aren't interested in anything that would make it stronger.

Would you rather have bankrupt cities and states? Because that is where we are headed and we are stomping on the accelerator just as fast as we can.

I'd like to see constructive alternative proposals.

Today, many cities and states have underfunded pensions following a continually worsening trajectory. The scale is enormous. Please take a read about the state of public pensions in Illinois, for example.

If you're not profitable while funding pensions at their present discounted value, you're not profitable to begin with, and this requirement only revealed it.

Regardless of what their pension obligations are, shouldn't the financial stance be determined by actual financial planners instead of the US congress? That's what everyone else in the world does if they need to plan for a future payout. They pay someone to do the math. In this case Congress made the decision, and I suspect for politically motivated reasons.

In the same real world, every other corporation is required to set aside the present discounted value of promised pensions. We learned our lesson from the GMs and Bethlehem Steels of the world.

It turns out there's a difference in the way the private sector and the public sector account for pensions. In the private sector, if your actuarial numbers tell you that the pension is going to ultimately cost $1 million, then you have to have $1 million in the bank right now to fully fund it. But for public sector accounting, you can figure that the magic market money tree is going to top you up by 7% each year and so you'd only need, say, $800k right now to "fully fund" that same $1 million pension. The "onerous" USPS pension obligations is really forcing the USPS to fully fund the pension according to private sector accounting. [1]

This explains a lot about pensions. First, having to have the entire pension cash value up front makes pensions extraordinarily expensive: giving someone a $1k pay raise puts you over $20k out-of-pocket for that pension. Consequently, the private sector abandoned pensions because they were unaffordable. The other observation is that, because almost all public pension funds have assumed unrealistically high growth rates, so consequently their funding rates have consistently slipped.

The truth of the matter is that virtually all public-sector pensions are in exactly the same boat as USPS's pension is. It's just that the governments are more effective at sweeping their pension issues under the rug, while they have forced the USPS to have its pension issue sit in broad daylight.

We should be pushing to force the same reckoning on cities and states sooner rather than letting things deteriorate while thinking we'll magically make up lost ground in the next decade.

[1] Edit: As an addendum, the USPS is specific required to 100% fund its pension benefit. This 100% funding requirement is actually legally unique, although a decent portion of the private sector does seek to do so.

> Consequently, the private sector abandoned pensions because they were unaffordable.

So a pay cut by another name? Because even if pensions aren't available, individuals still need money to retire on

I'm not sure. In a traditional pension scheme, the company kicks money into the pension fund, and this kick of money plus the internal investment income of the fund provides the assets to cover the liability. In modern 401k schemes, the company kicks some money (in addition to the employee kicking money) into the 401k to generate the internal investment income to cover the liability.

It would be a pay cut if the modern salary plus employer match were less than the prior salary plus employer contribution to the pension fund. I do not know if this is the case (especially when you maximize the match). I also do not know to what degree companies were underfunding the pensions in the past. My suspicion is that the upper-middle-class who maximize employer match are no worse off, perhaps better off, but that the median employee is worse off.

City and state pension managers only need to change their stupid formulas to account for actual risk and variance in annual returns -- not some mythical 8% annual no matter how good or bad the economy does. Yes, some cities have been underfunding even the contribution amount and they should be held to account.

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.

Post Office Pensions: Some Key Myths And Facts

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...

They can’t set their own rates and have an obligation to deliver everything, which leads to them shipping many things (not just Amazon) for free. There is no other country in the world, no other private business that lets you send first class letters for $0.60 for a reason. For years they were also wrangled into a treaty obligation that forced them to ship small packages from China for a loss.

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.

>but the most fundamental issues they struggle with revolve around factors beyond the control of USPS management.

In other words, they are inefficient.

Seems like you didn't read the article. The issue, according to the article, is that USPS management is intentionally delaying regular mail in favor of Amazon deliveries.

Yes, I've read how the article blames USPS to favor Amazon. I've also thought about why they are doing this. Why is the USPS of Portland doing this? Are they being influenced by Amazon? By the national USPS? By the government?

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?

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