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Comment by limagnolia | Hacker News Reader

Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.

USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places.

Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.

Charge junk mail the same rate as first class. More money for the post office? That's a win. Or less junk mail? Also a win.

> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places.

Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.

How does that square with their universal service obligation?

Which county is that?

I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.

Thanks! The free PO box is an interesting loophole that USPS can exploit.

My rural PO Box rental is $120/year, for the smallest size. If there's a free option they must keep it quiet.

I didn't know about it for the first few years I lived here, so ask when you're at the counter.

Most extremely rural areas don't have home delivery and never have. It's been this way for literally centuries.

Their web site seems to suggest they have last mile delivery everywhere because they're under universal service obligation. But, when I lived rural, I remember my mom having to drive to the post office to pick up the mail.

The universal service obligation is not that they have to provide home delivery for everyone, but that they can't close your podunk post office and make life even more hellish for the the 12 households that rely on it that it already is.

And if that's the case, then what it indicates is that USPS in your area is chronically understaffed and underfunded.

Like...c'mon, this is not hard stuff to understand. There's no motive for the USPS to be neglecting last-mile service in your area if they have the resources to provide it.

And this is absolutely caused by Republican efforts to destroy it. Because that's what they've been doing for decades, specifically to get people to think it's doing a bad job, specifically so that they can privatize it and farm out the contract to their big-business buddies.

This has been the standard in many rural areas since the post office was founded.

Having a P.O. box is a choice: you asked that mail be delivered to the P.O. box instead of to your residence. You may have been throwing away money for 20 years! Instead of complaining, go to your post office and submit a change of address form.

Junk mail is a net positive for postal service revenue. Even if you could eliminate it (major free speech concern), would it be a good idea? Who would pay extra when the can just throw out the junk in less than 2 minutes a week?

A privatised postal service could capture this as well to finance rural delivery.

im uninterested in having to pay for said waste, and have to figure out whether the junk is recyclable or not

its not just paper - all kinds of strange plastics too

when i was in the states i despised that i was required to accept said junk mail under penalty of law and i think thats also a free speech concern. i have the right to not be part of an audience

I'm not sure that there is any law forcing you to accept it, but if you have a mailbox, it will get put into it. I don't think there is any law requiring anyone to have a mailbox, though.

prime “can’t see the forest for the trees” sort of thinking, here

Absolutely. People love to find the lowest possible snipe, to pretend like they are totally unable to understand value.

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