The UPS STORES are franchises with outrageous mark-ups. Taking my cartons to the local UPS warehouse saved me about $10 per equal shipment over the UPS STORE.
Taking equal shipments to the local post office saved me around $22 per shipment over the UPS STORE and about $10-12 over the UPS warehouse.
My savings are markedly substantial by utilizing the postal service for multiple shipments.
Turning all shipping over to private companies may not be all what you bargained for.....(with the caveat, of course, that the U.S. postal service was concurrently being managed properly).
Leni
Early on after The Marxist Onada usurped the US presidency didn’t he extol the USPO as being a positive example of what government can do?
The Post Office, in my life time anyway, has always operated at a deficit. Oh, well and Eureka. Now I see why Onada would say that. He thinks deficits are good things.
“Look for the union label”
Sell it off and open up delivery of first class mail to private carriers. We would however need to figure some way the government could sell commerative stamps to collectors (probably the only profitable and fun division). The Federal government could also keep a small federally operated service for its own mail or just ‘sensitive’ mail.
If this is a warning signal of the lack of "turnovers" in the economy, then their downturn in volume is very ominous...
The US must have some kind of Post Office because of very old international treaties, that both we and the British empire fought for, taking both our efforts to pull them off.
That being said, US domestic mail service is a different matter. There is no reason for the congress to insist that bulk mailing be subsidized by the Post Office. The “franking privilege” is so ingrained in US law that we probably have to keep that, though.
However, first class mail should be open to competition.
The best way for the Post Office to then compete would then be by offering highly secure legal and government mail, much more than it does today. Everything from having a required recipient, as in, proof of ID or you don’t get the delivery, to process serving for courts, to notarization and “electronic proof” of delivery admissible in court.
They could even perform the function of insuring that absentee ballots are from legitimate persons and addresses.
This would also include the ability to ship very valuable information, that would normally be carried by a bonded courier, as well as armored car services.
Lots of possibilities here for the Post Office to make itself profitable by performing far more specialized services. Though in a much diminished size.