The United States Postal Service (USPS) intends to eliminate Saturday service cum August. They are doing this in an attempt to become profitable for they are losing money like a seive.
Its problems don’t have anything to do with mismanagement. A couple decades ago, we paid our bills with checks sent through the mail. Many of us still corresponded through the mail, too. The Post Office was supported through business mail (aka “junk mail”) to a larger degree than today. Business interests now pester us online where the cost per ad view is far less than that using even low-cost bulk mail rates (and let’s not forget printing costs, either).
Congress controls the Post Office, and they have made life tough on the Post Office by requiring it to prefund 75 years’ worth of future Post Office retiree health benefits in just 10 years. The agency has paid more than $21 billion into a special fund for this purpose.
No other government agency, for some reason, is similarly burdened.
The Post Office is saddled with some unique labor problems, too. It’s committed to labor contracts with no-layoff clauses, making it hard to adjust to the lower volume without either raising prices or cutting back on services. It’s one of the few industries which responds to lower volume by making its services less attractive. You don’t need to be a Harvard economist to see that that doesn’t work.
Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors in the field of delivering physical documents and packages.
This is why the USPS has decided to end Saturday service.
Here’s the problem with that “solution,” though: Look at their history of raising the price of postage on a regular basis to cover their costs.
If cutting Saturday delivery doesn’t do the trick, what’s next? Cutting Wednesday delivery?
No, cutting service is the wrong approach.
Why is the Post Office the only government agency saddled with having to make a profit or to be at least revenue neutral? (And if you run a business shooting to be revenue neutral, you’re going to aim at making a profit anyway, in order not to be revenue negative.)
Perhaps in response to lobbying from the Post Office’s main competitors, it operates under rules making it relatively unable to take away business from those interests. Whenever it starts to impinge on the UPS, FedEx, Pitney-Bowes and other competitors, Congress gets complaints about how unfair it is for a government agency to be taking business away from the private sector.
The Post Office is really an amazing agency, despite the complaints which most people pass along without really thinking about them. What it does every single day is almost astounding. Even without using Priority Mail, most stamped items can go cross-country in just two or three days. Shorter distances often are delivered overnight on just a first-class stamp. I mailed two Netflix movies yesterday. I’ll have the new movies in tomorrow’s mail. Amazon regularly delivers goods in about two days from the day of order even under their supposed “standard” 5-7 day shipping that costs me nothing. Netflix and Amazon couldn’t do these things without the cooperation of the Post Office.
It’s time to speak up and protest the end of Saturday delivery. Things will just get worse from there.
