I’d be surprised if a majority of holiday cards were handed to someone in person. I don’t know about birthday cards * but I’m sure a majority of retirement cards and life event ( baptism, bar mitzvah ) cards are given in person.
* A lot of people send birthday cards to people they wouldn’t travel to see on their birthday while most people will go to the baptism/bar mitzvah/retirement party of someone they would give a card.
Granted. That was a bit of a strawman intended to point out the hybrid nature of funding a postal service. I did not really finish my argument, so it’s not surprising you’ve objected. I’ll try to finish it now …
We could make postage zero and simply have the taxpayers cover whatever it costs to run the delivery system for however much volume occurs, or we could spare the taxpayers completely and stick it all on the mailers as in my example above, or some combination.
There are aspects of the problem that scale with volume of mail, and there are other aspects of the problem that (given reasonable volumes) scale only with the number of addresses delivered to, and their geographical density or lack thereof.
What does not work, as @Kropotkin so clearly points out, is to saddle the postal service with the low revenue high cost work while creaming off the high revenue low cost work to private industry, then complain that the taxpayers have this large bill to make up for the postal service cost vs revenue shortfall.
I have just addressed 35 holiday cards, of which 7 will be handed to people, 28 mailed.
I DID just get some retirement snail mail. But I wouldn’t have received any under normal circumstances. It was just a sealed card bitching at me for having not yet selected my retirement gift and “HEY, here’s the online code - get it done…oh, yeah and we value you highly…so…close out our administrative files already” (paraphrasing here 
). I hadn’t gotten around to it because it was a pretty random collection of mostly uninteresting (or poorly reviewed/cheap) crap.
I’ve been handed a few “get well” cards for my husband. None have arrived in the mail.
I love it! I still mail my Christmas cards but sadly the numbers have gone down in recent years. I still mail about 20/25.
Further to the points above, I am not sure that letter service itself is the problem it is made out to be. If letter service is falling, then presumably it is less work and strain on the system. Hurrah! So instead of a bagful of letters, the carrier need take only a handful on their appointed rounds, along with the packages they deliver. I suspect a larger problem is the private sector taking a bigger share of the more lucrative parcel deliveries, constantly telling people the post office is too expensive and too slow and likely to go on strike anyway, and pushing the government to change the rules and regs to give them more of an advantage. The aim is to shrink the post office to create more space for the private companies, who cannot readily compete because they are in business not to meet a need but to make a profit. Rather than actually innovate to provide a better service more cheaply while paying decent wages (don’t forget, competition and supply and demand are supposed to deliver better service AND better working conditions!) they use their political influence to hamper the post office.
Sorry I wasn’t thorough with my response earlier. I agree with your points. I objected to the $12 stamps not to be argumentative, but because I had the same idea at first. “Why can’t we just charge what it costs?”
In the US we have this weird fixation on public services turning a profit, when that is the definition of inefficient. The profit is unnecessary overhead. It would be much easier to say “We want this level of service for our citizens and it’s going to cost this much to do it.”
I don’t think this is exactly the situation. The issue isn’t that the private companies are gobbling up the efficient deliveries. It’s that they use the USPS to do the inefficient ones and the USPS doesn’t (or can’t) charge what it really costs them. I think we end up with logic like ‘“We’ve legally got to go to these addresses every day plus turn a profit, so we’ll need to subsidize it with a ton of bulk mail, and since we’re going there anyway we may as well take some Amazon packages to help the balance-sheet’'.”
If the USPS only had to go to each address once a week, they could charge a premium for off-schedule, last-mile deliveries and recoup the real cost. Then private companies would decide to pay or do it themselves.
You’re not alone. The same logic is at work in Canada and other countries and has been ramped up since the 1970s. When sectors such as manufacturing became uncompetitive and unprofitable, capital moved overseas and into other sectors, such as transportation, seeking better profits. And they had to disrupt postal services to make it work. At the same time, they were keen to attack any government operation and service that didn’t benefit them directly or offered another way to do things. Post offices paid better, had pensions, etc., and so posed an example of what workers could get if they organized, and so came under attack.
I recently lost a court case; a default judgement was given against me because the paper form that I dutifully filled out and returned somehow got lost to the ether. This experience makes me want to explicitly (legally) phase out snail mail for government and business communication.
I still feel that some kind of service – even a pricey one – should probably exist for people who do want to send old-timey love letters and postcards though.
For ludicrous, or even merely large, prices, the private couriers will deliver whatever you want. $10 for a postcard? If you want it to be cheap, well, that is the problem; good luck today trying to send an aerogramme or telegram.
Not quite. They don’t mean it has to operate at a commercially viable profit like a business. What they mean is “It must not, never no ever no way no how, operate at a loss requiring taxpayer subsidy; breakeven would be fine.”
Said another way, we have a fixation that taxes should not support universal services. User fees should support universal services. The crunch comes in when we also insist they must be trivially low user fees, using only magical thinking to make up the difference.
There’s also a strong resistance to thinking through the consequences of changes. $12 postage would certainly alter the demand downward drastically. But that level of analysis is too hard for Americans.
At least in the USA, a postal service that charged near current first class rates for current bulk mail (to greatly reduce the volume), and delivered to ordinary destinations only weekly, but operated all 5 days to different sections of their coverage area so the smallest number of last-mile trucks and workers was required could work great. And would not require stupid-high postage rates to operate.
Right now the huge mail recipients, like where you mail your credit card or utility payment to, already receive their mail by the semi truckload, which in many cases they bring their own trucks to the post office to be loaded, not vice versa. That part need not change.
Ref @mijin above, all mainstream domestic mail in whatever country should also be barcoded and package-tracked, just like higher value packages now are. Because the reality is that nowadays, most of what does constitute “normal” (US first class) mail is pretty darn important. All the routine crap from 30 years ago has already shifted to email. Leaving only government / legal stuff and some few financial transactions to flow through the mail system.
I have had emails get lost in the ether, also. And I don’t trust anything stored only online not to disappear; or not to get edited.
USPS has an option in which mail must be signed for, which provides proof of delivery. Costs extra, of course; but worth it for some things.
Yes, and indeed all my letters to the court since have been recorded delivery. Fool me once…you, shame on…you can’t get fooled again.
I’m curious what percentage of bills in the US are still paid by checks sent through the mail. Here in Canada, cheque volumes are down by 42% and value down by 24% over the 5 years 2019-2024.
Are those check volumes or “checks sent through the mail” volumes? They aren’t necessarily the same - I don’t remember when was the last time we mailed a check to pay a bill , but my husband pays the dentist by check in person and until last month, the same went for our garage landlord.
I still pay a few bills by check in the mail depending on the month and type of service.
Property taxes twice per year/HVAC and/or plumbing service(they charge extra fees if you use a credit card)/ and every two months I purchase a local fire department lottery ticket via mail/medical bills/etc.
These are the ones I can come up with without thinking too hard.
It’s certainly a declining number in the USA too. But …
I pay substantially all my bills using my bank’s website. For most big billers, the bank can send them the money electronically. But for a surprising fraction of national businesses, they are not equipped to receive electronic payments.
So when I click [send] on the bank’s website, the bank prints an individual check, puts it in an individual envelope, & snail mails it to my vendor.
So the rise of internet banking and bill paying here is reducing checks in the mail, but not as much as it first appears.
If only we had the equivalent of INTERAC or the EU’s equivalent system. Nope, not here on the wild west frontier. We still do it the 1930s way.
We used to pay the landscaper by cheque, but his son got him setup for direct payment. I don’t think I have written a cheque in the last 3 years.
Interac makes a huge difference, it helps that there are only 5 major banks in the country.
Yes, as I’ve mentioned a few times, one reason we are so slow to adopt modern financial systems in the US is that there are still over 4000 banks here. And that’s after several decades of massive consolidation.
Regarding mailing checks, I do it very rarely nowadays. Basically, only those bills that come once or twice a year, like my homeowners insurance. I have an emergency credit card that I rarely use; when I do I pay the balance with a check.