Rethinking The Postal System
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"You could specify the to and return adress, you could pay with a credit card, and you could add whatever options you want."
What would the point of obfuscating your address with a 16 digit ID number be? You'd be adding another layer of complexity to an already simple system of names and addresses on a designed letter carrier's route. If you want obscurity you can always register a PO box.
Your solution also relies on other businesses easily and quickly adopting your idea, which in reality is never quick and easy unfortunately.
Truth be told, the mail system isn't perfect, but USPS has done a lot in the last 3-4 years to innovate their own business. I don't have to wait in line anymore because I can print out postage and tape it to my package and leave that at the post office.
Unfortunately a lot of post office customers don't seem to realize the online system exists.
I didn't really start mailing things until the last 3-4 years, so I must admit that I don't know how the system worked previously.
While I agree that it wouldn't be immediately adopted, I don't think it would require too much work on their end to make it work. It's probably naive, and I don't fully understand the system now, so I may be totally wrong, but this was just my idea.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout....
Well, self sufficient if you ignore their pension obligations.
The same logic says that if I run a business with $100 in revenue, that pays $50 in cash and $75 in IOUs to suppliers, it's profitable.
If so, you may have noticed that your mail is ultimately delivered by a human. Someone who has to be able to grab a handful of mail out of their bag and perform a quick visual check that yes, everything in this bundle actually goes to this address. Someone who might have a hundred bundles destined for an apartment building, and would like to be able to quickly parse the addresses to put them into the proper mailbox instead of having to type a long, cryptic ID into a smartphone, and hope they continue to have connectivity.
Any proposed new addressing system also needs to deal with the fact that the postal service serves EVERYONE. Even people way out in the middle of nowhere who have no cellular service. The ONLY processing power available to those mail carriers is their own brain, so it pretty much HAS to be human-readable.
All of the things you complain about in the address are USEFUL redundancy. Including all of that stuff makes it more likely that mail will get to its destination in the event of the ink being smeared (or running due to being rained on). It's more data that's useful in error correction.
Also, if you are mailing out many things and hate copying the info manually, let me introduce you to a concept called "printable address labels" and "mail merge". I recently had to mail out about a hundred books after a successful Kickstarter; I manually addressed maybe three of them. I put books in mailing envelopes, put the labels on the envelopes, sealed them shut, and brought them to the post office. They figured out how much it would cost me to mail them. I paid with a credit card. It really wasn't a major hassle at all.
back in the day, back in the day...
Reducing or contractorizing staff (to cut medical and retirement costs) would have been done already by a really private company, but would have political and economic consequences given the size of USPS and government affiliation. It is probably easier to cut facilities and routes, lower delivery frequency, vs change employment terms.
The USPS is increasingly b2c and spam delivery service; used a lot less for b2b and c2c, so reducing frequency to even twice a week would be fine.
Second, they need to push their parcel service, and open the counter all week long. The internet has caused a reduction in regular first class postal mail, but is also increasing the number of packages people send. Rising fuel costs make sending packages locally a good option.
I like Saturday home delivery, but from a business perspective, it's not critical. Parcels, however, I think are critical.
Yes, rather than fully funding their pensions like any private company, they should be allowed to push massive problems into the future like the public sector does.
High-risk private enterprises don't do pensions now (can you imagine a Zynga Pension Plan?). Approximately everyone has shifted to defined-contribution from defined-benefit. The problem is USPS and the fully-private companies with legacy pension plans are both in long-term decline and have underfunded pensions, but USPS is particularly large in workforce and obvious in long-term decline (and political).
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00004:@@@L...;
Though strangely, defined benefit non-pension plans (e.g., retiree health care) are not required to funded. That's a loophole which should definitely be closed.
You are correct that the private sector has abandoned pensions for defined-contribution retirement plans, and with good reason. The public sector should do the same.
Cool, now just make them fund the next 75 years of expected liability, instead of just the current liability.
I think you're on to something though, we should definitely require private sector retirement benefits to be pre-funded by 100%, then we can all point our fingers and say how obvious it is that the private sector is less efficient.
The issue is that even the GAO thinks there are "pyramid" issues -- the USPS revenue is going to be in a long-term decline, and peak-retirees will hit in a period where the revenue is lower than today. So, pre-funding makes a lot of sense.
Similarly, SS (and I think medicare?) were supposed to be pre-funded during high tax years of the baby boomers. There's technically a surplus, but it's invested in US treasury debt, essentially an accounting trick. (although I don't know what an SS surplus would otherwise be invested in -- you don't really want the government investing in private securities, either).
Parcel drop-off could be automated, extended hours, partnerships with businesses, etc., although I think most parcels originate from businesses now.
Maybe a good compromise would be fewer post offices, open later, and less delivery, but with mail available for pickup at the post office up to the day before delivery. This would be capital expensive vs. operating expense intensive, which should be good for the USPS (they can borrow at cheap rates, and the government could fund some of this).
The reality is that most of the losses since 2006 were directly due to the overfunding requirement (they had to prepay 75 years of projected liabilities in 10 years time -- a requirement that no other agency has). They are also prohibited from cutting back service because they need congressional approval to do so (and a bunch of rural congresspeople are pushing back against it), so the USPS is in a real bind where they are being essentially forced to make changes but don't have the authority to do so.
You could certainly cut the facilities producing the least revenue, but then you'd be closing mostly rural post offices. Incidentally Fedex and UPS use USPS infrastructure for rural delivery. Since we're all guaranteed postal service in the constitution, perhaps it would be better to question the idea that the USPS has to be profitable and run like a business.
Could you cite the relevant part of the constitution?
As far as I know Congress has the power to "establish Post Offices and Post Roads", but there is no requirement that they do so.
"The congress shall have power ... To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
I haven't chased down future acts, but the post office act of 1792 definitely does mandate certain postal routes to be maintained by the postal service.
Universal delivery is a very important service, but it probably ought to be directly subsidized by Congress. Because the current system of subsidy through monopoly gave a false sense of security in their revenues. Now technology is killing those revenues, and the system is trying to avoid job losses by service reductions. The logical end of that spiral is obvious.
I don't think USPS is that inefficient for some of its operations.
FedEx (Air/Express) is the gold standard for premium delivery.
There's no anonymity. Rather, there's redundancy because they print the destination address. If you need to hide you address, you can buy a PO Box at the post office or a private box seller.
I wish they'd innovate by having the post office retail windows open on Sundays, rather than these current cutbacks. (The cutbacks are due to overfunding their pensions, and that a 2006 law is forcing that.)
Why not raise the rates for junk-mail?
Sure, megacorps will scream and cry that it'll put them out of business, but it won't. They'll continue sending out junk-mail as it draws in far more in customers than they spend on it. If some don't, that much better for the environment, since I'd guess >99% of junk-mail goes straight into the garbage (with a small percentage of that being recycled).
Seeing as the vast majority of mail I've received over the decades has been junk-mail, it should be an easy way to increase revenue.
They took their large sorting facility property, Terminal Annex, and leased it to a server colocation company. It's at 900 Alameda, Los Angeles. Look it up.
They stil have PO Boxes and a counter there. I recently tried to drop off a letter there on the weekend, but THERE WAS NO FREAKING MAILBOX. USPS needs to stop eliminating mailboxes. There are even post offices without mailboxes outside. Do they not want to make money?
As others have pointed out, they already do. Go to http://www.usps.com and click on "Find Locations." Put in your zip code, click on "See More Results" and sort by "Approved Postal Providers" to find those non-USPS-owned locations.
Either you need to add the ability for reading a 16 digit code to the existing system, or build a second, new, system to handle 'the new codes'. Either solution ain't gonna be cheap.
However, the website needs vast improvement. I once tried to find out how much it would cost to send a package from my house in CA to Richmond, VA. It should need only the package type, weight, and the two zip codes, but it took 10 or 15 minutes of filling out forms.
What the author is missing is that somebody has to physically deliver the package or letter, and that's why you need the destination printed on the package.
Doing that with IDs alone is needlessly complex.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to prevent human error without everyone having barcode sticker printers, which seems extremely unlikely.
Then again, they could more or less do this now, and they don't.
Or at least I've always assumed they do.
Tell your congressional representative, not USPS. FedEx and UPS have spent large amounts of lobbying money ensuring that USPS does not innovate. Congressional legislation is what prevents USPS from innovating.
It's hardly surprising, but do you have any sources for this claim?
Over the past five years, FedEx and UPS have spent a combined $100 million lobbying Congress. Because neither company has a delivery network nearly as sprawling as Donahoe's, they contract with the postal service to deliver the "final mile" of much of their cargo. For instance, more than 21 percent of all FedEx deliveries are dropped off by a postal carrier. Meanwhile, millions of postal-service letters hitch rides on FedEx flights every day, for which the company gets paid $1 billion a year. FedEx and UPS don't want the postal service to go out of business but to remain contained, out of the way — one reason many of the addresses on packages that pass through Medford are handwritten by mothers and grandfathers and eBay minimoguls, rather than printed by manufacturers and retailers.
[1] http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-troub...