I understand that through some agreement that mail from China to the US is so inexpensive that the USPS loses money delivering it. I wonder how the “From China” Ebay sellers would suffer if they had to pay more postage.
That may be AN argument, but it’s not a great one.
The real reason the USPS is running at a loss is in 2006 Congress mandated the USPS pre-fund its pension obligations for the following 75 years. That is, it was and is expected to fund retirements for employees that have not been born yet.
This is not a requirement held by any other public or private institution and blew a big hole in the budget. The USPS would be running at a profit in the absence of additional Congressional requirements (well, maybe not so much in 2020, but this has been a strange year). There are reasons why Congress did this. It is worth noting that many of the people in favor of privatization of the postal service also decided that a government agency (well, sort of, the USPS is quasi-independent now) that has been run efficiently for decades has to have onerous requirements added that somehow prove public agencies can’t be run efficiently at all.
To the extent Amazon is involved, the USPS makes a bit of a profit delivering those packages. It is a “subsidy” in the sense that it would cost Amazon more in the short term if this was not an option, but they aren’t getting any deals that any other large company would not also get.
That was a question I came to post. Amazon ships a massive amount of packages via USPS. Wouldn’t any company that large doing business with another company get a quantity discount? And to the extent you want to call that a “subsidy” doesn’t every rural customer (or a sender to a rural customer) get a similar subsidy?
If Grandma sends you a handwritten letter, she pays the same 55 cents whether you live in the middle of town, or outside of town up a mountain road. Whether that is a good idea or not, it was one made many years ago to allow rural people to have the same access to the outside world as people in town, and we see a lot of the same thing with subsidized broadband internet, or rural electrification.
Why is Amazon suddenly the bad guy for using the same infrastructure as everyone else?
Because Trump is doing the same thing he has done his whole career , screw people out of money if he does not like them. One reason that he is sued so often was he refused to pay contractors who did work for him.
This isn’t my experience: UPS and FedEx delivered to my door when I lived in the boonies, whereas the USPS wouldn’t go there and forced me to go to a P.O. Box in town.
I wonder how many of the people who think the USPS has a mandate to deliver to every address have actually lived outside of a big town.
I can give you addresses the USPS does not serve. Where does this meme come from?
I know this from experience as well. I think I even posted on here about it. I had to drive a mile to a cluster of mailboxes to get my stuff, not put a mailbox next to my house. I thought that Rural Free Delivery meant that they deliver to anyone’s house. I was told on this board that is not true.
Whereas UPS would drop off, of all things, Amazon packages right at the door.
Are UPS or FedEx set up to make six-day-a-week deliveries to the addresses that USPS delivers to? I doubt it.
And the USPS isn’t set up to deliver to some of the addresses UPS and FedEx deliver to. I don’t see your point.
Some people apparently want it to be true badly enough they’ll insist it is.
BTW, my place didn’t even have the gang box. I rented a P.O. Box in town or I didn’t get USPS mail.
OK. I thought it was obvious but I’ll be explicit. If the USPS were shut down tomorrow, neither UPS nor FedEx could replace its functions, not without expanding and reorganizing their business.
Does UPS or FedEx deliver to your house?
Actually Ravenman there are places where the parcel carriers will deliver to your door and the USPS will not, and places where USPS does and the parcel carriers won’t. The USPS does have a mandate/policy to at least put a delivery point as close as viable to the maximum number of people, as part of the support for rura population UltraVires describes, but it’s not an absolute mandate to find your cabin in the middle of the woods.
Yes, that’s a headscratcher there in wherever Trump is supposed to be going with this.
Is he actually proposing that the USPS discriminate against Amazon in denying it deals they’d make with other volume customers, or even in outright upfront pricing? Or to force USPS to renounce offering any type of volume consideration or third-party “last mile” service in those places where it’s available?
I’d think the “last mile” package deliveries would be a good deal for the USPS; Amazon, FedEx or UPS drop off a bunch of packages to a local post office, and the mail carriers deliver them to the individual addresses that they already visit six days a week.
The only argument I can make out is something along the lines of: Amazon makes go-jillions of dollars per year. A big feature of their products is the fast and low cost shipping. When Billy Jo Countryboy orders items on Amazon, the taxpayers are subsidizing the delivery to the end of his road located way out in the sticks. Amazon therefore takes advantage of this subsidy by charging lower prices and making go-jillions. Why should Joe Q. Taxpayer be putting more money in Jeff Bezos’ pocket?
Well, first, it just reeks of a Bernie Sanders stick it to the rich argument that I’m surprised any Republican would get near. Second, it is horribly shortsighted because the subsidies are there for Billy Jo, to get things shipped to him at cheaper prices, not for Amazon. Finally, it seems like taking this sort of action would just cut USPS’s own throat because with the advent of electronic communication, there just isn’t that much paper stuff to be sent. Amazon supplements USPS business (if not keeps it afloat entirely) by the massive amount of stuff it ships, even if it does get a discount relative to other shippers, and as said before, there is nothing unusual about that.
If there is another argument to be had for this, I’m willing to hear it. But what did Amazon do to piss off Trump anyways? Do they compete against any of his businesses? I thought he was in real estate and the like. It shouldn’t bother him a bit what Amazon is doing.
Jeff Bezos made his billions the old fashioned easy. He earned it.
Unlike a certain real estate developer who only started out with «a few millions» from his father.
Yes. I thought I said that.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. QED.
It is. I think they’re just playing games with numbers.
The US Postal Service loses money every year. One of my cites has says they lost 2.7 billion in 2017- I don’t have the more recent numbers. And if you divide that number by the number of Amazon packages that the USPS delivers, you could come up with a statistic that claimed “The postal service loses $x for every Amazon package they deliver.”
But before they started working with Amazon and other carriers, they were losing 16 billion a year. They make money on package delivery, just not to offset the rest of the operation - it’s the things like first class mail and catalogs and operating retail post offices that kill them financially. Package delivery helps offset that.
Also Amazon is not required to provide fully funded retirement for 75 years into the future. The USPS is required to fund retirement for future employees that are not born yet. It’s been a plot since the Bush years to make the USPS “uncompetitive” and loss making with BS like this.
Right. Personal/political grudge that makes him *very *willing to listen to those who’d further cripple the USPS.