Amazon is delivering nearly two-thirds of its own packages
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Traditional carriers break even or even take a small loss on a percentage of deliveries because it's important to their business model to have consistent prices and deliver everywhere. Amazon isn't restricted that way, they can cherry pick which places they deliver based on how profitable it is to get the package to the doorstep.
Essentially Amazon is draining away all the deliveries which made UPS/ USPS/ FedEx profitable. How sustainable this model is long term is somewhat questionable.
This would be nice to help the local communities a little.
One possibility is to reduce the days mail is delivered to rural communities to cut costs.
Imagine if shipping of all consumer goods were made free. Amazon would be INCREDIBLY more dominant. And in fact, this is a large reason they started with books. The USPS has a special program built for a world 100 years ago called Media Mail which allows you to ship books for next to nothing. It made it impossible to run a bookstore profitably. Removing shipping subsidies to rural communities may very well create more of them and will definitely make them more resilient.
USPS is a government agency though. if they ship stuff to rural areas below cost, that is the US government subsidizing rural communities. with mail still being the lowest-common-denominator means of communication, there is a public good argument for burning money to deliver mail/packages affordably to people in these areas. I do agree they should feel at least some of the cost though, and I also feel there is something distasteful about amazon exploiting this cost structure.
Historically never, since you need convenient access to a population of workers. Rural areas are too spread out.
In modern times car companies, in particular, have built factories in the middle of nowhere because land is cheap. Small cities then spring up around them to support a population of new workers.
As a side note, the car companies are pretty savvy doing it this way. They get to pay minimal amounts for empty, "worthless" land and force everyone else to pay increasing prices on the surrounding land which may be purchased, directly or indirectly, by the company.
http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-personal-segreg...
But they do. That's the market price. That and the subsidies.
I invoke Chesterton's Fence. You haven't demonstrated an understanding of why package and parcel delivery works the way it does; so I reject your call to dismantle it, until you do demonstrate that.
Exactly.
As an example here in Germany, the city of Wolfsburg has the original Volkswagen plant. It's so big, it's literally called "car city" ("Autostadt"). They certainly don't make cars just for Wolfsburg, or just for city dwellers.
Additionally rural communities are about 20% of the population, and many of these communities are around farmland, which of course is necessary to keep some of. It's much harder to live alone with just a small amount of farmers vs. even the smallest of communities. Should farmers commute to the farm just so the USPS has a slightly easier time?
Assuming it's a steady state then it's certainly good for Amazon. Particularly since their competition doesn't have the scale to reduce costs similarly.
Maybe that's the case for the average walk-in, but at scale all of these terms are subject to negotiation.
It's common wisdom that most of the cost for delivery is in the last mile. Amazon has great leverage, because DHL certainly isn't making money on their deliveries - the intake scales with Amazon's large quantities, but the individual delivery does not.
It's a race to the bottom between the delivery companies, fueled mostly by sub-sub-contractors with very low wages, long hours and bad conditions. DHL has seen giant growth, but profits are falling apart.
Up to a certain point [1], that's actually reasonable. Amazon drops off entire truckloads at a time, whereas end users hand packages over individually at shops that have to pay staff and rent. So the cost of just accepting parcel is going to be higher for packages sent by end users.
Side note: If I were DHL, I'd be giving Amazon a discount for packages that are addressed to a Packstation, since that cuts down on the other big cost center, the cost of delivering parcel on the last mile.
[1] I'm not arguing that this is the difference between 2 and 5-6 euros, but it's certainly a large part of it.
I'd be surprised if Amazon does not enjoy additional rebates for Packstation deliveries.
I'm sure could, but prior to Amazon, having a fairly flat rate table has been a selling point for carriers even to their larger customers.
If what is being said is actually true, then amazon doesn't have any leverage at all. (again if what is being argued is true) These last mile providers might be taking a small hit to deliver amazon packages, so why deliver them at all?
If you answer is: "if they don't deliver these they won't get amazon's business." It would appear they are not getting any of amazon's profitable business (2/3 of delivers), so who cares about getting amazon's crap business?
It's a bit of a catch-22, they can reform their route and coverage to similarly profitable state with less coverage, potentially dooming them in the long run, or they can take the near 0 profit contract from Amazon and stay competitive while having almost no cards at the negotiation table. Amazon knows their business is huge and needed by these groups and is not afraid to point that out.
Anecdotally, your claim doesn't seem correct, but I'm not sure what the exact rules are.
from the document
I know this because as I type this I’m sitting in a house in a rural area of upstate NY that doesn’t have USPS delivery. When clueless e-commerce merchants send me things via USPS anyways they never arrive and eventually get sent back.
This situation is not uncommon at all.
This seems like the simplist way. The company could take a sample of 100 Amazon parcels, analyze the marginal cost of delivering each (how full was each van, how much did it add to each route, etc), and use that as the basis for price negotiations with Amazon.
If that means Amazon pays more than other customers, fine.
And yet Amazon does their own deliveries in my parents' rural area where the houses are indeed about a quarter mile apart and several miles from the nearest town. Perhaps the business model isn't quite so one-sided as you thought? USPS has issues with managing their pricing, true, but UPS and FedEx are under no obligation to deliver packages below cost.
It could easily be self-selecting, Amazon puts out their own deliveries essentially the same way as Uber. They set rates for drivers and if they can't get drivers at the rates they set, they send the packages off to USPS. The result is more-or-less the same. Much as Uber drivers don't service unprofitable areas, Amazon's contractors don't either.
Delivering to urban areas is generally more cost effective because there is an opportunity bonus. People in rural areas can simulate that opportunity bonus by getting more packages more regularly.
I wouldn't worry much.
What's the worst that could happen ? Amazon would need to invest ~$50B in their network ?
They already did so since 2014. They'll manage.
We get a lot of stuff from Amazon, and in a single day I have seen the UPS guy, FedEx gal, our regular USPS postman, and the packages only USPS guy, all bringing Amazon boxes in one day.
Without Amazon, there is no business for UPS/USPS/FedEx to deliver Amazon packages... Heck, the deliveries that Amazon choses not to do themselvs, is extra business for UPS, USPS and FedEx. Also, there is a great deal of shipping that has nothing to do with Amazon.
A few years ago there was an Amazon promo for when they first started "same day" delivery in another city, where all deliveries were in paper bags.
But while Amazon now offers "same day" service from a warehouse 20 minutes away, and delivers all their own stuff, everything continues to arrive in huge wasteful cardboard boxes.
I like Amazon, I like ordering from Amazon, but I'm tired of recycling entire trunks worth of cardboard boxes often holding very small items.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53724620
It’s one of the reminders that the invisible hand of economics, incentivised properly, can solve not all, but a surprising lot.
Outer packs protect the goods not just against long-distance parcel shipment.
At what distance is it overall more environmentally friendly for me to purchase from Amazon vs. taking my car and grabbing that item myself. I think I'd be surprised at how little that number is.
it's not a direct answer, but it seems like the answer is that it's essentially never more environmentally friendly to order online, because the odds that it actually eliminates a trip in your car are so tiny.
I'd be curious to know what the environmental numbers are for someone like me.
Once you think decide that all highly environmentally-destructive actions are not even an option on the table, your behavior changes.
Can’t use it because I’m in Canada, but would love this service. I’d batch it all to arrive before recycling day, and save my parcel receiving/unpacking efforts.
Then is UPS, who are happy to stick a note on your door saying you were not home, even if the door is open and you are waving at them.
Then is FedEx, who never seem to make it on time.
And last/worst is Amazon, who lose or misdeliver about 20% of my packages.
Amazon itself is next, usually arriving on time, occasionally a package will be delayed and I'll get an e-mail telling me as much.
USPS is by far the worst unless it is priority mail express. One thing that constantly happens is Amazon will hand off a package to USPS for final delivery, USPS will then mark it delivered on the day it is supposed to come, but won't actually deliver it for another 2 days. I have also had packages seemingly lost or stolen once being handed off to USPS including a very expensive computer monitor. Amazon refunded me of course, but it seems clear someone decided to steal it. Priority Mail Express service though has always been perfect.
That 2 day delay is because sorters and carriers are scanning packages delivered in bulk in their vehicle, and then either loading or delivering only a subset of them, due to your local sorting/delivery teams having been overwhelmed by package volume. Eventually the overflow carriers catch up on the pile of packages, and yours is either included or lost. The early delivery scan protects them against retaliation — but also hides the necessity for more staffing.
This isn't a defense of their actions, but since I did the months of diligence with my local post office on this a few years back, I thought you might be curious to know why.
ps. Palo Alto? :)
Ironically - in neither case was I dealing with either "Fedex" or "Amazon" - but third parties that were contracted to Fedex/Amazon. Amazon just had better responsiveness and communication.
I don't have data in front of me so I'm sort of pulling numbers out of my a if you will but I'm pretty sure UPS + FedEx raise rates about 7% year over year for all sizable shippers at pretty much the same time of the year. Meaning, FedEx raises rates, the next week, UPS raises rates.
The answer here is probably: software.
Their software is ingenious in that it sends drivers circling my sub-division and pulling in and out of driveways to turn around.
I don't watch FedEx and UPS trucks aimlessly wander. I wonder why that is.
Like how google tells you to drive on a dike and then over some one lane dirt roads through a hill to get there 10 minutes faster.
I don’t know the operation so I can say exactly what is happening but I would imagine some of the factors are: poor mapping software, poor routing software, poor training, high employee churn.
Ever since Amazon began delivering in my neighborhood it’s been a disaster. Packages frequently say out for delivery and don’t show up for two days, after saying out for delivery. Packages frequently sit at the “distribution partner” for days. Delivery targets are missed frequently. Packages are just chucked into the front yard. All of this was pre-COVID. It’s obviously worse now.
Prior to Amazon delivering, my packages typically came via USPS. The target was pretty much always made and I can’t remember a time where I had a rash of issues.
Aside from all the issues of tracking and delivering packages, I generally find the Amazon vans drive more erratically and the drivers typically seem rushed, distracted, and overall less knowledgeable of the roads and respectful of the fact that it’s a residential road and not a divided highway as compared to FedEx, UPS, and USPS.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fedex-settlement-idUSKCN0...
Now, today, UPS has to bend-over-backwards to meet Amazon's demands for delivery days, pickup days, days worked, the price Amazon is willing to pay, etc.
Amazon was even able to compel USPS to delivery Amazon packages on Sundays!
Basically, UPS works for Amazon now - FedEx saw that coming, and saw Amazon buying up freighter aircraft and trucks, etc.
That said, regular mail is also on the decline, significantly so, as more people use technology instead of pen and paper- bills, letters, contracts, nearly everything is going digital. Packages make up an increasingly significant amount of post office revenue.
That said, anyone who pays attention to Amazon at all knows that they show no remorse about screwing over business partners by entering the same market, and Amazon has been doing that for awhile now.
Even so, I suspect that they aren't going to bother expanding delivery out to where I am now- paying the post office to deliver is almost certainly cheaper than keeping a regular workforce of independent delivery drivers way out here.
Except, when we do napkin math, it's costing USPS more money to deliver each of those packages than they collected! They would literally make money by not delivering packages.
They aren't making money off delivering your package, no - they lose money. If they were making money, they would not need billions of capitol injection routinely.
It's no secret getting a job at USPS is for life. That should not be a thing for a supposed public "service" organization that's expected to not bleed money everywhere.
Can someone clarify for me if this USPS pension thing is any different from any other organization that offers pensions? Naively, the requirement to "fund" pension liabilities pretty reasonable. How else do you guarantee pensioners they'll have something when they retire. I know here in Chicago we're in bad shape because of unfunded pension liabilities.
Yes, there is some point to be made about pensions and 401ks being raided, but now is not the time.
When would the appropriate time be then?
The point of 75 year pension is to guarantee, in no uncertain terms, the existence of a retirement for the over 470,000 postal employees.
That is absolutely huge - particularly for an organization that's subject to the political whims of the day.
The only thing certain to happen 75 years from now is postal employees will be able to enjoy a rightfully earned retirement. Why would you want to deprive them of that?
I could argue the opposite right now. Seems "the other side" only wants to champion USPS right now, even though only a year ago everyone would have been in near agreement USPS needs reforms. It's political... I get it, but does everyone here arguing get it too? Doubtful.
In my time serving as a legislative assistant for a California Assemblyman, we fought against several state controlled pension funds, including pushing for divestment from Iran. These attempts were always met with fierce opposition - "you're destroying my retirement!" and more. Anecdata I know...
Pensions, in my opinion, are universally bad. You, the individual, should control your own retirement. Too often these pensions, that people rely on, dry up or disappear suddenly due to gross mismanagement.
If you're going to have a pension - it should have to be funded for a massive amount of time. Maybe not 75 years, but the average person's working years (ie, 40 or 50 years). Making it impossible for the pension to be gone through no fault of your own is what we owe people stuck with pensions.
It's a common attack on public goods: Amtrak & USPS, but would never be asked of the Military or FEMA.
Amtrak and USPS both charge for services. It's reasonable to expect them to not hemorrhage billions of dollars annually as well.
Further, it can be argued a private business could operate on USPS or Amtrak scale with greater efficiency, cost much much less, and even turn a profit (see SpaceX).
2. SpaceX, one could argue, is being subsidized majorly by the US government, for strategic reasons. I'm pretty sure it would have gone bankrupt without government intervention.
3. Almost no passenger rail system is fully profitable, in the world. Just like education, it's something you still want because it's a community/public service.
The assertion was a privately run company could do what USPS does a lot better, for less cost, and likely provide a better end result. SpaceX is an example of that, but there are many others.
Some parts of the military charge consumers, don’t they? For example, military Exchange stores charge for goods, but are also partly subsidized by direct appropriations - and the “profits” go back into military quality-of-life programs. You could decide instead to forgo this charge since as you say the military is not designed to turn a profit, but then you’d have to deal with all the perverse allocation problems and incentives that might pop up if everything in the store was suddenly “free”. Adding a cost to items helps to allocate limited supply (and helps to defray costs to the taxpayer of other military programs), even if the military as an overall organization is intended to direct taxpayer funds into achieving a purpose.
Now take that same idea and apply it to “providing government funded public transportation to make a city economically viable”, or “maintain a constitutionally mandated postal service”. Taking money for services is not incompatible with being fundamentally a government-funded service that expends more taxpayer funds than it brings in.
This seems like a specious argument to me. I'm not intimately familiar with the napkin math, but I am also not convinced that they would ve profitable simply by not delivering Amazon's packages. Their costs continue to rise every year- new addresses, inflating gas, healthcare and pension expenses- while their primary revenue stream (posted mail) has been continually declining.
Add to that the fact that the USPS still has to go by every address every day, and so the last mile costs are relatively fixed; the only additional cost to them for delivering is the internal sorting and movement investments needed to handle the volume. Nobody actually knows the rates amazon and USPS have negotiated, but outside of Trump I have not seen many people argue that they are losing money on the deal- most seem to believe that it is a win-win scenario.
Would you rather make $0 on 0 packages or "not $0" on lots of packages?
Amazon retail operates at basically 0 margin. It is very difficult to compete with them given their scale and willingness to forgo profit. The writing was on the wall once Amazon decided they wanted to handle their own shipping. No way Fed Ex et.al. could be competitive on price and make money.
- Yes
Its scary what amazon will be in the future.
This may have been true in the past but it's not an accurate any more. Especially the way you're phrasing it like how they don't make any money. Profit is low because they're using the cash flow to make further investment. Not because each item sold is not making any money.
USPS has been mostly reliable and yet on Saturday a package scheduled for delivery didn't make until Monday with no status change until Monday morning.
I wanted some more RAM this weekend, ordered it on Sunday morning and had it Sunday afternoon.
Personally I think that everyone is a little bit too "okay" about the whole pandemic thing... but you can certainly buy stuff from Amazon and have it show up quickly.
Given the substantial increase in online shopping prompted by the pandemic, Amazon is doing pretty well. Other retailers are doing much worse, including Walmart which has been the least reliable shipper I've bought things from.
Amazon's ability to adapt while other companies are falling on their faces is pretty impressive all things considered.
The Uber model wins by destroying society.
Or is the Amazon Logistics gig-economy tax scam unique to the UK?
Bezos: ok, I'll DIY.
USPS: uh oh.
The world's most sophisticated logistics company is WalMart.
Not because they wanted to be a logistics company, but because by doing their own logistics, they can cut costs.
Same thing with Amazon. At some point, shipping all those packages is your last remaining major cost (outside of personnel). The more you can do in-house, the cheaper you can do it.
And that's not the only space where they've done this. AWS is basically Amazon selling their infrastructure. Infrastructure they built because at some point it was their biggest cost. Then they reduced that cost by bringing it in-house. Then they turned it into a profit center by selling it.
So I don't think this is going to stop at Amazon doing their own deliveries. Soon enough, you will be able to ship items via Amazon. (This is already kind of the case with third party sellers on Amazon, but instead imagine treating Amazon as FedEx or UPS).
For retail, logistics is core business.
In Japan they use 7/11 to do deliveries to people and pay bills there like a post office. Maybe we can learn from them and use Amazon for that.
Because it's actively being sabotaged. It's staffing is held back by pension requirements which other parts of government and Amazon do not have. Their perfectly fine working sorting are removed.
I know this is the political line of the day, but the reality is USPS is, has been, and will be insanely inefficient for decades. Decades. That spans multiple presidents from both parties. Decades.
The very fact that USPS receives funding by Tax Payers, but also still charges the same tax payers money to use services, and still manages to lose billions of dollars every year is a modern marvel all in it's own right.
The very fact it costs USPS more than $0.55 to deliver a letter to your mailbox (which only USPS is legally allowed to put mail into for whatever reason in 2020), is insane. Raise rates they'll say! To what end? To the point where UPS or FedEX rates start looking attractive for normal letter mail? What will happen then to the USPS?
For larger packages over a few pounds, it's already insanely cheaper to ship packages via UPS or FedEx. Sometimes over half the price in difference. Neither UPS nor FedEx are subsidized by Tax Payers + Still Charge for Services. Somehow, they make a profit and deliver packages on time.
The mismanagement of USPS is as criminal as it is resolute. It is not the current administration's doing - claiming so is not just intellectually dishonest, it's flatly wrong. No, the mismanagement of USPS has always been, and all signs seem to say it will always be.
EDIT: It's a myth that USPS isn't tax payer funded. Pay attention to the wording they use - "Not Tax Payer Funded". That says nothing about routine bailouts[1][2][3], which are so routine they might as well be scheduled. How is a bailout not tax payer funding? Run yourself into the ground then get bailed out by tax payers again, and again, and again, and again. It would probably be more efficient to actually just give them the money up front.
[1] https://justthenews.com/government/congress/congressman-says...
[2] https://keller.house.gov/media/in-the-news/usps-has-lost-78-...
Besides the fact that this isn't true (you'd be astonished at the number of homes that USPS won't deliver to, generally rural areas[1]), it doesn't preclude USPS from being profitable if managed properly.
Let's not pretend if USPS could ditch some routes it would suddenly be profitable and not need billions of tax payer capitol injection all the time. They're a long ways from that.
Saddled with thousands of unproductive employees, ones that will never be fired, yet collect a paycheck paid for by tax payers, and will enjoy a comfortable retirement with all that pension money. USPS might be a quasi-private company, but they sure don't behave like a private company.
[1] I'm in the industry. For these shipments we have to send them FedEx or UPS, whichever is cheapest usually, since both will deliver when USPS will not.
I took a mailbox full, just 2 days of mail, 99% spam, and took it into my local post office. Plopped the mail on the counter and told the clerk I no longer wanted to receive mail from any of these advertisers.
Of course the clerk couldn't help me. USPS makes too much money delivering junk right to your mailbox. What a great system we're engineered here, where our national carrier service primarily slups junk mail around the country, and won't stop because it's one of their most profitable side-hustles.
https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...
So quite a lot.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/22/politics/postal-service-house...
Bailout, Funding, Potato, Potato.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/22/politics/postal-service-house...
Might as well be considered direct funding, since they find themselves in that situation almost like clockwork.
What history of bailouts? This "bailout" only passed in the House. They aren't receiving those funds.
> Might as well be considered direct funding
No, that's not what that term means.
> since they find themselves in that situation almost like clockwork.
No, they don't.
That being said, USPS used to be profitable until Congress decided that they pre-fund pensions for all new hires (1). They went from making a couple billion a year to losing $5 billion a year. Your statements have no truth in them. Republicans love to actively sabotage profitable and useful public services and then try to defund them by claiming they don't work.
As a bootstrapped business owner working out of a rural and very republican community, I'm disgusted by the lies and misinformation people use to try to destroy the USPS. It's literally in our constitution.
(1) https://www.thoughtco.com/postal-service-losses-by-year-3321...
If it was purely a service and designed to be in the red, we wouldn't be having this debate here.
No, it's a quasi-private business that manages itself horrendously, and requires routine capitol injection via Tax Payer Bailouts.
As a service? USPS is more of a jobs service - employing thousands of unproductive employees that will coast until retirement then enjoy part of that enormous pension.
Are you going to deny they were profitable before then?
You say they're horribly mismanaged and only exist to create bureaucracy. You ignore facts and reality. It seems like you've made up your mind and you won't have reality interject. I pity you and your warped mindset.
If they're a "Public Service", then let's stop these emergency bailouts every few years and just fund the darn thing properly.
If they're a business, then we need to stop bailing them out and force them to work with what they have, or let people go that are not pulling their weight. After all, their private-business competition has managed to do just this.
Either way, pretending this is some new emergency is disingenuous. USPS has been on fire for decades, that is a fact, paper-profits or not. It's about how they operate, at the core.
The pension requirement is two-fold. First, to guarantee postal employees they will have a retirement waiting for them, regardless of who the current administration is or what the political tides bring tomorrow. That's huge.
The second part is it makes hiring new people quite expensive. That discourages hiring instead of working with the people they already have (~470,000[1]!!!!). It's no secret it's hard to be fired from government jobs, and no secret USPS is the same in that regard. There's likely a massive amount of bloat within USPS that would better be cut than preserved. That alone, chopping dead weight, could help free USPS up from it's current predicament.
I'm floored that we have so many people staunchly defending status quo with USPS today. A year ago, we would all be railing about how inefficient USPS is, blah blah blah. But, politics blinds everyone in turn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#:....
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
Most private businesses no longer operate with defined benefit pensions, because businesses have moved on to defined contribution retirement plans (eg 401k) which are inherently prefunded. Funding retirement obligations at the time they are accrued is a good thing, and we should push for more of it rather than silently indebting future generations.
If the USPS was partially compensating workers by promising them a pension out of some future budget, then they were only profitable as long as their assumptions about growth held. We can accept this while still acknowledging USPS as a public service entitled to public funding, especially as needed to get through this accounting change.
I'd imagine one of the goals of such legislation was to reduce the bloat within USPS - ie. let go of unproductive employees and replace them with productive employees, or just remove dead weight completely.
Instead, USPS is basically a job's program. "Nobody ever got fired from USPS", is probably not very far off from the truth.
Just like courts, building permits, transfer stations, vital records, DMVs, passports, and every other government service that charges fees (including the IRS itself!).
> For larger packages over a few pounds, it's already insanely cheaper to ship packages via UPS or FedEx
USPS rates are high for anything over 12 inches on a dimension. Compare the prices for shipping a small package and you will see why many small businesses depend on USPS, especially ones unable to negotiate favorable contracts with UPS/Fedex.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/08/us-postal-rat...
https://gofranklingo.wordpress.com/tag/compare-postage-rates...
They're not being funded through taxes.
2. Do you think it's a bailout in a year when the US is supposed to have mass voting by mail?
3. (whataboutism) How many (especially big) US companies haven't received help in 2020?
> but the reality is USPS is, has been, and will be insanely inefficient for decades
Because you mention them and efficiency, here's a reminder that FedEx had horrible guidance in September 2019 (YoY from 2018 lowered guidance) leading some analysts to speculate towards bankruptcy; had deliverability reliability issues such that Amazon cut deliveries with them.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/09/26/is-there-hope-for-...
https://investorplace.com/2018/12/fedex-reported-earnings-an...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2019/12/18/am...
And Fedex is struggling while it's workforce is free of pension and healthcare costs for their mostly contracted workforce; which has been ruled a mis-classification of workers
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fedex-settlement-idUSKCN0...
The Constitution make operating a postal service one of the enumerated powers. If you want to change that, I suggest lobbying for an Amendment.
I'm sure that will be quite popular.
That can't actually happen, because if UPS or FedEx delivers first-class mail they have to pay the USPS the normal price for the delivery on top of their own costs (39 U.S.C. §601). Ergo, UPS or FedEx will always be the more expensive option for letters. The only bright point is that physical letters are becoming increasingly obsolete with most communications taking place electronically. Now if we could just do something about all the physical junk mail…
Even after pension funding in 2019, they lost $3.5 billion on operations. They've always been extremely inefficient. Between 1960-1995, they lost a net accumulated total of $91 billion
Blaming the pension funding bill for the economic woes of the USPS is wholly inaccurate
6-day service, rural delivery, profitability; pick two.
1. Because their prices are uniform and fixed by legislature, and they are required by law to serve every part of this country, including remote rural areas.
This means that private carriers cherry-pick profitable, high-volume, high-margin parts of mail delivery, while letting USPS handle the unprofitable, negative-margin parts of mail delivery.
2. Because they are actively being sabotaged by the current administration.
3. Because they are forced to pre-fund their pensions. If we required the DoD to pre-fund pensions in the same manner, their budget would double overnight, and four fifths of the military would be fired tomorrow.
>This means that private carriers cherry-pick profitable, high-volume, high-margin parts of mail delivery, while letting USPS handle the unprofitable, negative-margin parts of mail delivery.
This is such an important part that appears [0] to be missing from most recent journalism about the USPS. Unless you want to tell a large portion of this country "sorry, you need to drive X miles to pick up your own mail" someone is going to have to do these delivery routes. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems unlikely that a private company can serve these routes in a clearly fundamentally cheaper manner. There are lower bounds on the costs, i.e. the sparse delivery routes are real geography with real people, you have to physically traverse them to make deliveries.
[0] based on my recollection
You're not wrong. None of the private mail carriers can beat USPS pricing on these routes and still turn a profit.
mmmmkay,
> PostNord Sverige (formerly Posten AB) is the name of the Swedish postal service. The word "posten" means "the post" or "the mail" in Swedish. In 2009 it merged with its Danish equivalent, Post Danmark A/S, forming PostNord AB, a holding company that is jointly owned by the Swedish (60%) and Danish (40%) governments.
People depend on postage just like they depend on water or electricity. It would be far better to privatize military as it make no money at all!
USPS as a governmental institution was attack by politician trying to destabilise it so then they can spew this BS that USPS is not profitable - it was until shackles were put on them.
This patter is so overused that by now I would hope people get an idea of it.
Take a 'non profit' service institution, its doing too well for private business to compete completely with it.
Hit institution with new management change laws, cut funding.
Lament how awful given institution is, how old and outdated.
Surely this brand new company could do it better, faster.
Lets sell institution and give business to those new companies, they know what they are doing.
And we will spend that money on filling pockets of contractors building roads we bombed abroad... ups i mean parks, lets build parks.
And what is the outcome of that? American healthcare 'system'.