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amazes me how the US as self-proclaimed champions of the free market and technological progress still holds on to outdated, bureaucratic nationalized monopolies like the postal service.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