Quasi? Is the post office owned by the government, or isn’t it?
I wish they were just allowed to up the price of mail when need be. I do send out mail, though my bills have gone down due to the internet, I sent out and received a lot of mail this past year because of a family reunion.
The other thing I don’t get is they paid to have machines put in to allow me to ship stuff when they are closed or really packed. They’ve taken them all out around me, now I have to stand in line. I also liked being able to buy stamps that way and again I have to stand in line.
I’m sure a lot of people are going to get really upset when all these changes come through.
The USPS is an independent agency of the executive branch of the federal government. It’s not actually a government-owned corporation (like Amtrak) despite what many people think.
Congress makes no direct appropriation to the USPS and requires that their operations be funded by their own revenue. They will make loans to the USPS to cover shortfalls in some years, but lately they have become more reticent to do so.
That is an interesting question. They are an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States.” And they are the only entity so described that I am aware of. They aren’t like, Amtrak which is an independent corporation which just happens to be mostly owned by the the US government. And they aren’t an actual government department. Quasi-government seems like a pretty good definition to me.
It is, but it’s technically an “independent agency”, at least in part because its operating budget comes almost entirely from what it charges customers for postal services, rather than from taxes.
So capitalism and USPS don’t belong in the same sentence. I mean, in regards to the OP - that the USPS isn’t a “business” since it’s not allowed to run as such.
I’m not sure how many people would pay for such a service, but I disagree that it’s one we should encourage. Personally, I think that the inconvenience of junk mail is a very minor issue, but I respect that other people feel differently.
The problem is that paying an entity to keep it from harming you is going to establish the worst sort of rent-seeking behavior. Paying the USPS to not deliver types of mail is just as silly and wasteful as the Dept. of Agrigulture paying people not to farm their fields.
The problems that the USPS has are exacerbated by Congressional control, but the real problem they have is that their primary service has been rendered obsolete. In that respect, reducing the timeliness of their service makes a lot of sense (as a sort of stop-gap measure). Paying extra for next-day delivery makes little sense for most people. If it’s actually urgent, you can email or fax it, and it’ll be there immediately. If it’s not urgent, waiting a week doesn’t matter that much. In the long-run, though, the USPS is simply going to shrink to a much much smaller shadow of its former self. The parcel service may stick around in more or less the same form, but the normal mail service won’t. It was in the business of information distribution, in the form of words printed on paper, and information distribution got a whole lot cheaper. There will still be niche cases where some people want a hard copy of a signed document, but they are going to be relatively rare.
Right. They’re just expected to perform like one. Worst of both worlds, really.
No different from any quasi-official utility company or suchlike. There are a lot of nominally for-profit businesses that only exist to service a government-granted monopoly. In exchange for that guaranteed market they have to accept some oversight for what they charge. In that respect the post office is no different than your power company or (before its divestiture) The Phone Company. (Remember when there was just “the” phone company?)
In these types of arrangements there will always be a battle between the organization just barely surviving and regulators who want to ensure minimal pricing.
Not necessarily. The most PROFITABLE businesses thrive. High levels of service cost money. It makes good economic sense to reduce your levels of service by n if it only leads to some fraction of n customers leave.
See also:
“airlines”
“cable provider”
In the early 1990s, they stopped picking up mail from “street corner boxes” on Sundays and Holidays. Even at Post Offices themselves, anything “put through the slot” on a Sunday or Holiday just sits there until the next workday.
Damn you! I came in here to post exactly the same idea, which I thought was both brilliant and original.
I disagree. By necessity, the USPS has become a service which is subsidized by advertising, much like the SDMB and many, many other business models. Just like you can pay a premium to view the SDMB ad-free, there’s nothing wrong with paying a premium to get mail delivered to you ad-free. There are tons of examples of successful business models that work like this, so there’s no good reason why the USPS can’t or shouldn’t do it.
It’s a win/win/win/win situation really. The winners:
- The person who dislikes junk mail enough to pay a premium to avoid it wins by getting what they want.
- The USPS wins, in that they would charge more for the junk-mail block than what they would get paid to deliver it, while simultaneously reducing their workload.
- The junk-mail senders actually win, because anyone who would pay a premium to not get their ads were absolutely not reading any of that crap anyway. So, they spend less to reach a more receptive demographic.
- Finally, the environment wins. Because, I don’t know about you, but I get enough junk-mail to easily make up around half of my trash!
The only real losers are the paper companies and the printers who make all the junk mail.
There are already opt-out lists for junk mail. You can add your address and marketers can filter you from their mailings. But it’s optional. So the companies which care about targeting their mailings already have a way to do it.
Even if the PO added a service to not deliver your junk mail, I don’t see a lot of people signing up. The vast majority of people don’t even take 10 seconds to add themselves to the opt-out list. How many people would actually sign up and pay for a service? A few, but I can’t see it really making a big difference to the bottom line.
The PO needs to restructure itself to the new reality. They had an ad campaign a few months back trying to encourage people to send more personal letters. I laughed at that. I rarely sent personal letters back in the day, and now they expect people to ramp up letter writing?!? Sure. I’ll print out my emails and send them in an envelope from now on. They need to position themselves for the future, not ask people to conform to how things were in the past. That’s like Kodak asking us all to start using film cameras again because it was so much fun getting to know the film processor at Walgreens.
I don’t know- I seem to recall similar discussions of apathy and such regarding the Do Not Call Registry, but 72% of Americans signed up for it. Granted, that’s free, so it’s not totally the same, but there’s something.
Yes. If you can cut costs by 50% and degrade service by 10%, it just might work.
At least that’s the principle the USPS is planning to use. Of course, if cutting service by 10% results in 50% decrease in income, that might not be a good thing.
What you’re talking about might help a tiny bit with junk mail that is addressed to you, but what I’m primarily talking about (and hate the most) is not that. I’m talking about all the flyers and coupons and crap that has no address, and as far as I know, there is no way to opt out of. I live in a major metropolitan area, so it might not be so bad where you live, but around these parts I get a metric shit-ton of crap.
No way for me to guess without knowing the actual numbers, but if the USPS can do less work for more money, while simultaneously making more of their customers happy and their sponsors’ advertising more efficient, it would seem stupid not to do it. I’m not saying that it would solve all of the USPS’s problems in one fell swoop, but every little bit counts in the sort of situation they’re in.
How do you suppose they would implement it, though? The advertisers are paying postage to have things sent through the mail, and the people on the mail route with “ad free mail” would be paying to not get the stuff the advertisers have paid to send. How do you resolve that? Either you refuse the postage revenue from the advertisers or they paid for a service they’re not getting. This would mean the USPS would have to keep track of the people who paid to not get ads, then subtract all the postage in a given area from the advertisers’ bills. It seems a bit difficult logistically, and I’m not sure how it increases profits.
/edit: I guess my point is that mail ads don’t work quite like online ones in that they cost money to print and send up front and the revenue isn’t impressions or anything you can directly tie to the piece of mail. The logistics seem like a pain in the neck.
No kidding. I was out of town from Friday to Monday (so, 3 mail delivery days) and when I got home last night, there was a stack about six inches high in my mailbox. One thing was an actual letter for me (cable bill), 2 were thin catalogs I’ve probably signed up for over the years, and the rest was all junk mail fliers. They’re now on the floor of my car (I have to drive to my mailbox up the road) until I get to a trash can. My passenger seat floor is literally FULL from just those scattered three days of mail.
You can opt out of commercial junk mail. Unfortunately, that’s useless against the nonprofit operators who send my wife’s grandmother a ton of mail screaming that only they can save this country from Kenyan socialism. She sends a bunch of them $10 or $20 every now and then, and as a result, is on every wingnut mailing list under heaven.
She’s 87 and gradually losing it, and she doesn’t understand that the reason she gets 20 letters a day from these whackos (who she thinks are trying to save the world, hence she feels obligated to try to read them all) is that she sends some of them money. Occasionally she’ll write “take me off your mailing list” to a few of these outfits - then turn around and send them money before they would have a chance to do so.
My wife has a power of attorney to handle her affairs. Unfortunately, the only options the USPS can give us is to leave things as they are, or cut off her mail entirely. No option exists to cut off just the junk mail, and let regular correspondence through. And we just aren’t ready yet to cut her off from regular mail.
Not USPS’ fault; they’re limited by what Congress is willing to authorize them to do. And if you think this Congress is going to give anyone a tool to block the right-wing direct mail machine, I would humbly request that you share your drugs with me.
Maybe, maybe not. We would sure sign Granny up. I’d cheerfully pay $100 a year for the privilege. (We’d pay 2-3 times that much if it was available but only at that price, just less cheerfully. :))
This. Off the top of my head, I’d without hesitation pay $10 a month for the service. Hell, I pay $3 a month for my recycling trash can to be picked up by the city, so $10 is well within the realm of “convenience pricing.” I’d also be willing to pay plenty more, but I’d just need a guarantee that the system actually works.