Ingenious! Fewer people are using your service and you’re losing money. So what do you do? You make your service much less useful:
Facing bankruptcy, the U.S. Postal Service is pushing ahead with unprecedented cuts to first-class mail next spring that will slow delivery and, for the first time in 40 years, eliminate the chance for stamped letters to arrive the next day.
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The changes would provide short-term relief, but ultimately could prove counterproductive, pushing more of America’s business onto the Internet. They could slow everything from check payments to Netflix’s DVDs-by-mail, add costs to mail-order prescription drugs, and threaten the existence of newspapers and time-sensitive magazines delivered by postal carrier to far-flung suburban and rural communities.
I love the USPS. I subscribe to a ton of magazines, I write letters to friends, I use Netflix, I pay bills by check. But every time they make a dumb move like this—was it two or three years ago when they removed those incredibly convenient stamp machines from the lobbies of post offices, making the lines even longer?—I feel like I’m watching a friend slowly kill herself.
(Thanks to Slog tipper Greg.)
The thing is the postal service is not committing suicide it is being killed. The reason for the losses has alot to do with the fact they have to prepay retiree benefits, a requirement that started in 2003, being the only agency in public or private sectors that have to do that. They have overpaid something like 75 billion into this fund. This whole thing is just more of the Republicans hate for anything that benefits everybody.
What are they supposed to do? They can’t raise rates without an act of congress. They aren’t allowed to go in to debt. Their only option is to cut service to save money. As long as there are morons in congress who believe that UPS and FedEx could do the job of the USPS; shit like this is going to happen.
Sadly it is not to the post office who is killer itself, it is Congress. They placed unfair requirements on the USPS which is bankrupting the institution in favor of corporate control. They must have 30 fucking years of health care expenses in the bank, thanks to the United States Congress. No other government agency is required to do that. The Congress could fix this issue tomorrow if they wanted to, but they won’t since their mother’s milk is corporate America.
The “automated postal center” machines are way better than the old “incredibly convenient” stamp machines. They’re about the only tolerable way to do business with the USPS.
@3- actually it is 75 years of pension and health care expenses.
@4 -Yes- I use those things all the time, and they do sell stamps by the book. You can also buy stamps at just about every grocery store. Never understood why you would go to the post office for stamps.
nice violent imagery against women at the end. Govt agencies are traditionally referred to in the masculine as opposed to boats, extreme weather and white sharks [regardless of the actual sex].
Yeah i think Congress is blocking every other move possible!! sad…
They should have started slashing delivery days a decade ago. It seems the the only thing keeping this outdated fiscal black hole breathing is bulk rate junk mail. Cause that’s all I ever get in the mail.
I’m with the 1st several posters: The GOP dominated congess has put the USPS into an no-win situation at the behest of intense lobbying by private carriers such as UPS and Fed Ex. I, for one, have always received quicker, more reliable service from the post office than from private parcel services.
No, no, Paul. See comments 1 & 2. The facts in those comments are accurate and well-documented. Every effort the President has made to avert this disaster has been thwarted by the House.
So really, this post should have been about how, consistent with Mitch McConnell’s endeavors last week to shrink the federal workforce and its pay, Republicans are committed to the proposition that the way to achieve smaller government is to make it so fucking dysfunctional that people will hopefully demand less of it.
Without that ridiculous pension funding requirement refered to in 1 & 2, the post office would be profitable.
That Postmaster General, however, seems like a fink to me. He should be screaming about that everytime a microphone is put in front of his face.
I do a lot of buying on line, and whenever possible, have it shipped USPS.Not out of any lefty sentiment, but because I have never had a bad experience with them. Never a lost package, never a damage claim, just no problems whatsoever.
It works. That’s why the Republicans hate it.
I don’t need a book of stamps, I need two fucking stamps. I just want to put a dollar into a vending machine and get two stamps. Why is that an impossibility?
The National Association of Letter Carriers has produced an extensive report (PDF) documenting the Congress-created fubar that’s driving the USPS into the ground. In addition to the absurd 75-year prefunding — setting aside pension funds for employees who haven’t been born yet — there’s also a USPS surplus of $6.9 billion in a different federal pension plan … but Congress doesn’t allow the USPS to access those funds.
According to the NALC (page 1 of the above-cited report), without the excessive and onerous pension set-aside the USPS would have made a slight profit in the four years between 2007 and 2010.
I suspect this proposed action will get the attention of elected officials in the Congress. They depend on the postal service to deliver their campaign mail in a timely manner, and what’s being proposed sure ain’t timely. Expect to see a change.
Best way to save costs is go to 5 day delivery. That way one carrier can deliver one route every time, and not have a swing carrier doing his/her route one day a week. Better more reliable service remaining on the 5 delivery days.
@6 – I think you’re reading a bit too much into that. I think Paul was just doing the thing where sometimes, when talking about a non-specific individual, you say “she” or “her” rather than defaulting to “he” or “him.” In this case it happened to be about a friend killing herself, but it could just as well have been about a child learning to tie her shoes or a scientist making her case. It’s a form of grammatical equity, not a verbal hate crime.
@4,
I’m with #12. It’s now impossible to buy less than 12 stamps without going to the counter. It’s not the worse thing ever by any means, but I still don’t understand why those machines were removed. They took up less space than the automated postal center machines, and elderly patrons actually knew how to use them.
There’s also the other congressional shiv in the post-office’s back, limiting their stamp hikes to inflation; never mind that whole price-of-gas thing.
@1 and @3 Congress also takes their profits for the general fund. Makes it hard to plan for tough times when your loses are your own but your profits are someone else’s.
Raise the price of a stamp to a dollar.
@12 and 16- really? you’re willing to stand in a post office line to buy one or 2 stamps, when you know damn well you’re gonna need to do it again in the near future? Just buy a book of them- They are all “forever” stamps, so it’s not like they’ll ‘go bad’ or something.
The USPS was, before this attack, often held up as an example of a government agency controlling costs and turning a profit.
The problem, as always, is Republicans.
Republicans are terrorists, and should be treated as such.
Why not just have 3 classes of Mail.
1st Class – Blue State mail and mail to major cities – Mon-Sat delivery, next day.
2nd Class – Red State mail and mail to small cities – Mon-Fri delivery, 2 days, twice the postage, since they are way inefficient tax-subsidized wastrels.
3rd Class – Postcards, Books, DVDs, and Pipe Bombs – one week delivery – Mon-Fri delivery, same postage as 1st Class.
i can live with 2 day delivery. 1 day delivery is kinda spooky.
@14 hit on something there. What service do all the campaign flyers, hitpieces, slim jims, etc. get delivered by? USPS. Are the politicians going to be happy when their latest response to their opponent’s mudslinging takes a week to deliver?
@20,
No, I’m not willing to do that, which is why I bemoan the loss of a machine that’ll dispense individual stamps. Haven’t you ever gone to mail something just to realize that you forgot to put a stamp on the envelope? If I bought a new book of stamps every time I did that, I’d have enough stamps to last me the rest of my life.
And while it makes sense for *me* to buy an entire book of stamps because my absentee landlord won’t pick up the checks or set up electronic payment, many people don’t need stamps often enough to justify buying that many at one time.
@23 one day delivery is pretty normal between major Blue State cities, actually.
Just what we need, more unemployed in this economy. The government should have an obligation to NOT lay off anyone when we are in a recession. This is not helping.
@24 Yeah, they are. Especially the dirtiest liars. They’ll time their misinformation and character-assassination pieces so there won’t be any time for their opponents to respond. Benefit: GOP.
In the u-dist there is a machine in the post office that weighs your mail and prints you a sticker with exact postage. Last I checked any UPS store can do this too and they’re supposed to sell it at cost. Use debit, credit, or cash with either.
They should just merge with UPS and be done with it.
If you want someone to walk your shit to your doorstep then pay for it. The rest of us use Facebook.
And as someone who regularly mocks dense urban cores, @30, what is your proposed solution for all the exurban/rural addresses that UPS may not deign to serve but where USPS is required by law to deliver, especially the rural poor who have no internet access and no public transportation?
What if Kent East Hill falls outside the clattering diesel/double-parked UPS convenience/obscene profits zone?
Why can’t they raise prices?
And for me, the kicker is all the damned junkmail I get. I’m ready to kill off the Post Office myself in order to get rid of that stuff. Or, at least I would be if it didn’t provide a vital service. Jerks.
Our postal service – once the pride of our nation and the envy of the world – is another sign that the United States is becoming a second-rate, has-been country.
I realize that email and fax has made much of the USPS superfluous, but in my opinion (not so humble in this case) people will still need the post – and the fact that I can give a letter to my carrier and it will be in Lost in the Woods, Minnesota or Isolated, Montana or Way Up North, New Hampshire in two days for 44-cents (or anything under a dollar) is bloody amazing. That’s never going to happen with a commercial carrier. Never.
If you have ever spend a chunk of time or lived in another country – even developed ones – you know what I’m talking about.