Not really, no. Having to travel during bankers’ hours to perform a trivial administrative task is even more outdated and unreasonable than performing those tasks by mail.
Okay, but if its gone up that much that recently, that tells me its been paying for itself and its retirement fund until quit recently. Of course that kind of begs the question. Do liabilities include the pension for the workers they now have or do liabilities include the pensions for workers that haven’t even been born yet?
Or in other words, if they can’t fund the retirement of current workers, that is worrisome. If they can’t fund people that don’t even exist yet then its not a real problem.
My understanding is that the liabilities include future pension obligations for existing and former employees. They do have to make some assumptions about new entrants to the workforce, since some employees will undoubtedly retire - I believe this is what drives the claim that they’re funding pensions for “unborn” future employees. However, this is a pretty standard actuarial practice when dealing with future pension liabilities for large organizations.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that while pre-funding pension liabilities clearly puts a burden on the USPS, it might not be the worst idea for a business in secular decline (since you can’t really bank on unknown future growth to offset known future liabilities).
I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that politicians are in charge of their pricing and service structure, rather than the people who run the business.
Thats certainly a good point. I just wonder is this retirement funding planning is of the more reasonable prudent planning the funding wise or more of a ohh come on! planning wise? Honestly appreciate your input but I suspect the actual details that would answer that question would be more than you (or somebody else) would want to dig up and analyze. Though that whole 70 year thing makes me think its at least on the more conservative side than it needs to be (therefore things sound a bit worse than they actually are).
Here’s my bitch of the day about the postal service. I went to get my new mailbox registered (the rural free delivery that’s a mile from my house) and the post office is closed for lunch from 1-2!
No private business does that. You take lunch in rotating shifts. You don’t shut out customers for an hour in the middle of a workday.
Does your post office have shifts to rotate? Some small post offices just have one person.
That’s not true. Almost every doctor’s office that I deal with shuts down completely from 1 to 2 for lunch. No telephone calls, no walk-ins. And they’re all private businesses.
First off, I know of many businesses that do that. Second off, it’s a post office in a rural area, maybe they simply don’t have the staff to rotate and maintain the integrity of the place.
Third off, didn’t you say earlier that “you and me” pay for the post office’s benefits? How? They’re self-funded aren’t they?
When it opened back up at 2pm, there were three people working there. I don’t know why they couldn’t have staggered it. Doctors are an exception because with Medicare and Medicaid they have become bureaucrats themselves. Evil Wal-Mart is open 24/7 to serve its customers.
Yes “you and me” pay because inertia forces us to use the postal service. I had to pay my property tax bill by check through the mail. (Yes, I could have missed work and handed it in, but I talking about practicality). Instead of accepting online payments like every other business I deal with, I had to put a 45 cent stamp and mail it.
Any place that you do business with, and certainly the legal system, needs a physical mailing address. Saying, “Fuck off, I don’t use the postal service, send me my stuff in PDF format to my email address” is simply not accepted in most places.
At least you admit you don’t know. 
Plenty of businesses do it.
Okay, I don’t know what that bizarre nonsense has to do with anything, but I’m glad you had a chance to vent your spleen and I’m sorry Medicare ruined your doctor’s life.
Oh, so when you said, “you and me” were on the hook for their pay, you were just serving up a huge plate of horseshit and didn’t intend to back it up with a reasoned argument.
Okay then.
And to some extent that’s because email is not considered reliable (will it arrive? Servers have errors. People abandon addresses routinely. Will it be read? Will it be filtered as spam? Will it be ignored or deleted? It’s not considered secure, confidential, or private – it goes through any number of vulnerable points.
And, indeed, many taxes are payable online. But that represents a cost to the government that has to be funded by guess what? More taxes. When’s the last time people were happy to pay more taxes for anything?
There are people in this thread saying that poor people have to suck it up buy a computer and pay for Internet access to conduct all day to day business. The poor already have any number of obstacles to making it through a normal day that the middle class and rich don’t. In this country it’s already hard ti be poor and it’s not just because thru are less able to buy things.
I frankly don’t understand the anti-USPS sentiment espoused in this thread. I understand it fits into the wider anti-government schema embraced by some posters, but the arguments against the USPS appear a bit strained. Having lived overseas, I find it odd that people would complain about a postal service that is generally reliable, prompt, and affordable. First world problems indeed.
To be fair a lot – but certainly not all – critics of government run organizations point to the government meddling as one of the reasons it is inefficient. Now a lot of that criticism is invalid anyway since a lot of the meddling is from those who have an ideological interest in seeing it fail, but you can’t completely separate government control of pricing and service from the overall efficiency of the program.
However, certain people do directly impugn the workers for the percieved ineffiency – even in this thread, and that is simply incorrect, like you said. It’s mostly governmental regulations, mandates, and pricing oversight that is causing it to be merely breaking even rather than running a surplus.
If UPS or Fedex took over, you can be sure you’d get LOTS of junk mail. Those dudes have to make a profit, you know. Mind you UPS is bringing in a service where they will charge you $30 for the privilege of getting your packages delivered, so who knows? Maybe you could pay them to not deliver your junk mail.
No. It’s 100% political. Bought and Paid for by UPS and Fedex, and fostered by the hate the GOP has for the Postal Workers Union.
They are being asked to fully fund workers who havent even started yet. No one does that. It’s insanity.
Doctors’ offices do it all the time, around here.
Oops. Ninja’d by Ascenray.
It’s an interesting thing to think about. Look where he wants the price point to be for that.
$10/year seems kind of low. Maybe if the USPS instituted several different classes of direct mail advertising, people could pay a premium to avoid the lower classes. The higher class you want filtered out, the more it costs you per year. And for the advertisers, the higher class of mail they want to send out, the more it costs.
We could have bidding wars between the Direct Mail advertisers and the mailbox users!
I better contact the PMG. I may have just saved the Post Office!
I’m kinda confused about this junk mail sidetrack. You aren’t getting junk mail because the post office. You are getting junk mail because advertisers pay the post office to deliver it. If the post office was privatized advertisers would still be paying to get their messages to you.
Television has been run by private companies yet they still aren’t offering the option to pay them to escape commercials. In fact they are pretty upset consumers are finding ways to see their content while avoiding their commercials.
The fact of the matter is advertisers will always be willing to pay more money to get their message out then consumers are willing to pay not to here it.
Just an observation. It seems like a long time since a disgruntled post office employee went on a spree. Is that meme dead and gone?