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Comment by tdoggette | Hacker News Reader

To kill junk mail would be to kill the US Postal Service, I think. I'm not sure if it's worth the price.

Shouldn't the US Postal Service have died a long time ago?

It always amazes me how the US as self-proclaimed champions of the free market and technological progress still holds on to outdated, bureaucratic nationalized monopolies like the postal service.

In many countries this market has already been privatized a long time ago, and/or scaled down to the point where relics like post offices no longer exist.

The main reason for the USPS is coverage. The US has a whole lot of sparsely populated, but not unpopulated, land. Covering these people is part of what makes the USPS unprofitable.

The same problem exists for telephones but the main approach has been to set high minimum prices that non-rural carriers have to pay rural carriers for traffic flowing from the former to the latter. This enables the rural providers to make a profit but leads to unintended consequences like free conference call companies set up in rural areas which get a kick back from the local provider for the incoming traffic they engender.

I thought the reason the USPS was unprofitable was that they had to fund employee pensions 75 years in advance

In fact, I thought the USPS was profitable before that mandate. In fact, one of the very few profitable government agencies. But I might be wrong on that.

It always amazes me that the "efficient", market-driven private package-delivery companies in the US... actually use the government-run postal service as an integral part of their system.

It also always amazes me that people outside the US, or people who've only looked at models of other countries, think we could have universal delivery from a profit-driven private entity (hint: the US does not have the population distribution or density of European nations).

In a sense, it's lovely that people living in the middle of nowhere in Alaska who require bush planes to fly hundreds of miles to deliver anything to them can get a letter for only 40-something cents courtesy of the US Postal Service. The American system of government is all about enabling people's selfish choices to live in the wilderness by forcing everyone else to subsidize their infrastructure, and that's a truly wonderful thing. Can we please find a better way of doing so than stuffing trash in my mailbox every week?

Having come from a country where the postal service was privitized, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: it sucks. But hey, they're profitable...

One of the (very few) things the US does better than most countries is the USPS. It should be a point of pride, not some problem that needs to be left up to the 'free market' to ruin.

Isn't this a perfect example of a service you would want to keep paid for by everyone so it does not die? To me it is a part of important infrastructure and thus should not be thrown into the profit-needing waters of private capitalism.

It won't kill the postal service. Maybe they'll have to cut back delivery to two or three per week and maybe stamps will have to go up, but it's worth it.

I would highly encourage you to talk to your local small business association, as well as your city officials, before you conclude that it's "worth it".

I'm so sorry for all the small local businesses that can't get any customers from Yelp, internet advertising, advertising on the side of a bus, putting up flyers, having an enticing enough storefront, providing a good enough product/service to get word of mouth, setting up a daily deal, advertising on the radio, or hiring someone to stand by the side of the road with a sandwich board, and have to resort to the frankly sociopathic behavior of wasting valuable time and resources mailing me trash to throw away.

Some people willingly embrace the future, some have to be nodged and a few won't come if they can't help it.

Kill mail, keep package delivery.

In Greece, we don't have junk mail, and the post office works just fine.

It would also kill several small businesses that rely on junk mail as their only affordable advertising medium (e.g. think Pennysavers).

If their only means of survival is to ship metric tons of trash to people, let them die.

I think we'll live.

We could jack the price of a stamp to $5, it would still be a reasonable price, and nobody but the stingiest of cheap people could possibly complain. If mailing something isn't worth the price of a hamburger to you, then you shouldn't be mailing that something.

Wouldn't that affect, for instance, eBay sellers who need to ship their goods? You'd need to bump parcel mail up in cost in order to stop people using that instead. I've got small items from fricking China for less than $5 total including shipping!

Just set a 5 dollar rate for standard envelopes and slide everything else that was previously less that 5 dollars up a bit. Things that were previously 10 dollars or more would stay the same.

People who are running businesses that involve sending legitimate mail cheaply will just have to start collecting larger shipping fees. It needn't affect anyone shipping anything but small things.

That sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid that you'd be left with credit card and insurance companies who could afford those high rates. Your local small mom-and-pop shops would be left out.

Sounds like an improvement.

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