They have 330 million customers and still lose money.
That is the same mentality and skill level of people who will be administering our health care.
I have received excellent service in many a post office but I have also received very poor service from just as many if not more of them. One postal employee used to assist the older customers by repackaging their stuff up for free (using their own tape and boxes)and another would help people write all the addresses on those annoying little sheets of paper you have to use to get anything done.
Then we would get those that would tell you to fix or re-write an address or relabel a package or overcharge for postage and close the door to the back-room never to return.
The primary responsibility of the USPS is not the timely delivery of printed communications and packages, it’s to manage the benefits of their employees and union retirees.
> They have 330 million customers and still lose money.
And it has nothing to do with not charging enough for stamps (which always seems to be their fixed response)
They've got the national monopoly and they STILL blow it!
Our USPS has its share of problems. First, they’re a government agency at heart, function as such, hire as such, pay as such and operate with a skewed reality that the private sector does not. Secondly, as a quasi-government agency, they face real, relentless competition, which is something bureaucratic agencies aren’t equipped for but for one which they’ve successfully engaged and adapted, IMHO. However, you can’t deny they’ve done an impressive job with the sheer volume of mail and still manage to deliver with predictable reliability, 90% of the time. Thirdly and most importantly, here is why the USPS is imploding:
(From Time Mag, Feb 2013, How Healthcare Expenses Cost Us Saturday Postal Delivery by Josh Sanburn)
Since 2006, the Post Office has been legally required to pre-fund health benefits for future retirees at a cost of around $5.5 billion a year. For the first time last year, it defaulted on its annual payment.
When Congress imposed those mandates in 2006, the Post Office was doing just fine. Digital communication had yet to take such a huge bite out of the amount of mail the USPS processed and delivered. First-class mail volume was about 97 billion pieces in 2006. So there wasn’t much of a backlash when Congress decided that the Post Office was healthy enough to lock in health benefits for future retirees — for the next 75 years, mind you, something no other public or private agency does.
Two years later, the U.S. was hit by the Great Recession at around the same time that mobile communication and things like online bill payments were growing at explosive rates. The Post Office began reporting massive deficits from which it has yet to recover. Last year it delivered only 68 billion pieces of mail.