Hacker News Reader

Up until very recently, the rates that the USPS could charge for delivery of mail from China (and other foreign countries) was set by the Universal Postal Union which is an agency of the UN. The USPS had no control over this pricing.

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

Good point. And it was an excellent correction.

Business should not depend on Political arbitrage for its survival.

Many more reforms are needed to correct this at the USPS.

> I have mixed feelings about the USPS but one thing is clear. They price incorrectly. It should have never been less expensive to ship a parcel from Beijing to Washington, then from say, Detroit to Washington.

Well, that actually worked really well for a long long time since the USPS was netting a lot of money through that because the USPS was the one taking advantage of other countries on this. It was only in the last five years that it started playing against the US.

True, but these are still small potatoes compared with the losses they realize shipping last mile parcels.

What are the losses they realize shipping last mile parcels?

If you're referring to agreements like their NSA with Amazon (the example from your parent post), that shouldn't be resulting in any losses. They're not legally allowed to set rates which result in a net financial loss; taking into account potential cost efficiencies from the increased volume, at the very least the NSA rates have to break even.

For other classes of parcel service, it's entirely possible they're losing money (I'm not sure). But that's because it takes a literal act of Congress for them to touch those rates. Even addressing the "cheaper to ship from China than domestically" was a situation outside of their control - it resulted from an international treaty[1] the US is a party to, and required leveraging authority beyond the USPS's purview to address the situation (in this case, by threatening to pull out of the treaty).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

Netherlands already moved post offices into a small corner shops.

Portugal has been adding more services like telecom and banking.

Same in Finland. I believe under 15 Posti-operated dedicated post offices remain - just yesterday they closed their former HQ post office in the Post Building: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/end_of_an_era_as_posti_ex...

There are 900 post offices and approx. 2000 parcel lockers (population 5.5M).

They have also taken steps due to the dramatically decreased amount of mail in the last decade (over 50% down since 2010 - this year yearly decrease has been 15-20% so far):

- Yearly price increases of letter mail (50g letter stamp is now at 1.75€).

- Slowed down the basic letter services (first class stamped letter went from 1 day to 4 days).

- Reduced delivery frequency (no mail delivery on Tuesdays if possible).

- Mail may now be delivered later during the day.

And of course large layoffs, which have probably resulted in a reduction of service quality - public complaints seem to have increased.

Thats pretty cool

The more rates for Chinese packages is an artifact of an international postal treaty that China was abusing to prop up their manufacturing sector.

The US now has the power to redetermine rates for China-sourced packages.

“ Negotiated Rates (NSA) can allows companies such as Amazon to buy postage at a significant discount. These deals should be eliminated. Why should a poor person pay more for postage than Jeff Bezos to ship the same thing?“

Rather than suggest that Jeff Bezos gets a deal on postage due to his influence, perhaps a better characterization is that the American consumer enjoys the efficiencies of bulk purchasing power, essentially arranged on our behalf by Amazon, which lowers our shipping costs. Bezos doesn’t get cheaper postage than we do; we buy things off amazon and win.

Edited for clarity.

This is true.

It comes down to your personal point of view and the principal of fairness.

Should the American public subsidize big business for the benefit of big business's customers?