That “first question” was “What if USPS goes away and no private carrier will deliver to rural areas?”.
Perhaps you didn’t mean that they should live without mail service, but it does seem like you don’t particular care if they have no choice but to do so.
The USPS wants to change. That is the entire point - they are petitioning Congress to allow them to change, and so far have been denied.
You actually had 3 questions, and I skipped the first. The answer to your first is that someone is going to do it, it’s just a matter of price. I’m not really invested in exactly how much service we give to rural Americans, so have at it. Give them as much as you want. Just make sure we know what we’re paying for and we’re not subsidizing people who can afford to pay for what they need.
It may occur to them, but a significant minority just does not give a crap about shared needs.
They’ve been sold a bill of goods about “OMG Socialism bad!” combined with a corporate agenda that has promoted a natural tendency to be greedy and selfish. ("I want more stuff for MEEEEE!)
This has led to a large portion of society that is short-sightedly focused on self-gratification (don’t tax me) at the expense of the long term benefit to society as a whole. They simply cannot conceive that they live in a world that is bigger than their own little self-indulgent consumer world of “meeeeee!”
This is a huge problem - folks who don’t have the foggiest idea of how their own society actually works, and don’t get that they are not unique little islands that exist in isolation from everyone else.
And indeed they are already delivering on those routes. So if they can increase the number of packages they deliver - and thus the revenue they receive - using the same number of employees, trucks etc., they are better off.
IOW, the marginal cost of delivering an additional package will be well below what they receive to do so.
There’s a difference between accepting that people live differently than I do, and agreeing that the best course is for me to subsidize it.
Living different places has different tradeoffs. I live in Southern California. I get to have beautiful weather year round, but also have to deal with high rent, higher population density, and the occasional chance that I will catch on fire or be swallowed up whole by the earth. People who live in rural Maine have colder winters and fewer movie premieres, but they have plentiful land and wildlife, wide-open spaces, and small towns. I wouldn’t choose to live there, but I don’t have any problem with people who do.
Now, why can’t one of the tradeoffs of the urban/rural choice be that it costs more to send things to rural places? Why not let it cost $0.25 to send a letter to me and $1.50 to send one to them? Note that these aren’t punitive prices. I’m not trying to stick it to rural people. It actually costs more in a real sense, to deliver mail to rural areas.
I don’t get my rent subsidized because we have to make rent equal everywhere, though I think we’d agree that shelter is an even more basic need than postal service. Why does mail have to be the same price everywhere in the country? Why can’t rural people pay something closer to the real costs for mail delivery?
How so? If the USPS dies and UPS or FedEx take over letter delivery, then the only difference will be who delivers the junk mail. As others have pointed out, bulk mail delivery is a big money maker for the USPS since they don’t have to deal with the sorting and what not. Why wouldn’t private companies want to get in on that if they had the opportunity?
The people who don’t know how society works are the ones who set up an organization where you can’t lay employees off, where they have outsized healthcare and retirement benefits. Those are recipies for bankruptcy.
Hey, I’m starting to like this “shared needs” concept. I gotta need; you’re gonna share in paying for it. I live in CA, too, and gas is much more expensive than the rest of the country. They should share in paying for it so we can all have the same gas costs. I pay taxes, too!
I’ll be interested to see how local and federal governments deal with this, since the existence of the USPO is assumed by, and even required by, quite a number of statutes. Example: if I’m sending a reply brief to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the law says that I have 30 days to submit it, and that it is presumed to have been timely sent if it is placed in the US Mail on or before the 30th day, even if it doesn’t arrive until several days later. Without the Post Office, that and all similar laws will have to be rewritten.
Competition does not reduce cost if companies are forced into an inefficient service model.
4 companies provide coast to coast mail delivery services. That means 4 guys in 4 trucks drive to my home every delivery day, each delivering 25% of the day’s mail. Whether they’re putting 1 letter or 4 letters in my box, they have to stop, exit the truck, walk to my box, put in the letter(s), get back in the truck and go to the next block.
For the same reason, we don’t have 4 power companies providing 4 sets of wires down every block. It’s 4x the setup 4x the maintenance, for the same customer set. I don’t care how competitive they are, costs won’t go down until some of the competitors go bankrupt, or until the local government agrees to a local monopoly on service.
Mail delivery isn’t available where I live, and in the entire county that I work in (except for some gang boxes here and there). Businesses don’t get it either. So delivery isn’t mandated.
Without competition (ie, a market), there is no way to determine the market price. Right now, you pay whatever the USPS says you pay, or you don’t mail the letter.
We already have exactly what you describe w/ parcel delivery. FedEx, UPS and the USPS.
Newspapers, too. My neighborhood is served by the SF Chronicle, SJ Merc and NY Times (to name just 3). Not to mention every company that delivers anything or provides any service. We have at least 5 or 6 (maybe more) landscape service companies coming 'round every week.
Well, that law doesn’t have to be rewritten. It will gracefully degrade into a delivery requirement rather than a sending requirement. That makes the deadline shorter, for practical reasons, but it’s still well-defined.
There are plenty of things that have a delivery deadline (absentee ballots come to mind), and they work fine.
this is true for many rural areas. you go to the post office and pick up your mail there. sometimes the post office is in the same building as a store or feed lot, that sort of thing.
the post office has been closing small offices that were separate buildings and maintained by the usps and having them move into existing businesses where they make arraingments to have a counter or section.
the up side is that the business has rental type agreement with usps there by increasing revenue. also should that business be burgled or something of that sort it could go under federal charges instead of local.
there were cases in the great depression where someone would be in a bad state, nab an apple or loaf of bread, and go down the river because the post office was in a grocery store. of course it wasn’t just during that time period, just that there was a higher rate during the depression.
The USPS was originally funded by the Federal government, it’s in the constitution that they should do so, I’ve no issues with it returning to it’s original status.
Further to my reply to Cheesesteak…
The other thing you’d get is I bet there are a lot of people like me out there who could live with once/wk mail delivery. 90% of the mail I get goes directly into the recycle bin. I pay all my bills online and very rarely mail anything out other than Birthday cards and Christmas cards.
Businesses might need daily delivery, but we shouldn’t be in the business (no pun intended) of subsidizing their mail service. They can pay for a premier service if they want.
I could go for this also but I have to wonder what it would really save. Unless Optimus Prime is hired by the USPS, there is no way a single indivual would be able to carry the amount of junk mail I, personally, receive each week.
I know that in Antigua there is home postal delivery maybe once a month. Everyone has post office boxes and you go and pick up your mail at the post office. Right there the USPS could save a fortune by stopping deliveries.
That might make sense in sparsely populated areas, but would be an absolute nightmare in cities.