The postal service

You've got (no) mail

The postal service has been hit hard by the recession and by faster competition

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Readers' comments


The real LudwigX

Your supposedly free-market journal failed to mention that the U.S. Junk Mail Service functions primarily as a conduit for indirect subsidies to business. U.S. citizens must pay twice, once in taxes and again in inflated rates for first-class and other services, in order to receive mail they don't want: that's why they call it junk mail.


One possible answer is to change the law that forbids post offices from doing anything but deliver mail. This reform happened some years ago in Australia where I live. Now most post offices have a retail shop where you can buy greeting cards, gifts, stationery and many other things. They act as agencies for some banks, they allow you to pay utility bills there (all earning nice agency fees for AusPost). You can buy mobile phones and recharge them. They sell postal packaging products. The list is endless. Some of these post offices are sold as franchises to small businesspeople. Problem solved.


I used to write letters. Then I stopped because of emails. They lost this business.

I used to go to the video store and other shops but now I use Netflix and order stuff from Amazon and other online retailers.

I probably never wrote more than once a month while Netflix means a few movies per week and online retailers a few packages per month. So, since the advent of internet, the post has got more business from me, not less. That must be true for many other people. I'm surprised USPS still manages to lose money.


There are problems in all levels:

The biggest problem is more than 95% of USPS delivered is advertisements, so call junk mails; it is acting more like a delivery arm of major corporations. In this economy, the major corporations are cutting back to save money, therefore, the revenue in 2009 is decreasing 13% compare to 2008 and the revenue of 2008 was almost 8% less than 2007. The letters and bills are very small part of USPS delivery volume.

The second biggest problem is that USPS is a very strange animal, it is semi-government, so called independent agency. They called themselves government when they want to, and call them private company whenever it is to their advantage. Indeed, USPS suppose to delivery one letter to anywhere in the country with one regular stamp. USPS is losing a great deal of money, if you send a letter from the American part of Virgin Islands to North Pole in the state of Alaska, or a letter from a village in an Indian tribe somewhere is New Mexico to a little island in Hawaii. Also, US government has too many rules and regulations as well.

The third problem is the APWU (American Postal Worker Union) with the same problems for all union shops. Every USPS employee is expecting 30 years of employment with cost of living adjustments and promotions, also another 30 years of retirement. If this expectation is threaten, an employee will go crazy, so there is no lay-off; even you sleep on the job for 29 years, the union will fight for you and law suits. The labor cost is very high when you add the benefits and retirement; for example, there are 26 days of annual leave per year, 13 days of sick leave, 10 days of holiday, and sleep on the job, or simply do not report to work, the benefits are 40 % of salary. USPS can not force an employee to retire, I see some people still drawing salary older than 80 years old. Do not forget there are retirement for employee and their spouse to both of them death.

The fourth problem is USPS is a very political organization; some of the upper managers have US congress connections, or presidential connections. There is informal racial quota, which is why you will see high percentage of minority in the work force. There is preference for military service too. Not only USPS is very difficulty to reduce workforce and it is very hard to reduce facilities too, the representatives in US Congress will get into action to protect their territory. So, the management are not running as a business with employee not afraid of losing their job.....

USPS still uses the same technique as the first Post Master General (Benjamin Franklin) 200 years ago by casing the mail to a mail slot, etc... Therefore, in my humble opinion, USPS should be broken up into several private companies, one company take care of sorting the mail, one company deliver the mails, one company do the transportation from major cities, such as from Los Angels to New York by truck or by air, etc....

I am not an expert on this subject, only my observation. Actually, USPS is a reflection of the society, the political systems, and the economic systems. As I see it, we need to do major surgery....


Several years ago, I audited invoices for my employer's business reply mail fees. In a typical month, we paid over $10K in erroneous or incorrect fees and received over a thousand pieces of misdelivered mail (including mail for a foreign consulate's office in our building).

We spent years trying to find someone at the USPS to take responsibility for these problems. Complaints to the local office resulted in mysterious service interruptions that held up mail delivery for days. Complaints to the district office, national offices, and even the Postal Inspector were ignored. As a result, my employer finally gave up and stopped offering business reply mail.

Instead, Mr. Potter should focus on making the USPS do what it already claims to do. Until then, potential customers will look elsewhere.


The postal services is a dinoseaur in the information era.I have tried to model how to revive this but there can be no remedy other than putting governmental money in sustaining it.Of course like India if the USPS introduces some form of banking, insurance and activities similar to these, there can be way to maintain the department. But I do not know if it can be really sustainable.


George Jetson: You do not need a mailbox. Pull it up out of the ground or take it off of the front of your house and you will no longer receive mail. You can also notify the post office that you don't want any more mail and there is nothing they can do about it. It will just end up in the dead letter office.


I am trying to get rid of my mail box at my house - why do I need it? The "IP Address" has replaced the "street address" (horse and buggy).....snail mail is not green, efficient or 21st century.


Marvo....I know there are indeed "guidelines" the USPS must follow before closing a Post Office. However, let me state that the USPS has repeatedly circumvented those guidelines in several instances. For example, one of the guidelines is the requirement for community input. The USPS will have a so-called public hearing prior to the closing of a post office, and then proceed ahead with their plans. Never have I experienced a public hearing that resulted in the public agreeing to close a post office, but the Postal Service goes ahead and closes the facility anyway, and they have met the requirement for a public hearing "guideline" regardless of the opinion of the public. Another requirement is to notify the Unions and Congressional Representative in that district. They rarely notify the Unions and as far the Congressional Representative, by the time the representative responds the closing is already in the works. The only requirement needed for this so-called notification is proof of notification. The USPS does not wait for a response, just provides proof (if asked) that they did indeed contact, by mail ironically, the representative. There are other "guidelines" and they are ignored or skipped over completely! As far as the Unions are concerned: the Unions are in on this charade because they would lose millions in dues dollars if the aging workforce were offered incentives to retire. So...we are still sitting in rooms doing nothing and payday was Friday!


What can one expect in these days of gloom and doom?

I liked the best the beginning of the article, because it reminded me of the Anglo-Russian movie “Anna Pavlova”. This ballerina, forced to flee her country due to political turbulence, danced practically everywhere after 1917. When asked, in an interview given in New York, on what she liked the most in America, she quoted the Post Office inscription at the beginning of this article.


"Chebapi wrote:
April 30, 2009 19:45
USPS is one gov't arm I am pretty happy with. They provide mail delivery service even to the rural boondocks at an inexpensive rate, have not taken much gov't money, and no shooting spree recently. It even made services like NetFlix feasible."
The problem is dim bureaucrats unable to think outside the box. If they had gotten into providing web access and e-mail they wouldn't be in trouble. Other readers ask for new products and services, but there's the same problem. It would be possible to equip post offices to send certified faxes or e-mail for a fee, for example, but don't hold your breath waiting.


Could the postal service compromise and only make deliveries to businesses on Saturday, while restricting residential deliveries to weekdays?

Another solution could be to charge overnight rates for Saturday deliveries. Either solution would provide a drastic cost reduction without eliminating Saturday service.


It's way past time to free the Post Office. Revoke the USPS monopoly, cut the umbilical cord to the taxpayers, let it compete.


As a postal employee for over 30 years, I can report that the United States Postal Service is not telling the whole story. I hope this website means what it says about protecting my privacy because the information I have could cost me my job. As I type, across the country, the USPS has thousands of employees sitting in rooms for eight hours a day doing absolutely nothing. There is no mail. There are Letter Carriers, Truck Drivers, Window Clerks, and Clerks sitting in these rooms. The average entry level salary for postal employees is at least $23.00 per hour. This has been going on for the entire year 2009. Meanwhile, I read other posts of people complaining about waiting in lines, when you have ready and available Window Clerks sitting in rooms getting paid and receiving benefits to do absolutely nothing. Further, employees with at least 25 years of service and 50 years of age are being offered what is called a VERA. A VERA is an acronym for voluntary early retirement annuity. The problem with this is if you are, say, 50 years old with 25 years of service you are penalized 2% on your annuity for each year under age 55, which means said person would take a 10% penalty on their retirement. The USPS is divided into two groups of employee types under the retirement system. Most of the people being offered this VERA are under the Civil Service Retirement System. And, there are a lot of employees covered by CSRS. It would not cost the USPS one thin dime to fund these pensions. We pay into it ourselves, and when we retire, the Office of Personnel Management issues our annuity checks. In addition, the Postal Service has not hired since 2001. The workforce is getting old, and the people sitting in the room doing nothing are the younger people. The policy of the Postal Service has left the older workers to suddenly begin doing jobs they weren't hired to do. For example, they are forcing employees to learn to drive trucks, and if they don't pass the test, they are fired. This misuse of funds should be investigated. I think the general public would be interested to know that in these tough economic times, the USPS is paying people good money and benefits to come to work and do nothing as opposed to just allowing the employees with the seniority to retire or offer some kind of incentive as other companies have done. So, now you know what is going to be done with the postage increase.


Regional pricing! For goodness sake, they say operate like a business and then force them to charge a flat fee. Sending a letter to someone who lives in the middle of nowhere should cost MORE! Sending a letter from Miami to Anchorage (or from anywhere to Anchorage) should cost MORE! Sending mail from the Cambridge to Boston should cost less. Allow the price to reflect the service and magically all the problems go away.

Karen M.

I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where mail service is questionable during the best of times. It takes three times longer for a letter from another part of the U.S. to reach here than anywhere else. We joke that we have the last operating branch of the Pony Express. In addition to the normal slowdowns and delays that we experience, our mail gets disrupted by hurricanes. It took months for us to get consistent deliveries after Katrina, and weeks after Gustav. So, really, would we notice suspension of Saturday delivery? Post office branches already send customers to automated machines for most services (for example, purchasing stamps and mailing small packages), so would customers notice the closure of the counters? The only difference I'd see is a line to a machine rather than to an understaffed counter.

Sure, sending parcel post or priority mail is inexpensive, but for that price they don't guarantee delivery dates. If I want to ensure that an item gets to its recipient by a certain date, I have to send it overnight express. The post office does not have a consistent mechanism for tracking even overnight packages - So, if I want to track my shipment to make sure someone gets it, I'd better use UPS or Federal Express.

As for employment - Your article reminds me of the film "Hollywood Shuffle," where the lead character says "There's always work at the Post Office." A lot of people view the U.S. Postal Service in exactly that way - As workfare. Perhaps that explains why we get our mail at the speed of the Pony Express.


I have been very pleased by the service at the U.S. post. While I have not had any awful experiences waiting in line, I can understand that frustration. Let me say, though, that for the size of the U.S.A. postal rates are extremely, even surprisingly low. The fact that you can send a letter anywhere in the country (including Alaska and Hawaii) for less than fifty cents is amazing. Overnight delivery is pretty cheap too. I currently live in Japan, and the price of post is pretty expensive. It costs 50 cents to send a postcard, and 80 cents to send a domestic letter. That's a little less than double the US rate, despite Japan being a country the size of California.

I am not exactly sure how the postal system could recover their losses. The Japan Post also functions as a bank, has ATMs in all their branches (what about 'no surcharge' ATM feature--that might get people into the post office) Also, what about luggage courier services? What I love about Japan is this 'takkyubin' service they have, where you can send your luggage from your home anywhere in the country (including airports) for a very reasonable price. I know this thing has started to appear in the U.S., but from what I have seen it is very expensive. But then again, our infrastructure is totally different. What about mandating postal carriers use motorcycles instead of cars? In my little town here in Hokkaido all local postal deliveries come in modified motorcycles, and when it rains or snows they just put on jackets. Who pays for that fuel, anyway?

I hope the postal system does begin to function more like a company instead of getting a government bailout. I like the idea that every town in America has a post office. It's very good to have that kind of national structure.


I think the USPS does a decent job compared to many other postal services around the world. Rates are very reasonable, & service is generally very reliable. Given the size of this country & the fact that the postal service delivers to every last corner is admirable. It is a necessary service after all & almost a social service.
This is not to say that actual visits to the post office are maddening, or that I don't get my junk mail. But I receive far more junk e-mails.
Clearly they can be more efficient & I have no doubt that they are overstaffed etc compared to FedEx... I like jeruchim's suggestions about using USPS for census data & so on. All said, technology can be expected to evolve faster than such institutions... but there are several people still who can't use email for numerous reasons or ones that are too remote. For all those, I hope the USPS will continue its service.


I suspect many people are like me: I try to avoid contact with the US Mail whenever feasible, even if it requires me to spend more money. I do receive mail through my mailbox at home, and most of that mail is junk that I immediately throw into the recycling basket. Some is bills, but I mainly pay bills online these days. In the event that I need to send a parcel or some other bulky item I will use FedEx or UPS because I don't want to spend up to forty minutes standing in a line at my local post office. The staff are old and slow and I have far better things to do with my time. The local FedEx office is fast and efficient. The US Mail is, despite its nominal independent status, just another branch of the US Government, which means that it is outmoded, inefficient, complacent and low-quality. Its employees, while well-meaning, lack the necessary skills for modern work and their systems and procedures are antiquated. My assumption is that, unlike the US Government, the US Mail will slowly fade away. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the US Government will not follow its example.



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