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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

The question I have is, why does the USPS provide a discount for bulk mail at all? Sending bulk mail is less than half the price if a regular letter. It’s basically a subsidized door-to-door garbage delivery. My recycling bin is right next to my mailbox, and my daily routine is removing the garbage from my mailbox and putting it in the bin. Such a ridiculous waste. And it’s my responsibility to opt out of this nonsense? Make it more expensive to send and maybe that will reduce the crap being sent.

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> why does the USPS provide a discount for bulk mail at all?

Because as a condition of the discount, it is presorted by ZIP code, eliminating a significant part of the labor cost of processing it.

But why not heavily tax it?

They could just as easily make a rule that bulk mail costs twice as much as normal mail, and still require senders to presort them.

Sure, some senders would then try to send their bulk mail as normal mail. Then there could be another rule that defines what "bulk mail" is, and that anything falling under that definition must be sent bulk, with the consequence being fines and refusing to deliver that mail.

Yes, this is more complicated, and I'm sure some bad actors would still be able to get through, but I expect this would greatly reduce spam.

I imagine part of the issue with something like this is that the USPS is chronically underfunded, and policing and enforcing it would be to much extra work.

There are still plenty of legit reasons to send bulk email, such as companies sending you bills, or the government informing people about local stuff.

Bulk email is discounted because it saves the mail company a lot of money: it comes presorted, and there is no need to mess around with stamps.

Why would a bill be a bulk email?

One example might be an energy company (they tend to be big) that will send bills to a significant percentage of any residential area in its catchment area, probably four times a year at around the same time for everyone. Now repeat for water companies, phone companies, local government et cetera.

No reason for those to be bulk emails. They’d just be customized per customer.

Bulk, for a mail delivery company, refers exclusively to volume. You get discount on volume. Creating massive volumes of customized mails has been trivial for years.

My comment was about email, not snail mail.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35753488>

For the USPS, "bulk mail" is a term of art, more properly bulk presorted mail.

There are several categories: 500 pieces of first-class mail, 200 pieces or 50 lb as "USPS Marketing Mail", Parcel Select Ground (50-piece minimum per mailing), presorted and carrier route sourted bound matter (300 pieces), library mail (300 pieces), media mail (300 pieces).

<https://www.usps.com/business/business-shipping.htm>

The tradition of discounting certain mailings, especially publications (e.g., newspapers) and books dates to the very beginning of the US postal service and was established by Benjamin Franklin.

<https://www.history.com/news/us-post-office-benjamin-frankli...>

I strongly suspect crote wrote "email" intending "mail". Particularly as little email carries stamps or requires sorting by a post office.

I've nearly done the same several times in this thread myself. "Mail" really doesn't roll off my fingertips so readily these days.

Just because there are legitimate reasons for bulk mail to exist doesn’t mean it should be discounted. Most bills are electronic nowadays, and for the smaller number of people that live in rural areas and maybe still rely on snail mailed bills, I’m sure another 30 cents isn’t going to break the bank, when the bank is making 20% interest on the credit card bill.

There's no reason why it has to be defined this way, though. Create a new category for "marketing mail" (or whatever), define what belongs to it, and require senders to continue to presort it, but make it cost 10x as much (or whatever).

This is never going to be perfect, of course, but anything that reduces the amount of crap I get in my mailbox every day isn't just great for my levels of annoyance, but also great for the environment. 95% of what shows up in my mailbox ends up in the recycling bin. Creating, printing, shipping, and recycling that material is a huge waste.

It's certainly possible to do that, but keep in mind that if the government (or an organ of the government) is in the business of deciding what category of speech something is, that is eventually going to cause a problem.

> The question I have is, why does the USPS provide a discount for bulk mail at all?

Because those are their customers, and they treat their customers well. The hundreds of millions of USPS mail recipients, on the other hand, are the product. USPS works for their customers, not for the rest of us.

https://insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office...

>‘You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”’

-- Patrick Donahoe, US Postmaster General

This is of course an evil fascist talking point though, because the USPS has a large union that consistently votes Democrat, and how could we do wonderful mail-in ballots without the wonderful US Postal Service? Don't be a fascist, mindlessly cheer for USPS.

And this is why privatizing essential government services (ok, the USPS is a weird public-private hybrid, taking on some of the worse attributes of both) is a bad idea. The USPS should exist to serve regular-Joe recipients of mail, not to serve the bulk mailers that pay the USPS to put literal garbage in our mailboxes every day.

But once they have to worry about revenue and income statements and all that, an organization is going to care more about the interests of the people who pay them the most money, rather than the people they're actually there to serve.

The privatization is the bad part? Never a piece of junk mail until...

Oh, wow. Look at this, never actually privatized.

> The USPS should exist to serve regular-Joe recipients of mail,

Can we get a federal telegraph agency too, just in case I need to receive some telegrams? You have no idea how horrible it is having to pay exorbitant sums of cash on private telegraph service.

The trouble is that the USPS has a union which is a reliable voting bloc for the Democrats. That makes it sacred. Even if it performs a service no one has given a shit about since the 1970s, everyone will gush on about how "what if I need to receive some mail" and pretend that mail service belongs somewhere other than a museum exhibit. I predict that every 10 years or so, it will be necessary to invent a new reason why we couldn't ever get rid of it.

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