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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

i'm mostly impressed that the USPS has the analytical resources to produce this. did they put this much thought into email, before revenues started cratering? what was their intelligent plan to manage runaway employee pensions? do we still need so many people physically shuffling around junk mail? (apologies to newman). seems like they have plenty of issues to grapple with that are closer to the present than the impact of 3d printing.

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If it weren't for a recent retirement pre-funding mandate, the USPS would still be profitable. http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/f...

Edit: Wait, that page says they'd still be at -$3B in 2010 without the pre-funding. And it looks like they haven't been paying into it since 2011. http://www.opm.gov/news/testimony/112th-congress/us-postal-s... So I guess I have no idea how profitable they are.

That -$3B, or whatever it's ballooned to now, comes even though a federal law makes it a felony to compete with the USPS and deliver "non-urgent" mail. That's why FedEx always claims to be delivering "urgent" messages. Here's a Baltimore Sun article from 20 years ago when armed USPS police were actively enforcing this law: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-01-07/news/1994007008_...

If you give me a government-granted monopoly and a phalanx of federal agents empowered to put my competitors out of business, I'd have to be providing very poor service to be losing billions of dollars. Unfortunately, the USPS has managed to do just that.

Don't forgoet that the monopoly comes at the cost that they are required to keep a lot of post offices open in rural areas, which is a very unprofitable enterprise.

Couldn't the government just directly build and manage post offices in such rural areas, and stay out of the postal business in more populous regions? If the problem is insufficient postal services in some regions, it makes more sense to just fund postal services in those regions than to place a blanket ban on postal competition across the whole nation.

But then the government would be operating the rural postal service at a pure loss, rather than using the profitable parts of the postal service to fund the unprofitable parts. That would mean higher taxation with no extra benefits.

There'd be the huge extra benefit of dramatically cheaper postal services for people in metropolitan areas, due to competition. The 'profitable' parts of the postal service are profitable because of its status as a monopoly, and represent a deadweight loss to consumers. If rural post was funded by taxation, at least the burden would be distributed more fairly, instead of primarily upon people using metropolitan postal services.

Don't forget that FedEx and UPS are heavily reliant on using USPS's infrastructure all over the country.

I'd love to see you try. Don't forget you'll also have government-mandated prices and a governmental mandate to serve everyone, including places which have to be delivered by mule[1] and populations of <350 which have to be served by plane[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supai,_Arizona

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaktuvuk_Pass,_Alaska

USPS can be quite profitable if they can set the price of their products. They can't. Congress sets the price. They are mandated to run at break-even. They lose money when Congress reacts too slowly to market condition to set new price.

They constantly lose money. By the time they convince Congress to up the postal rate, inflation and market conditions have already exceeded the rate increase. All they can do is lessen their losses.

They can't add new products without Congress. They are also looking at money services, like basic check cashing, to help the 10+ million US households without regular access to a bank. It could be a great help to many impoverished Americans and, at the same time, boost USPS profits – but it relies on Congress to act. One or two Senators with heavy contributions from check cashing companies could derail, stall, or kill the effort – a net loss to society.

USPS can be profitable if they can make changes without Congress's approval and without having arbitration rules that prevent them from considering their ability to pay the bills.

So if you can eliminate Congress, throw out their arbitration rules, they might be able to make the structural and functional changes they need to succeed. This does mean closing offices, distribution centers, and having a pension and retirement system they can afford to offer. Which by the way is what is facing most government employee pensions as many are unfunded and have ludicrous payouts

Lots of the USPS's financial woes can be laid at the feet of anti-government republicans and libertarians offended at the idea that a government agency can do its job well, and determined to make it the case that the agency won't be able to.

That would be a very fun conspiracy meeting. "Alright guys, let's kill the Post Office by inventing a time machine, going back a few decades, then getting them to promise all employees defined benefits pensions. It will doom them. For the glory of capitalism! bwahahahah!"

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