Hacker News Reader

Comment by asoneth | Hacker News Reader

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/

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com