Fast forward 10 years into obamacare and replace “mailbox” with “doctor” in the story for a preview of the news...
Tiny town...maybe they could make it a smaller mailbox?
Why don't they just make less frequent pick-ups?
Why don’t the people of the town just use FedEx or UPS?
Playing post office is the only fun they have in their burg.
6 letters a day is $2.64 in revenue. Taking in to effect cost of transportation, fuel, maintenance, and the salary of the truck driver or carrier to pick up this mail, I could easily see a cost of $10-$30 to pick up for this box. I would have to side with the USPS on this one.
How small is this town? I stop by a small pharmacy once in a while which is a retail unit for the USPS to drop off Priority packages or a letter once in a while, and I see a tub they have there filled with more than 200 letters in it for that day, just from this little drug store.
This is the problem the USPS is going to have. In attempts to cut costs and streamline operations, they are going to have tens of thousands of rinky-dink post offices that are complete money losers that need to be closed, complain to their congress critters they need to stay open, and under intense political pressure the USPS will keep these places open.
In this era of email, cell phone texting, and other electronic communication (which I use constantly), I still like getting a birthday or Christmas card, a bulletin from my church or school, or a letter informing me of important financial information. If you have ever been to Post Office processing facility, you would be amazed at how bad hand-writing has become in this country, and what a great job machines and clerks do in deciphering those letters to get a good bar code to deliver that mail on those mail pieces.
It would never work, because it is so simple just to put a single stamp for every letter you mail going anywhere, but it costs the same to mail from Brooklyn to Anchorage, AK as it does to mail from Brooklyn to Queens. If they PO could figure a way to say charge $.80 to mail a letter from NY to AK, but charge $.10 from Brooklyn to Queens, I think it would open up a ton more localized mailings and increase volume and revenue, but then again bureaucrats from rural areas would bitch and moan and it will never happen.
Did it ever dawn on you that there are plenty of other choices open to the public to communicate and pay bills? That by making it harder for your customers to use your service that you just might be driving them into the arms of your competition? That you are being penny-wise and pound-foolish? (the good people in Maine know what that means).