I don’t want to be a surrogate for the Post Office. There are some serious problems that need to be addressed. But the piling on fails to consider some of the facts:
The Post Office delivers more mail in one day than UPS or FedEx does in a year.
Claims have been made on the internet about retired postal workers getting 75,000 to 100,000 dollars a year in retirement. Perhaps this was true for some higher level members of management under the older retirement system. Today, if you work for 15 years and retire (after reaching retirement age), you draw a little more than $400 per month.
A surprise to many people: The Post Office delivers a sizeable amount of the packages for UPS and FedEx. In fact, through Parcel Select and SmartPost the Post Office delivers almost as many UPS and FedEx packages as those companies do. UPS and FedEx drop their packages off in mass each morning at the local post office. DHS doesn’t even deliver to certain parts of the country. They send their packages via the Post Office to these areas.
The Post Office is generally cheaper unless you mail a very heavy or very large package a very long distance.
UPS and FedEx do not want to take over the Post Office’s business, because, as things are, they are able to cherry pick the cost efficient routes and let the Post Office deliver the rest.
The Post Office delivers 175 billion pieces of mail a year. When you deliver that much mail, there will be some horror stories about misdelivered, damaged, or late mail. You rarely hear people tell about the majority of the mail, which is delivered correctly, safely, and on-time.
Always use the Post Office for overseas delivery. It costs anywhere from two to ten times as much to use UPS or FedEx. (Hint: I can’t attest to today, but I know that five years ago, if you mailed something overseas using a UPS Store, at the end of the day those employees went to the nearest Post Office and stood in line and mailed your packages via the Post Office. This is not a second-hand opinion. I know that this is the case.)
Counterpoint for your shameless promotion of the USPS:
The Post Office is on track to lose what, $6B this year, with the taxpayers on the hook when the Post Office defaults on its loans. This is not true of UPS or Fedex, which do not survive on taxpayer loans.
In my experience, international mail through the USPS is a horror. Long ago I learned from having critical documents disappear into the void that USPS is grossly unreliable. In fact, it is impossible to track your letter through to its destination with the USPS! I send dozens of documents every week internationally via Fedex, and have done so for years. Only ONCE did a document go missing with Fedex in all that time, and from their tracking they were able to pinpoint the exact driver (in France) who was culpable.
USPS is a dismal failure and an anachronism and needs to be permanently weaned from the government teat. If they collapse, so be it.