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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

Whatever USPS is paid to deliver me junk mail I would gladly pay a premium to USPS for them to not deliver me junk mail. Of course as I say that I wonder just how much money USPS is paid to deliver junk mail to one person for a month? It's probably a lot more than I'd expect.

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In FY2019 the USPS earned $16.4 billion from marketing mail [1]. Estimating 121 million households that's ~$136 per household per year.

The households that might choose to spend $136 per year to avoid junk mail are probably wealthier than average and therefore more valuable to advertisers. So letting those households opt-out would also probably reduce the value of those that remain. As a wild guess I suspect they might might need to charge closer to ~$200/yr to be revenue neutral to the USPS.

Having said that there are cheaper options [2] and I don't think the USPS should have to resort to delivering ~41 pounds of unwanted junk to every citizen every year just to stay afloat.

[1] https://about.usps.com/what/financials/integrated-financial-... [2] https://www.paperkarma.com/

Wouldn't costs also go down since they're delivering less junk and only stopping at houses that have letters/bills/etc to deliver ?

Good point -- I don't know how to estimate the marginal cost of delivering marketing mail but it's certainly not zero. Looking at the same USPS FY2020 financials [1] it looks like marketing mail constitutes a little more than half of the pieces they deliver. That about matches my experience. My guess is that several times a month I have a mailbox that contains solely marketing mail. I'm not sure how much money it would save the USPS if the mail carrier passes by my house without stopping on those days, but I suspect the bigger impact would be dealing with half the physical volume of mail for our household.

I still hope we can find a more sustainable path for the USPS than forcing them to stay alive by delivering something no one wants to receive.

[1] https://about.usps.com/what/financials/integrated-financial-...

I am almost 100% paperless with my affairs and nearly every single day I receive a mailbox solely filled with marketing mail.

No. USPS still has to stop by all of the houses anyway to pick up mail as well. So junk mail subsidizes the cost of going to all of those remote homes.

Sounds a solution, if one is already willing to pay to avoid receiving junk mail, would be to use a mail forwarding service and instruct them to discard junk mail if they do not already do so.

I think it depends on why you want to avoid junk mail.

There's a lot of human effort and natural resources consumed in growing timber, cutting it down, shipping it, pulping it, printing it, mailing it, delivering it, recycling it, and pulping it again but into lower-quality product.

Whereas my only wasted labor is to skim through the mail as I walk from the mailbox to the house and then drop the junk into the bin by the door. In the grand scheme of things that part doesn't bother me except insofar as it reminds me of the useless waste of the rest of the lifecycle.

Nice "pursuit of happiness" you have going there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to bury it in junk mail unless you paid me a monthly fee.

Why should you have to pay a national service to NOT deliver you junk mail? If your government isn’t serving you, why would you double down and assume additional funding will address the issue?

Totally agree, just for some reason it’s unfathomable in this country that there could be a government-provided service that runs at a loss because it’s something that everyone benefits from that needs to be a government service precisely because it couldn’t realistically run at a profit without, say, doing something really backwards, like physically spamming people with no way to opt out.

I’ll also point out that without junk mail, they could reduce OpEx quite a bit, and that should be factored into the equation as well. Package delivery services don’t stop at each address each day, and without junk mail, most households wouldn’t receive something in the mail each day. Same with trash collection — literally 95% of the mail we receive goes directly into bin, and I’m sure landfills are composed of a not-insignificant amount of junk mail. Excessive traffic and road wear from more mail delivery vehicles is probably less significant, but still caused by this. So, in addition to the environmental harm and annoyance of junk mail, the ridiculous situation we find in costs more than just the apparent “lost revenue” we’d have without it. It’s not like the government doesn’t spend way more per household per year on far lower value things than guaranteed physical mail delivery.

Imagine if politicians got national parks in their crosshairs, they were deemed not profitable enough, and the proposed solution was to start selling ad space in prominent outdoor locations, like Yosemite. Just picture Half Dome, with a nice fat “BROUGHT TO YOU BY XFINITY, HOME OF THE PACKAGE”.

Do you really receive junk every day?

In the UK, the cheap junk mailing rate allows Royal Mail to delay delivery for several days, to suit their schedule. They naturally batch it up. This is also appropriate for a lot of commercial non-junk mail.

In Denmark, it is delivered around once a week, probably with a similar system.

In both countries, I opted out of all junk mail. I receive a paper letter every 6 weeks or so.

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