US Postal Rate Goes Up Today July 13, 2025

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I live in the Seattle suburbs, near a number of highways. Definitely not in a rural area. I have UPS and FedEx places near me.

I still use USPS frequently to ship things. It’s almost the only thing I use. It’s cheaper than the alternatives, items arrive pretty quickly, and everything is tracked. It’s great.

I also receive mail all the time. Most is junk mail but a lot of packages (particularly small ones) arrive by USPS. I get important letters too. The USPS is still the official way government reaches out to people. You can’t trust phone calls and emails and texts that claim to be the government, they’re usually scams because the government will always use USPS for anything official unless you’ve opted into something specific.

It’s a needed service and insisting it needs to go away is insane. It’s like saying that since we have planes and boats and helicopters we don’t need wheeled vehicles and roads anymore. That’s not an argument that any adult living in the real world should make.

22

We have enough “Forever” stamps that as often as we use them, a couple a year at most, we are set for decades.

23

I don’t mail too much anymore, but I hadn’t seen that. Thanks for the heads up.

24

See how profitable UPS FedEx and DHL would be if they HAD to deliver to every house 6/7 days a week, regardless of where that house is and for the same price regardless of distance. Take a few minutes to educate yourself. The main reason the USPS “loses” money is the assholes in Congress decided years back to make the USPS be the only government entity that had to prefund its retiree health care benefits 75 years in advance. That costs billions a year and NONE of that money comes from taxes, only from revenue from postal business. Not enough revenue? Too bad, cough up the prefunding.

25

Is it evil to admit I also have mixed feelings about the USPS?

On one hand, I really, REALLY hate snail mailed letters. I wish everything could be done via email or some form of secure online messaging like banks and hospitals have.

On the other hand, I understand I can’t speak for all postal service users. I don’t even know how representative I am (or not), either of the population at large or even in my own demographics. Where did that 91% favorability rating even come from? That’s crazy high for any sort of service, especially a government associated one.

In any case, does this have to be a black and white situation where we either have the full USPS as it currently is, or nothing at all? As a taxpayer, I don’t mind paying for mail and subsidizing rural routes and such, especially for people who have limited access to technology.

But the current way it’s set up, it seems like most residential mail sent through the system is commercial junk anyway, with interpersonal and official correspondence just kinda along for the ride. Is the USPS mostly funded by all this junk mail?

What if, instead of 6 day delivery to every home in the country, we instead had a system where (just an example, not completely thought out):

  • Online correspondence is developed and encouraged as the primary method of official government communications
  • The USPS is turned into a hub system, utilizing existing post offices, where delivered mail would be stored until pickup or delivery
  • Residential delivery would no longer be a 6 days a week thing. Maybe just once a week, on alternate days by neighborhood, like garbage collection.
  • But businesses, individuals, and governments could still subcontract out rushed deliveries for anything really important. These would go by courier from the post office to an individual household, like any Amazon or DoorDash or FedEx/UPS package. It would utilize the existing gig economy network where possible, or fall back to FedEx and UPS where not. Worst case, they’d have to wait for their weekly delivery.
  • The federal and local governments could still pay subsidize individual households’ rushed deliveries, such as for medication for low income households, Medicare, etc.

Overall, I wonder… could that lower the volume of snail mail spam? Save some costs? Encourage more adoption of online communications?

Has any such hybrid system been tried in other countries? How do they handle changing snail mail usage patterns elsewhere, especially in similarly big and rural countries (Canada, China, etc.)?

Mostly just wondering out loud…

26

That 91% figure apparently came from a 2020 Pew phone survey of a thousand or so people: Public Holds Broadly Favorable Views of Many Federal Agencies, Including CDC and HHS | Pew Research Center

It was the most popular agency in that particular survey. Its favorability noticeably increased from the 80s till now, starting from 70% or so before peaking at 91%.

Gotta wonder how useful that methodology is. “People who answer phone surveys” are a pretty select niche to begin with…

27

The biggest issue for this, even 25+ years after the internet boom, and almost 20 years after the introduction of the smartphone, is that reliable access to, and usage of, email or online communications still is by no means close to ubiquitous, the way that mailing addresses are*. There are still roughly 12% of American households who don’t have internet access, and 7% of Americans who don’t go online at all – among those age 65%, it’s 25%.

Lack of internet access and usage skews towards the old, the poor, and the uneducated, and they will be left behind by what you propose, until and unless they not only are able to reliably get online, but are able to learn how to use online services – and learn how to recognize the difference between legitimate official communications and scams.

Seniors, in particular, are already preyed upon by scammers, as they are often more easily confused or misled, and pushing official communications into electronic media – where they are already receiving scam messaging purporting to be about their Medicare or Social Security coverage – is a recipe for disaster.

*- There are indeed some people who don’t have fixed mailing addresses, including the homeless, but compared to the percent of Americans who don’t or can’t use email or online services, it’s far smaller.

At this point in time, direct mail advertising is an important revenue stream for the USPS. Even though most people throw those ads directly into the trash or recycling, if it weren’t for direct mail ads, postage rates for “desirable” mail would be even higher.

28

That’s fair, but it’s also specifically why I said the online stuff would be encouraged… not mandatory. At least not for a generation or so.

Basically, in this hypothetical hybrid system, most people would go online instead, but the rest would either get their mail once a week or pay for courier delivery, either on their own (for things like newspapers) or subsidized by the government (for medications, tax letters, things like that). I wonder if there would be a net savings to taxpayers overall, by drastically reducing the frequency of residential mail delivery but also paying extra to subsidize and subcontract it out for the households that really need it.

29

Polling, survey, and market research methodologies are all “broken,” in one way or another, by non-response errors, and it’s just gotten worse in the time that I’ve been working as a professional market researcher. There has never been a methodology which will deliver a truly representative sample of Americans, and this fact has gotten even more true in recent decades.

30

That’s my understanding.

Easily 90% of my mail is junk, and that might be a conservative estimate. But it takes no effort to pull it out and dump it in the recycle bin. The way I look at it, that minor annoyance keeps us from having to pay more in taxes to keep the USPS running. That, or reducing the funding which would naturally lead to a decline in service.

I know it will vary from place to place, but my local post office is pretty awesome. The people who work there are friendly and knowledgeable, and they can get long lines through pretty fast. It’s one of the few federal agencies I don’t mind dealing with. I know not every post office is the same, but the handful I’ve used over the years have been similar.

31

Not only this, but online-only access will also require people who can’t afford it to own a printer and print out their important documents, social security statements, bills, etc.

32

So I did a bit more reading, and it seems like most of the USPS’s costs are paid for by selling its own products/services. The public subsidies for it are minimal, and mostly in the form of various discounts (on loans, taxes, fees, etc. offered to it by other government entities).

Still not a very efficient system (a national fleet of trucks & carriers just to deliver junk mail to people’s recycling bins?), but if it’s mostly paid for by its actual users — junk mailers or otherwise — well… the taxpaying public is unlikely to get a better deal on its own without those commercial users/subsidizers anyhow. And the pension funding thing is just nutty.

Just kinda sounds like a non-issue, really… if not for the Republicans trying to sabotage it on purpose, I don’t think there would be a problem to discuss at all… sigh.

33

They’ve always been nice enough in every town I’ve lived, big or small. I know “going postal” is a thing, but it’s really the spam that bothers me. I wish I could pay the USPS to not deliver any unsolicited commercial mail to me… I’d be willing to pay double all the incoming postage they get from the spammers, just for them to not deliver it.

I don’t think that’d necessarily have to be case. When applying for state documents, for example, you can often choose to do it online, by fax, by mail, or in person at a local office. Having an online option is nice; I don’t think it should replace all the other options.

Of course, if you make it and people start using it… sooner or later a fiscal conservative is going to try to cut the other options, especially if they’re only used by the poor :frowning: It’s not like that everywhere. The US just has a sick political culture…

34

There have been days I felt like that too.

35

Older people, the ones uncomfortable with online access, want physical copies of their paperwork. The people who want to do away with physical mail seem to think those people aren’t important.

36

I have followed this thread with interest as it mirrors much of what is happening with our own postal delivery service (ie Royal Mail).

They are currently obliged to deliver to every front door in the country, six days a week, and that does mean the front door, not a box on a post at the bottom of the road. They are losing huge amounts of money and that obligation will soon be reduced.

From the end of this month, they will have to continue delivering first-class letters (next-day) six days a week; however, second-class letters (up to four days) will be delivered either on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or on Tuesday and Thursday, in a two-week cycle. In general, 2nd-class mail is either junk or cards (Christmas/birthday etc.)

A 1st-class stamp currently costs £1.70 ($2.29) and 2nd-class is 87p ($1.17), although there are huge discounts for bulk mail that most of us recycle without looking at it.

Most of my government business is done online. I just renewed my driving licence, for example. I pay my car tax online, and I can deal with HMRC online as well, although they still generate some snail mail for security reasons.