Posted on 02/17/2012 1:10:30 PM PST by Java4Jay
The U.S. Post Office, facing financial losses of up to $18.2 billion a year by 2015, wants to charge more for postage, more for services, and to suspend Saturday delivery.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
why would fitty cent get a stamp?
I used to complain about that too, but that 90% of junk subsidizes your 10% First Class mail. I've noticed that all of my regular bills are asking me to change to online notices. And the State of Wisconsin requires me to file my fees and business reports on line now.
I recently did some heavy duty shipping. Using the P.O., I saved an average of $3-$5 per carton (depending on weight) over the two private shippers.
In toto, I saved big bread.
And if the P.O. rates go up, the privates will go up proportionately.
If you haven't tried it, don't knock it.
Leni
In the normal world prices are based upon supply and demand. If everyone wants your product you can raise your prices. In the case of the USPS, they have a product that no one really wants or even needs anymore so they defy the laws of economics and raise prices.
Government in action.
How much would it cost to have someone in New Zealand box one kiwi fruit and send it to you, using the shipper of your choice?
I was born in 1947 and if my memory has not gone completely bad, letters were still 3 cents when I was a kid. I also think post cards were still a penny.
Regular gas here in SE AZ is $3.449per gal.
I did not send Christmas cards this past Christmas, but used the money saved on cards and postage for charitable giving. Plus folks can take me off their card list and save some money.
What they should do is get rid of half of all USPS employees involved in handling mail, then deliver to half of all locations Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and the other half Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday.
Anyone who wants every-day delivery will pay for it, unless they get enough mail that it makes sense for the post office to send a truck out to them every day.
When I was a kid, we called them “penny post cards.”
| Organization | Wages as % of revenue |
| FedEx | 35% |
| UPS | 53% |
| Post Office | 82% |
There's nothing the Post Office can do if it doesn't change that.
Being born the same year I compliment you on your memory. You must also remember when the gallons on a gas pump went as fast as the dollars do today.
We lived in the country and ordered all kinds of clothing and small household items by mail from Sears Roebuck in Ft Worth, TX, paid for by postal money orders bought from the RFD carrier with cash in the mail box.
Life was good (and inexpensive too).
What’s the avreage salary of a postal worker?
Congress is the problem.
It will not allow the U.S. Postal service to make some of the changes it needs to, and will not use its power to force the U.S. Postal Service, and it’s unions, to make changes they don’t want to make.
If Congress does not quit its own madness with respect to the U.S. Postal Service, it will relegate it to a continuing slow painful death, when a ton of privatization could be injected into it, profitably, before eventually allowing it to be totally privatized as the third national, private mail and package delivery service (meaning regular mail service, at that time, would become opened to UPS and Fedex as well).
UPS and Fedex seem like such “better” delivery outfits, and part of that is true. But part of that is also due to the burdens - six-days a week general mail delivery to potentially, any/every physical address on the route; political hurdles to locations of and closing of locations of U.S. Postal service operations; political hurdles to private contracts and contractors performing many/most “customer counter” operations; political hurdles to locations of and closing of locations of U.S. Postal service operations; union issues deeper than any at either UPS or Fedex; and Congressional vasselation between hands-on and hands-off oversight.
An immediate “IPO” would not bring the taxpayers or the new company as much as would fixing some of the greatest burdens ahead of time, with legislation that allowed the executive branch to “make it so”, with a government appointed receiver (just like bankruptcy) who was allowed to make any changes they could in order to make the U.S. Postal service profitable.
Full disclosure - no one should think that even in a well-run, privatized and profitable U.S. Postal Service that a “general delivery” postage stamp would necessarily cost less than $0.50. Until the U.S. Postal Service was allowed to operate profitably, no one can be sure what the true cost of a general delivery stamp should be.
How much would it cost to have someone in New Zealand box one kiwi fruit and send it to you, using the shipper of your choice? A lot more than 33 cents,but the point is that private industry has optimized the method of delivery. I have to go to the supermarket to pick it up, but free markets generally entail some kind of compromise. Public enterprises pretend no such compromises exist.
For example, people might be happy to go to the post office to pick up mail if it would drive the price down by some considerable percentage. Right now, they get no discount for doing so.
Jay-Z, R. Kelly, and SnoopDog are gonna be pizzed!
Word!
The increase in the postage commodity is a direct indicator of the devaluation of the US$
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