Paying to not receive “junk” mail (though perhaps there might need to be various classes of junk mail). How many residents does a postal worker cover in a typical day? If its 15 seconds per mailbox you are talking about 2000 per day. Even a few dollars per each person that wants to block it adds up to a fair chunk of change per postal delivery person.
But then you’ll have Andy Roney’s grandson on 20 minutes in 2025 bitching about how we pay the Postal Service to NOT deliver mail 
Again, I’m not talking about mail that is addressed to you, or where regular postage is paid. I’m not exactly certain how the system works, but the way I imagine it, the junk-mail senders pay USPS to deliver a pile of crap to every mailbox in xxxxx zipcode for $xxxx.
So USPS would know how many people in xxxxx zipcode have the premium service, so could appropriately discount the spammer for the mailboxes that won’t get stuffed full of their shit. The money that USPS charges for the premium service could easily be double or probably much more than what they would be discounting to the spammer per spam-free mailbox.
-USPS gets paid more to deliver less. (They can just put a sticker inside each spam-free mailbox indicating that it shouldn’t be crammed full of crap.)
-Junk mail senders pay less to USPS and in paper/printing costs, to reach a more receptive demographic. (Nobody who would pay a premium is reading that shit, anyway.)
Does Granny have a fireplace? Junk mail burns quite nicely, and doesn’t cost as much as firewood!
FAHRENHEIT 419: The temperature at which Nigerian letters catch fire and burn.
To that point: I live in an older, suburban neighborhood (my house was built in 1928; nearly all of the houses were built before 1960). Mailboxes in our neighborhood are attached to houses; most mailboxes are adjacent to the front door of the house, and most front doors are at the top of a short (four to six step) stairway. Thus, our letter carriers are going up and down stairs all day to deliver mail.
A year or two ago, in a cost-cutting measure, the local post office cut a couple of carriers, which meant that the remaining carriers would now be working longer routes. We got a letter from the local postmaster, asking (but not demanding) that, if possible, we would move our mailbox from the current location (i.e., at the top of the stairs) to a location which the carrier could service without going up (and down) the stairs. The stated reason was to save the carrier the time it took to use the stairs…if added up across the hundreds of houses the carrier services in a day, I do suppose it would add up. (Note: we haven’t moved the mailbox…not yet, anyway.)
I wouldn’t call paying one third party to keep another third party from inflicting harm on me a “win”. The problem I have with this setup is that ultimately we’re all either paying a premium or getting crappy service. And then the Post Office has an odd incentive to keep junk mail around because it’s an even bigger part of their revenue stream. Once we start paying the Danegeld, how do we ever get rid of the Dane?
Wouldn’t it be better to just provide a free Do Not Junkmail list, like the Do Not Call list?
I’m not necessarily opposed to just subsidizing the USPS. I think that junk mail filtering is just a terrible thing to hitch their wagon to.
I for one am glad this is happening. I wish they’d just go bankrupt altogether so the world will stop trying to deliver anything that isn’t a package. Life would be so much easier if organizations were forced to evolve and stop depending on old, antiquated message delivery systems.
Postal mail is just another useless channel I have to regularly check because somebody, somewhere refuses to get with the times. The post is an enabler of a horrible addiction. Heck, I wish I could pay to not have a deliverable address and instead get all legal/importance correspondence emailed to me with a proper digital signature.
I dream of the day when the USPS goes under and municipalities are instead forced to upgrade their broadband infrastructure.
Its hardly a good analogy though. I can pay a premium to view the SDMB ad-free yes, but if I so choose I can also avoid those ads by simply not going to the website, at a cost to me of zero.
There is no similar option with junk mail, short of never going near your mail box (hardly realistic). I go to the SDMB, the junk mail comes to me.
However, I don’t think either that even the post office will try to degrade its service. In capitalism, the problem is mostly about not knowing your business targets enough. You always need a connection between the service/product and the demands. And here you always need a spesific research.
You can’t apply capitalistic reasoning to the problems of the USPS, because it’s not a free market. They have a government-regulated and strictly-enforced monopoly.
That’s exactly what I meant, too. But in capitalism, in any business with market concerns that plays a huge role.
That’s not how it works. All of that junk mail is still addressed to your house. Your name is just listed as “Resident” or “Occupant” or some such. I suppose you could block all “Resident” mail, but I don’t think it would take the junk mailers long to get around that.