it IS dumb, unless your goal is to destroy (I mean privatize) every thing the federal government does because you are stupid OR you know your buddies will make a lot of money this way and they will share it with you.
:mad:
I wish everybody knew about this!
The USPS wouldn’t be in such dire straits if not for the pre-funding requirement, which is clearly asinine. (I think that’s fair even in GQ.) But they’d still be hurting, every year from basically the beginning of the USPS up until I believe the late 1990s or maybe even early 2000s total mail volume increased.
It increased so much that not only did the USPS have to become massive, they had to basically invent new technologies and process improvements to handle the never-ending increase in mail volume. It’s pretty impressive they did all of this while typically turning a “profit” and mostly on postage rates that are literally cheap as dirt compared to any private sector competitor. (The other day I shipped something UPS, and it was $17.50, a USPS flat rate box would have shipped the same thing for 30% that price.)
But with the reality of decreasing mail volume the USPS pretty much has to change. Something a lot of other countries have done is substantially dial back or even privatize physical post offices. One approach that has been done internationally is the government will basically sell postal franchises to places like gas stations or supermarkets. The owner of these businesses will then dedicate a small portion of their floor space to doing postal stuff, and depending on how busy they are they may not even have to keep a full time staff member that (but instead have someone work the station “on demand” as necessary.)
This really fixes a lot of the problem with physical post offices. On one hand, in many places now it just plain doesn’t make sense to maintain a full post office with a full staff of clerks. However, if you close post offices everywhere it doesn’t make sense to have them, you end up putting some people in a situation where they may have to drive 20 miles or more to get to a post office, which isn’t ideal either.
If you just outsource these low volume post offices to private businesses then the service would still be there but you wouldn’t have to staff the whole place. A very low volume rural post office could probably be operated as a counter in a gas station that the regular cashier works whenever someone needs it, and it costs the business owner a little bit more but he is making more money from the postal business, and it costs the USPS a hell of a lot less to not have to maintain that physical location and staff it with potentially 5-10 people.
Well, that’s the thing you didn’t address - the USPS has to provide service to everyone, sometimes at unprofitable prices. Private carriers are allowed to refuse to deliver to remote areas, or else charge an arm and a leg to deliver there. USPS can do neither; they must deliver everywhere while often charging a set, money-losing price.
And that’s the other thing - you talk about a drop in revenues due to the internet bringing email and electronic bill-paying, but you also have to consider the huge increase in internet shopping that has greatly increased parcel delivery. There, too, the private carriers can deliver where they want, and charge what they want, while the USPS has to deliver everywhere at set prices, even if they’re losing money.
The result of that is an indirect subsidy of the private carriers, since they can choose from only the profitable business and leave behind the unprofitable scraps for the USPS. Either the USPS should not be expected to be self-sufficient/profitable (be partially funded by taxes), or they should be run like a business and allowed to set prices that ensure self-sufficiency/profitability. You can’t have it both ways - specially when you also impose onerous employee benefit prefunding mandates.
Aside from the pre-funding thing, why not just price your product such that you can pay your bills?
No need for any elaborate schemes…if the price to send a letter needs to be $1.00, then charge that price.
Congress won’t let 'em. The prices are set so as to make it affordable for those in rural areas. In the telecommunications industry, the telcos are mandated by law to essentially operate at a loss in unprofitable rural areas. In the delivery business, the USPS picks up all that slack, then is also expected to be self-sufficient.
Yes, I get that, but it doesn’t change the formula:
price per piece(assuming letter)=((Total cost to deliver all pieces)/(number of pieces delivered))
It does when half of the Congress is in a party that wants you to fail so they can privatize what you do.
I don’t think there’s a problem with subsidizing delivery to guarantee service. But what I mentioned was specifically post offices, there is no reason I can think of it wouldn’t be better to get rid of 4-5 people sitting doing nothing at a very underused rural post office and licensing some local convenience store that is open at appropriate hours to do the same functions.
If you privatized delivery and left it to itself, businesses wouldn’t deliver on unprofitable routes and people would lose out on service. So if you privatized delivery but wanted guaranteed service, you would have to subsidize the system somehow with either government funds or some mandatory fees that all users of the system have to pay, which are then used to make the overall system profitable. That’s basically what we do with telephone service where a small part of everyone’s bill is basically a fee that is used to keep people living out in the boondocks connected. If you’re going to subsidize it such I don’t know that it’s as big a concern as to whether you privatize it at all.
However with physical post offices, if you have a rural post office that gets 10-15 customers a day, it’s a huge waste of resources. However if you close it, it could mean that a few thousand people now can’t easily get to a post office. The private market could actually step in here, low volume post offices could easily be replaced by self-service kiosks and a counter at a convenience store that might require 20-30 minutes a day of work. The owner of the store makes money off this, and his costs don’t really go up very much at all by having that service ran out of his store. If anything they could go up as people would come in to do post office stuff and might buy a candy bar or soda while they’re at it.
The employees are in the male!