This angers me, I do not understand HOW the post office got into such a bad situation. Sure people email and don’t send letters any longer, but the real question becomes how did they miss out on the .com boom. Now more than ever FedEX and UPS are seeing record profits due to the internet.
Take it back 10 years, the United States Post Office should have seen this coming, and like any business (even though they are quazi-government) prepared. As Amazon.com, eBay and all these other companies started seeing huge traffic, and items started being shipped – why did our post office not pick up the slack? The USPS visits EVERY HOUSEHOLD, BUSINESS and location in this country daily – delivering packages would have been easy considering they had the infrastructure in place. If anything they could have expanded it, and created a chaper way to ship more items for all these huge .com’s. Instead of just being a “shipping option” they should have stepped up the plate and offered better discounts, and been more competitive.
Finally, in 2011 were starting to see tracking and some of the technologies that UPS/FedEX had years ago be adopted by our postal service. The tracking now actually shows in many cases where your package last was, and is accurate and not 12 hours behind. Database services are quick, why should anyone have to wait 12 hours to see a update?
Now the USPS is left with a 8 billion dollar shortfall, a bunch of commercials that say to use their flat rate boxes so you don’t have to weight them (up to 70lbs? – so you do?), not a good reputation for boxes – but the infrastructure in place to handle it. It would be interesting to see what percent of mail today is marketing related as well – I bet its well over 50%.
Finally, I wonder some of the stats. Lets say it takes 20 seconds per house to deliver mail, if the average postal worker makes $26/hour with benefits, that means that each house coss $0.14 per day ($46/year) to deliver mail to just for the postal worker alone. Why not just cut back to delivering mail to residential homes to 2 days a week, and keep businesses at 5 (since they do in general still handle a lot of mail), anyone who wants mail daily could get a PO Box and check it themselves.