A Better Way to Go Postal ( Eliminate USPS First-Class Mail Monopoly )

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ^ | AUGUST 22, 2009 | staff

[kellynla]

Whatever possessed President Obama to mention the travails of the post office while discussing health care the other day, his timing was certainly apt. The Postal Service is headed toward a loss of $7 billion this year and another $7 billion in 2010. Naturally, Congress is planning another bailout rather than the kind of reform that would recognize how technology has transformed modern communications.

Most mail today is delivered electronically via email. Traditional postal mail volume has fallen by nearly 20% since 2000, and the average household gets one-third fewer letters than a decade ago. But this is only the first stage of the decline. The transition to Internet communications means that the Postal Service's core business—from paying bills, to sending birthday greetings, to delivering magazines—is slowly vanishing. This is on top of the package business that has already been transformed by Federal Express and UPS.

Not that the Postal Service has ever been a paragon of efficiency. If the cost of a postage stamp had risen at merely the rate of inflation since 1950 when a stamp cost two cents, today you could send a first-class letter for 30 cents. Instead the cost rose in May to 44 cents from 42 cents.

These higher prices have corresponded with worsening service. The mailman used to deliver twice a day in urban areas, but now Postal Service Chief Executive John Potter says he wants to stop Saturday service to reduce costs. No private business in America could continually raise prices, lose billions of dollars and then hope to win back customers by promising poorer service.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Unlike UPS, FedEx or DHL, The USPS refuses to make street delivery in the City Of Mackinac Island, Michigan, for instance.

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My community, too. Hundreds of families within 3 miles of the post office, and we have to drive to pick up the mail as often as we want to receive it.

And we and our correspondents pay just as much as for those who receive home delivery.

[Mr. Lucky]

While not guaranteed, it was typical. Mailed delivered to the RPO car on any of the Pennsylvania Railroad trains leaving Chicago prior to the Broadway Limited would usually be delivered the next day to an address within New York City.

I discussed this with my dad once and he informed me that while he was in New York awaiting deployment to England in 1942, he received a letter from his mother in rural (and I mean rural) Indiana the day after it was post marked.

[clee1]

If we Yanks were smart, Barry wouldn’t be in a position to muck about with anything!

[discostu]

202 BILLION packages a year. Even if there’s a few chunks of the country that they decide not to go to, that’s still a lot of stuff going to a lot of places, 6 days a week, with usually around 48 hour turn over.

[ASA Vet]

What do think should be the minimums?

Many of the little non-profit churchs are dropping out of Presort because they no longer have 200 members. Same thing with smaller VFW, Legion, DAV posts, etc.

The new Move Update requirements are killing off many of the little guys. And when the IMB's become required many of the remainder will quit rather than buy a computer and software.

Telling them to hire a mail house doesn't sit well either.

The mail houses volumes seems to be increasing again, after a slump of a few months.

Lots of CSRS folks here still waiting for a reason to leave.

[muawiyah]

Myself? I never belonged to a church that had enough members to qualify for presort or bulk rates. Now you might think that means I find it difficult to sympathize with the larger churches that did, and you would be absolutely correct!

I was thinking of a minimum piece count of at least 5,000 (kind of like Canada).

[Mr. Lucky]

It depends upon what your definition of "packages" is.

Federal law prohibits private enterprises from competing with the Post Office in the delivery of 1st Class mail. Looking only at express packages, for which consumers are allowed to make market choices, in 2004, UPS handled 13,638,000 packages per day; FedEx handled 3,167,000; DHL 705,000 and the Post Office 149,000.

[ASA Vet]

A 5000 piece minimum would certainly cut down on the number of mailers.

I think I'll see if I can get the figures on average mailing size at our BMEU.
I'll get it for all mailers except mailing houses since their volumes would skew the figures so far up as to make the data meaningless. Doesn't take too many 500,000 piece mailings to mess up averages for all mailers.

[discostu]

Package - parcel - individually identified/ addressed/ paid for item. 202 BILLION. 3.8 billion a week, half a billion a day, that’s more items in a day than UPS, FedEx and DHL combine for in a year.

[Mr. Lucky]

Why is it, do you think, that the government has to guarantee the Post Office a monopoly on 1st class mail business and, yet, the Post Office still loses $7 Billion this year on the business?

[muawiyah]

I've seen single mailing statements for 50 million pieces. They are rare, but the only reason I would have seen any mailing statements at that time in my career was to handle a postage deficiency.

You'd think that if you have everything computerized that transposing the figures from a summary sheet to a mailing statement would be almost foolproof ~ but it wasn't.

Worst case I ever handled was AARP. Some person in the law firm then handling their affairs thought we could be hornswaggled if they simply flooded us with all the material they'd submitted as evidence at Congressional hearings regarding the regulatory point that'd resulted in their deficiency.

I read fast!

They lost.

Last time I had to deal with those people they had different lawyers ~ same kind of lawyers but different faces anyway.

[RipSawyer]

At one time I received regular first class mailings from my employer’s regional office in Atlanta GA which is about a five hour drive from me. The average was about four days and sometimes a full week. After I started my own business I sometimes received mail from a business in Greensboro, NC which is about a three hour drive from me, this usually arrived next day. On at least one occasion an envelope mailed from Greensboro after four PM arrived in my mail the next morning! I never could figure out why the mail from Atlanta took from three to seven days.

[calex59]

They should announce a 5 year phase out of the postal service. Give time for the private comopanies to extend their services as they will or new companies to come forth. Also, gives time for employees to retire or get other jobs. Sell off the buildings and put in fund to pay for retirements.

Actually, the people could get jobs with the new companies, probably at reduced pay and reduced benefits but still they would have jobs. Also, the buildings now being used by the USPS could be sold or rented to private mail companies. I would bet UPS and Fedex would love to take over mail and all package delivery services.

The alternative is for the UPS to dump the Unions, dump all the extra perks and go back to being the type of mail delivery service I remember from when I was a child living on a Rural Route.

[MayflowerMadam]

Y’know, I’d be thrilled if our mail carrier could read and speak English. That would be just so, so nice. Is that too much to ask?

I took the test a couple decades ago. People were told to note if they were foreign or minority and, if they were, they had points added to their scores before the exam even began.

[MayflowerMadam]

We had the same problem. We pay the bills online when we receive them, but in the last year the PO didn’t deliver an Exxon bill and an AT&T bill. They didn’t get paid. Got an extremely thuggish nastygram from Exxon.

I figure someone else got our bills ‘cause we get other people’s mail all the time. One day, I was sticking an incorrect envelope in the slot with “please re-deliver; sent to wrong address” written on it. The mail lady was there and SHE yelled at ME because what I had writtn would get her into trouble.

[giotto]

Here's an idea for cutting some of USPS' deficit: Double the rates charged for "bulk mail," i.e. junk mail. I am so tired of dealing with all the garbage that gets dumped in my mail box.

Here's another idea: Increase the weight limit for First Class packages from 13 oz. to 4 lb. Believe it or not, it is cheaper to send a First Class 1.5 lb. package from San Francisco to Yellow Knife, Northwest Territories, Canada ($6.97) than it is to send that same package to Milwaukee ($8.30 by Priority Mail, which for all practical purposes is the same as First Class. Parcel Post is $8.09, but it takes about four times longer than PM)

[muawiyah]

When UPS took its modern form the Teamsters Union was invited by management (former Headquarters postal employees and managers) to unionize the whole darned thing.

You have to be part of management to buy stock in UPS.

[muawiyah]

Invisible to the users but well-known to postal historians First Class Mail has both a letter mail sub-class and a parcel sub-class. They kind of overlap a bit. The parcels are usually identified as Priority Mail.

[muawiyah]

Someday go take a look at how things are done in the billing centers. During normal production of your bills (and I've been in a couple of the places that do phone company items ~ mostly on contract these days but once all AT&T) things happen ~ and bills turn into pieces of paper ~ tiny ones, and sometimes crushed into little blocks of what looks like wood, thoroughly soaked with ink.

There are procdures in place to "recover" from such losses.

Now tell me, do you think the employees at the phone company give a damned? What about their contractors?

If it weren't for postal audit procedures a lot of that sort of thing would be "swept under the line" and forgotten.

[muawiyah]

No doubt that's what you thought (that points were added) but they weren't. The standard has always been that even for veterans and disabled vets they had to pass the test first before points were added.

For the most part there's never been any justification for giving minority applicants an advantage on the test ~ that's because USPS is already well-staffed with all the minorities anyone could possibly want. It's way over any imagineable quota.

Kind of like Army Airborne.