Tech experts, including Google, to discuss future of the USPS | Hacker News Reader

Tech experts, including Google, to discuss future of the USPS

washingtonpost.com

42 pointslocaltalent49 comments

The most sensible suggestion I've heard recently was from a co-worker who said it would make sense to not sound out postal workers to every house, but instead to keep all the mail at the Post Office. If you want your mail delivered to your door, then you can pay extra. Otherwise pick it up yourself. This would greatly cut down on the USPS expenses.

I also would love a premium service where I get one address (just like Google Voice) that I give out and then the mail is actually forwarded to my new location if/when I move. UPS provides something like this, I believe, but why not USPS?

Would just shift cost from delivery to storage. Might be a net gain (or a net loss), but would also have deployment costs.

USPS does offer that, NCOA.

This is assuming that the amount of mail goes down. Would also naturally cut down on the amount of junk mail, since most people won't bother to go check their mail if it's always just junk.

As with the rest of the modern world, junk mail (advertisers) are the backbone of the USPS. Cutting down the amount of junk mail might be bad for the post office.

I disagree. The post office depends on junk mail only so long as it has to make door to door deliveries. If the door to door delivery is paid for by the subscriber directly the USPS can ditch junk mail as the main source of income. My main point is that USPS relying on junk mail is not sustainable. Either it will go bankrupt, or it will get huge tax subsidies, or it will get a bit creative. It is going to lose some of its work force either way.

A better solution would be mailboxes all in one area for the neighborhood. Eliminate door to door.

That could be the intermediary solution. Or a neighborhood could get together and deliver from post office to the neighborhood boxes via a third-party delivery provider. I think that we cannot completely eliminate door to door. There are lots of people out there that are not able to make the trip even down the street to the community mailbox and that rely on the mail system daily. However, saying that door to door delivery is a premium service would at least help USPS not go bankrupt.

The post office already can and does get this efficiency with community mailboxes. My grandmother and I both use a key to get our mail from a large mail drop. She lives in an newly constructed old person neighborhood in rural Florida, and I live in a Manhattan apartment building. My parents get their mail delivered by car to a personal mailbox. I agree with your suggestion, but how do we get existing neighborhoods to build a mail drop? Who pays for it? Who maintains the keyed mailboxes? My parents would be completely okay with having a mail drop and picking their mail up at the entrance to the neighborhood, but I don't think they are interested paying to build it.

I think we should combine some of the ideas:

If your neighborhood has community mailboxes, then you get mail every day. If you have personal mailboxes, then you get mail 3 days per week. If you want mail everyday, then organize your neighborhood to have a community mailbox.

I like your compromise. It still gives everyone access to door to door delivered mail but also cuts costs significantly. And the best part is that people who live in larger communities get the opportunity to get their mail delivered every day if they so choose.

The cost to build it would be recovered in the first few months if people were actually charged for the cost of having a person walk around for a half hour 6 days a week. That's got to cost $200 a month for a small community. Of course, government specializes in hiding the true costs of things, so who knows.

> If you want your mail delivered to your door, then you can pay extra. Otherwise pick it up yourself.

The funny part of that is, that is the inverse of how it is now. The post office charges for PO Box rental [0], but delivers to your house for free. Keep in mind that most post offices do not have sufficient PO Box numbers to cover all teh points they currently deliver to.

[0] the exception being those places with insufficient density to justify street/rural delivery. In those places the customers must travel to the post office to collect their mail, and they get the PO Box for free.

You want me to pay extra for the privilege of having junk mail delivered? I can't see this being a very popular option. Sorting through the junk to make sure I catch the rare piece of important mail is a chore. I would pay extra to opt out of all mass mailings, and have the occasional piece of actual mail delivered. They'd probably only have to open my mailbox 5-6 times a month. Win-win.

The amount of junk mail will go down. Since nobody is willing to go and pick it up and then will actually discard junk immediately at the pickup location, the value derived from sending junk mail will go down. Thus there will be less of it sent out.

This would also result in the firing of a very large amount of postal workers. Now you and I don't really care, logically you would only keep a job around as long as it is needed, but politically this would be a massive problem.

Agreed. But that goes into a very different discussion of how we are now so productive that having a job becomes a priviledge. I personally do not know if pure capitalism with unregulated markets scales well along the productivuty curve with a large population as a given.

I don’t understand why you can’t address physical mail to an identity and let the USPS automatically route it to a physical address. Especially during and after college, I moved so much, I’m sure mail got lost en route. It would also help with privacy. You could have “throwaway addresses” given to certain businesses, possibly, or instruct the USPS to block mail from <sender>.

"I don’t understand why you can’t address physical mail to an identity an let the USPS automatically route it to a physical address."

USPS should have transitioned toward providing digital identity services for citizens and government at least five years ago. They were perfectly positioned to do this, and yet completely missed the opportunity.

You could just use usps general delivery as a throwaway address, if necessary.

UPS provides this: http://www.theupsstore.com/products/pages/maiandpos.aspx

You just have to pay for both storage and forwarding.

I’m picturing this being something everyone can do, not a very niche offering. Interesting, though.

★ Edit in response: Only some of the same problems are being solved. If the USPS let everyone choose an ID, it wouldn’t be long before websites let (US) customers enter “tcollins12” instead of “Tom Collins, 145 Main St., Somewhere, ST 12345” during checkout… it wouldn’t be long before your public wishlist said “ship it to USPS address ‘alanh’” without giving away your residence… it’s not just an alias, it’s a paradigm shift. (With the UPS offering you linked, your address still takes the form of an address.)

Everyone can do this. You are picturing it being paid for by the tax payers instead of you directly, giving the perception of free. Then again I found their offering to be too expensive and would love to see USPS trying to compete with them.

Anyone complaining about USPS quality of service should really travel to other countries. From my experience in Europe and elsewhere, USPS knocks it out of the park.

One of the reasons that USPS is a national monopoly is that it provides an important piece of national infrastructure. I don't see how that is going to be replaced, as many features of federal and local government depend on systems for reliably sending citizens messages, such as censuses, legal notifications such as court summons, drafts, various aspects of voting and elections, information and notices from local governments, etc.

Most of these depend on every citizen being reachable by mail, which is in the USPS's charter, and which causes a lot of overhead. If the USPS goes away, private companies will not provide service to everyone. I have no idea how these systems will continue function (e-mail is, for various reasons, not an acceptable solution at the moment).

I would love for USPS to develop alternate forms of income in order to essentially "pay for" traditional mail delivery. I'm not sure it's in their DNA though.

From talking to my grandmother, apparently people used to love the postoffice. Now, I don't know a single person in my age group (20-30 somethings) that doesn't despise the postoffice. The fact that I can't opt out of garbage being delivered to my door, by an actual person, is pretty infuriating to most.

If the post office acted like a "letter carrier" and not a package/spam carrier, I think they could do alright. Let UPS etc handle shipping actual packages, drop the spam and drop delivery to 4-5 days a week tops, they would save alot of money.

The USPS makes money on the spam/junk mail and packages, not on letters. The profit incentive for them is not the same as their customers desires.

I understand the bulk mailers make up a good portion of their income, and effectively subsidize regular mail. However, I don't think it's an acceptable tradeoff. You can makeup for the difference by probably dropping a single day of delivery - my guess is postage wouldn't even have to raise if you dropped to either 4 or 5 days a week.

They are going with what they know makes them money. They have already cut Saturdays, and I would expect them to cut another day too.

They haven't cut saturdays in my area, so it's probably just a regional or maybe rural thing?

Why are we trying to save USPS? It offers worse service than any of the private companies, and according to this article, it currently has a net loss of 7 billion dollars. How about we delete it, then git commit -a -m "deleted unused stuff, should improve efficiency"

Because they deliver a letter for 44 cents anywhere in the country, in a few days.

Do any of the private companies get within a factor of 10 of that price?

That should tell you something: it's not profitable.

The USPS is obligated to deliver to any address in America for the same fee. If we had private carriers serve first class mail, it could cost pennies to deliver a letter to New York but hundreds of dollars to deliver to someone living in the middle of nowhere.

What is going to happen to the Postal Service? In 10-15 years, dead tree mail will be an anachronism. Mass mail campaigns will be much less effective because the current buying generation will have grown up ignoring letters. Will the post office be able to continue to function after losing 80% of it's current volume? Does this mean that we'll be trusting one or many startups to deliver important information from the government?

I also wonder how a world with a much smaller post office would look. I know there are already several startups operating in this space, but it seems like there will be a large opportunity in "replacing printed mail" in the near future.

According to their facts page[1], USPS process 6761 pieces of mail per second. They had a 2009 revenue of $68 billion. They pay $2.1 billion in salaries every two weeks.

Dead tree mail isn't dead just yet; they definitely have enough time to figure out a plan.

[1] http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm

> Dead tree mail isn't dead just yet; they definitely have enough time to figure out a plan.

Traditional printed mail (flats, letters, etc) will not go away until every person has an iPad (or equivalent) and has broadband. Many many areas of the US are still without broadband access.

Mass mailers are already shifting to email (and to a lesser extent SMS and apps).

earthclassmail.com is what they should look at. Many things don't need to be delivered. The post office could actually let people see images of mass mailings before they are even printed or let people print them themselves with no delivery.

In other words, where electronic mail won't work, USPS could handle parts of the delivery that make sense and how its done shouldn't matter.

As far as delivery 6 days a week, I think most people could get by with delivery 2 or 3 times a week.

Delivery of commercial could be scheduled to arrive just before delivery days so they could avoid storing too much mail.

USPS or private equivalents could also accept and store electronic bills for you as a trusted third party so you can access them as long as needed. It could certify that bills have actually been paid.

There are a lot of things that could be done to leverage its "official" position. But to do so, it actually must become technically competent. At the moment, it cannot even put the mail into the right box consistently at my house.

> Many things don't need to be delivered. The post office could actually let people see images of mass mailings before they are even printed or let people print them themselves with no delivery.

How curious, I imagine this is how people described fax machines in the early 70's...

not everyone had a fax machine in their house and pocket, though.

Most people do not have a smart phone, nor are most people capable of paying all their bills online.

Yet.

So we should wait until the last person that still needs physical delivery before making any changes.

That's the problem with enforced monopolies. If we had many competing companies, some can move into the future unrestricted. And those who don't want to change, other companies could continue to charge more for less value. Unlike now, where it takes an act of Congress to change the delivery schedule.

> The post office could actually let people see images of mass mailings before they are even printed or let people print them themselves with no delivery.

This makes as much sense as removing commercials from TV shows because people can now go to the network website and watch the commercials there. The problem isn't "how do we continue to provide junk mail cheaply?" it's "how do we continue to provide regular mail cheaply without being subsidized by junk mail?"

Are you sure junk mail is subsidizing regular mail? This article seems to indicate quite the opposite.

"Of particular concern has been the decline in the lucrative first-class mail, largely consisting of personal letters and cards, bills and payments and similar items. First-class mail volume fell 6.6 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2009, and 4.8 percent in 2008. Traditionally, this mail has produced more than half of total revenue.

Volume for standard mail – advertising and similar business items – improved somewhat, indicating some signs of economic recovery, but generates less income."

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/12/post-office-lost-bi...

I wouldn't mind getting mail once a week. The question is, would this work for everyone?

Are there items that are time critical (need less than two weeks round trip) AND must be sent physically AND would be prohibitively expensive to send through private mail services?

Considering the items I have in my mail pile right now I can't think of any.

most people would probably agree. The exceptions can be handled.

One fairly simple solution would be to reduce the frequency of mail delivery. Instead of Mon-Sat, we could deliver mail Mon-Wed-Fri or Tues-Thurs-Sat (different days for different zones).

That doesn't reduce the mail volume. Then you would have to store the mail somewhere, and still have the same amount to sort. So on the days when they did deliver, it would take longer to sort it.

I think one of the premises of the OP was that mail volume will be declining over time due to digital communication.

The commercial mailings could be given to the post office only on the days they'll be delivered. And this commercial mail is often already sorted

Yes, it doesn't reduce mail volume. That's been collapsing all on its own, as has the effort to sort it.

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