It might necessitate changing some laws, but…
Would you pay the Post office to throw out your junk mail rather than delivering it? I’m thinking somewhere in the $10-$20 per year fee.
What do you think?
Unfortunately, yes.
What’s the difference between a mailer from a random organization that will just go in the trash and a bulk mailer from an organization you’re associated with whose information you may wish to have, from the perspective of the USPS.
Put another way, junk mail can defined as “things I don’t want showing up in my mailbox” How does anyone but you know what it is you want?
What a great idea! Lower the carbon footprint of junk mail-then the mail has to make only one trip-straight to the dumpster!
Seriously, stop the junk-it doesn’t lower the Post Office’s costs, and fills the trash bins.
How do you know it’s junk mail until you see it?
Assuming we can get past that, how about this? The junk mailers are paying the USPS to deliver their junk to you. You’re proposing USPS take money from one party to do something, and then take money from another party not to do it.
OTOH, it would make the wingnuts who see a gummint conspiracy in everything the happiest people in the world.
I’m willing to risk missing the occasional piece of mail that’s been sent to thousands of other people too. They won’t throw away utility bills (or any other type of bills) for example, because bills can’t be bulk mailed.
Interesting idea, but I think that the USPS is actually heading in the opposite direction. Did you see this campaign?
My understanding is that a lot of the USPS revenue comes from junk mail, so I would guess that without an extremely high fee, you’d never be able to make up this difference (assuming that junk mail companies are not going to continue to send their stuff knowing it will be sorted).
To answer this question more accurately – bulk mailings. It is a separate class of mail pretty easily separated from other mail.
The PO could also make money selling the paper of the refused mailings to recyclers.
And maybe even by selling the names of the refuseniks (like me) back to the advertisers. They might use it to purge their mailing lists, but in some cases opt to send more expensive first class mail to the people who reject bulk mail.
Can’t you do this now, for free? I seem to recall once contacting the USPS to have my address removed from the list–somehow, it got back on, though, after about five years.
No, it can’t be done now, because a list of people paying the USPS to not deliver bulk mail doesn’t exist now.
As to what you’re saying about USPS removing you from a list – I can’t imagine what you’re referring to. USPS can’t remove you from an advertiser’s mailing list – AFAIK they can either deliver all mail addressed to you, or none (if you tell them to stop your service altogether).
The way that Congress is forcing the USPS to pre-pay for benefits is a big source of current problems, but the decline in mail volume is the real long term issue.
The best steps to reform the post office would be to close virtually all stand alone post offices. Instead, offer “franchises” to gas station owners, convenience store owners, Wal-Mart, Kroger, etc. These companies pay a franchise fee and in exchange they get to run mini-post offices that can do things like issue USPS Money Orders, accept boxes for shipping, sell stamps, basically do anything you can currently do at a post office.
It’s up to those franchisees to turn a profit on it, and the USPS national organization gets some percentage cut of the revenue from the USPS franchise.
This would benefit customers, because personally I never enjoy a trip to the post office. I’d be much happier if, when I go to the grocery store I could swing buy a little USPS outfit inside the supermarket to do some of the few things you still need physical post offices for.
After that, I would then divide letter carriers into two organizational units. One would be urban letter carriers and the other would be rural. My assumption is a lot of urban letter carrier routes, due to the density and volume, are actually profit generating. Those would be allowed to continue generating those profits. The rural letter carrier routes, I’m assuming, may not be profit generating. A private business probably would not have many of the rural routes that the USPS currently maintains. If our government and our society feels these rural routes are necessary to maintain, then make rural delivery a separate organizational unit within the USPS, and make it directly funded from the Federal budget by tax dollars. If you’re going to mandate something solely because you insist people must have this service, it only makes sense to fund it like other like things (fire, police etc.)
All they have to do is have a system where they deliver – or not – according to the highest bidder! 
It’s tempting, but I think I’d rather save the $20. I’m sure some non-college students would take them up though.
Something that almost everyone forgets is that postal customers are the people or companies that send the mail, not the ones who receive it. Who would pay to have something delivered if they understood that it would be thrown away before it reached the addressee?
I’d prefer that government employees not make any more decisions on my behalf than they already can. Anyone for that matter…but especially government employees.
This comes up regularly, and I think it’s a terrible idea.
If people don’t want to receive junk mail, we should simply pass a law that lets people opt out. It’s simple and economically efficient. The model should be the Do Not Call list. It’s not perfect because of loopholes, but it works quite well.
Letting the USPS turn non delivery of mail into a profit center results in very perverse incentives for the USPS. The profit margin on just throwing away mail destined for a particular address is way higher than actually having to deliver mail. As mail gets used less and less for non-junk purposes, the signal-to-noise ratio of mail delivery drops, and more and more people want to avoid junk mail. Ultimately we’re trending toward a system where we’re paying a large bureaucracy to do nothing. It’ll be the worst kind of rent seeking.