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?
Well frankly that’s how it should be. No part of the government should ever turn a profit. When government turns a profit it’s really over charging.
As for the monopoly that’s actually very simple: how many people do you want poking around in your mailbox? I want as few as possible in there. I especially don’t want UPS in there, UPS is one of the most annoying companies ever. FedEx is trying hard lately to be more annoying though, used to be FedEx was good to deal with, late they stick packages in puddles, run over parking bumpers (our FedEx guy has killed 2 and damaged a 3rd in recent weeks) and put these huge annoying stickers on your door to inform you that there’s a package in front of your door two feet below the sticker.
Do you really think any of the “competitors” could handle the volume USPS deals with? If they got just 10% of that 3.8 billion parcels a week they’d implode. People really need to comprehend what the USPS does. They deliver more stuff to more places in a year than their competition does in the entire history of their companies. And they do it pretty quick, pretty cheap, and with a surprisingly low error rate. Yeah everybody’s got their horror story, just this week I got mail that was eaten by the sorter, of course I got 2 dozen other parcels delivered safe and sound, and that was my first damaged parcel of the year.