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'.