Related only in that most of us rely somewhat on the USPS in business...how to fix ?

Stopping Saturday delivery may save 2 billion a year but that is a questionable number. But even if for real, the USPO was what, 16 billion in the hole last year ? So what the heck good is a pidley 2 billion savings going to do really ? I don't see any solution to this dilemma since even if 1 oz stamps were raised to 65 cents or whatever that would inspire even more internet bill paying and lower stamp sales. Junk mail is on the decline as well. Even magazines are read more and more via Nook or iPad. Just seems like the long term trends are working against them bigtime. Only thing I can see that might help is new revenue stream via advertisements on stamps.

The U.S. Postal Service seems to be hamstrung with regulations, and/or bureaucrats with no imagination.

Why not propose charging more for Saturday delivery? If it doesn't work, then abandon Saturday delivery.

The post office is a needed thing. Not sure what the solution is other than cutting it way back and making it a bare bones operation. Or selling it off to a private entity and they then would introduce advertising as a revenue stream. I don't think the government, and the post office is still run by the government, can run an operation efficiently enough to be sustained wholly on its own.

Tom

I have no faith in the Gov't to find a workable solution, the only thing they know to do is throw more money after bad. When was the last year, if ever, that the USPS showed a profit or even broke even?

kilroyjones said:

I have no faith in the Gov't to find a workable solution, the only thing they know to do is throw more money after bad. When was the last year, if ever, that the USPS showed a profit or even broke even?

Click to expand...

Apparently the Gov is looking way harder than you are at solutions. They are trying, while all you are doing is complaining and offering zero possible solutions. The US Gov throws lots of good money after bad but they also throw even more good money after good. If you hadn't noticed, life, economics and risk management decisions are damn complicated sometimes. It's not so black and white.

I'm sure if they charged what UPS or FedEx charge to send a letter they'd do a lot better. The price difference is an order of magnitude. I wonder what the biggest money sink is. Pensions? Labor? Fuel? Probably not vehicles or real estate. Nobody's getting rich being a mailman, so there's probably not much room to cut pay rates. If you cut jobs, there goes the unemployment rate. Nobody's retiring in clover from the job, as far as I'm aware. If you chop the pensions, they all end up in the ER at public expense. No easy way out.

I have not been reading on it, but on NPR they said that USPS was loosing business on delivering letters, but package delivery was increasing-and the saturday delivery woudl still be made on packages as usual. This may be jsut talk, but I use USPS for packages more than anything else-e-mails and phone calls take care of anything I used to send by letter, so this makes sense to me.
Joe

Right now the post office is pre-funding its pension plan... out 75 years, to the tune of $5.5 billion a year. They've got 4 more years to go of doing that.
Congress said so.

Take that away, and they look pretty decent.

Then you know what is going to happen, congress will look at all that money, and then take it.

I'd be really curious to know estimates of how much it might help to have the extra revenue from advertisements on stamps. It's silly really but I like stamps and even go out of my way to get decorative stamps. But if it would be a major benefit to USPS bottom line I'd grin and bear a McDougals arch on my stamps if it came to that. I heard they tried to do that years ago and stamp collectors were in an uproar over it. Stamp collectors need to be dope slapped as it seems like an idiotic hobby anyway. I like stamps but I'm sure as hell not going to "collect" the damn things !

I read that New Zealand used to, or maybe still does, put ads on the back of stamps ! Theory being you see the ad while licking. But now, no licking...LOL

The problem is that they have to fund the next 75 years of retirement in 10 years. How many entities could do this? Remove that requirement and they would not be in the red.

The USPS is VERY competitive with FedEx and UPS with shipping rates, and would still be profitable if not for the accelerated retirement funding. This probably has a lot to do with the "problem" that the republicans are fixing.

A customer sent me around 300 lbs of stone a month ago. He checked all shipping options. The cheapest way to go was Priority Mail flat rate boxes. Shipped in 2 days with no damage.

A while ago I sold some smaller aluminum parts to a guy in New Zealand. The cheapest UPS would ship it was around $120, USPS was $15 and only took a few days longer. Documents needed were a lot easier and they supplied the box as well.

Related only in that most of us rely somewhat on the USPS in business...how to

Yeah I like how the republifucks set them up to fail with the whole pension thing. Then they can do their classic finger pointing move, SEE government doesn't work! Same shit every time and people always fall for it. Hey lets defund banking regulators and Wall Street oversight and then act surprised when everything goes to shit. Huh huh, see, government regulation doesn't work, they didn't even stop the financial melt down! Better let the private sector handle it from now on.

USPS recently had a public hearing here about closing our village post office. There are 405 residents in the village and no mail delivery--we go to the post office to pick up our mail. If they close the post office they will change our zip code and we will have a choice of home delivery or getting boxes at another, more distant, post office.

The hearing was attended by about 150 people, which more than half the adult population, all against the closing of course. The people who ran it were on top of the numbers--they had income and expense data for the past ten years for our local office. Overall revenues of this office have declined 25% over the past ten years, all attributable to decreased revenue from letters. Packages are profitable and the largest source of revenue for the operation. Gross revenues from package delivery have increased over the same time span, and they attribute this to the increase in online shopping. Amazon may be the single largest mailer into our zip code.

The postal people also made the point that the annual payments they make to Treasury to fund their pension are the cash drain that puts them in the red. Their operating revenues and expenses are in balance. They did have some years of losses several years ago as email took off, but they were able to adjust and return to a profitable position.

And although they did not say it out loud, I suspect Othey have many legacy expenses from an earlier era that they would like to shed but cannot due to Congressional interference. Specifically, a huge number of small post offices left over from horse-and-buggy days when travel was slower. Much as I hate the thought of losing my 0.4 mile daily walk to the post office, there are 5 small offices within a 10-mile length on the same major road. That is fairly silly in this day and age.

Overall I had the impression that they were pretty good managers who had a handle on their business, and are hamstrung by laws beyond their control.

And yet we have one 10 miles away, and another further. Their route carriers are contracted out - which is not unusual for small town post offices, who have a staff of one or 2. Like ours. We used to have one 3 miles up the road, but when that town declined in IIRC the 50's, it was silly to keep the office open, so they closed up shop, and we ended up being part of the town 10 miles distant. At least it's not in the "big city" 45 miles away. And we DO get STELLAR service from our 2 postpeople, and our route carrier!

On the other subject... what gets me is they keep raising their rates, and wonder why their volume is dropping and business is flat. Remember the old days when a postcard cost, what 2-3 cents, a letter was like 8-13 cents? You could AFFORD to use the mail, and they got SERIOUS business. True, they tell you what a great deal you get for delivery to your doorstep for a half a buck, but if they want business to increase... in this day of the internet and email... Make Letter post and Cards cheap cheap again. If you could mail a postcard for, say 2 cents, which seems like NOTHING nowdays... hell, you'd mail a thousand of them, and they'd make more than what they get for a couple I send out only to my BEST customers. Compete like a business with FedEx et al, on THEIR level... and offer the letter service as a cheap sideline to delivering the packages. (Except, well, they deliver to EVERYONE, not just who the packages are addressed to... ) But still, it's an old retail trick - drop the price and make it up in volume.

Of course, all this unadressed junk flyer stuff you get 2-3 times a week stuffed in your mailbox? You BETCHA they get revenue for this.

I vote shit can USPS and bring back DHL... I miss DHL.

DavidScott said:

The problem is that they have to fund the next 75 years of retirement in 10 years. How many entities could do this? Remove that requirement and they would not be in the red.

Click to expand...

This /\ /\ /\ /\

I had saturday delivery stopped to my shop years ago, so it's not an issue for me personally. I can see online pharmacies and etc. really being affected by it. My mail usually arrives between 4:30 and 5:30 anyway.

Locally the USPS decided to send all mail 60 miles away to Harrisburg PA for cancellation. We have 2 huge PO terminals in my city where all the mail from this county is collected. It's now all trucked to the center of the next county to be cancelled, then is trucked back for distribution to local offices and delivery. I wonder if that really makes economic sense.

One major customer is 100 miles to my east, in suburban Phila. A check mailed from him consistently takes 7 calendar days after the postmark to arrive here and has so for several years. I've taken to having him ship it here by UPS and charging to to my UPS account so I can get it on time


I only use USPS when price absolutly dictates, like overseas shipments where the buyer will accept it. And then I use Express Mail, not Priority Mail. Priority Mail has no tracking ability other than to show it has been received by the USPS, until the package is delivered, then it will show the delivery date, nothing before that. I've had 2 Australian customers insist that I ship a second shipment when their first Priority package didn't arrive after 4 weeks. On one, the Express package arrived in 7 days, the 5 week old Priority package arrived the next day. Express tracks every move like UPS/Fedex does, and only costs about $10 more for international shipments.

The only incoming package I've lost in the last 10 years was an ebay purchase 4 months ago, a seller sent me 6 sets of Chick jaws in 2 Priority boxes, 5 in one box and 1 in another. The 1 arrived in good time, the 5 never showed and there was no way to find it. The seller told me he called repeatedly for info and was given misdirection, like to call my local post office, or to call back tomorrow because maybe it was on the truck today, etc.

For cheap and replaceable stuff, and when you don't really care when it arrives, Priority is fine.

Can you tell I'm not a big USPS fan?

One thing that I bet would bring in some extra cash for them and more shipping volume would be to add a few new shapes and sizes of flat rate boxes. I would love a small flat rate cube. Maybe some long rectangles and a few other creative shapes. In the day and age of the internet the flat rate box was really one of the smartest ideas anyone ever came up with and I don't know why UPS and Fedex haven't tried their own. I guess part of it may be they focus a little more on the customer base who don't have automated websites that instantly calculate the exact postage a package costs to go from NY to CA or accurate shipping scales either.

Outside of that I have no idea. They say that there are some negotiations on foot to have the USPS deliver for other services. Does it really make sense for a company to have a USPS, UPS, and FedEX guy show up on the same day, or would it be more cost effective to have one man deliver all packages. Especially if you are talking residential where the post man is there daily the UPS, or FedEx guy not so much. On the pension issue, all I can say is if I were in the USPS's pension system I would far rather that they had slightly over funded the thing than be an underfunded the liability similar to my social security fund they have already spent on, or the pension funds of many other states.

Q: Whats wrong with the USPS?
A: Bulk rate mail.

Don't believe it? How much junk mail do FedEx or UPS deliver?

I don't like price increases any more than the next guy, but it seems to me the rates for letters and the like are awfully low, all things considered.

The USPS rate structure for typical personal use classes of mail is way too complex to efficiently administer on an individual basis, and they really don't have much opportunity for "big-ticket" sales. It can take a postal clerk five minutes to evaluate, review options, and compute and affix postage for a $3.00 transaction, when in the same time a Wal-Mart check-out clerk can process $300.00 worth of groceries.

Make the rate structure simple enough to easily digest, and require the use of standard USPS designed "if it fits it ships" packaging. Make this standard packaging pre-paid and available for sale at as many retail locations as possible (groceries, drug stores, department stores, etc.). Decrease the frequency of route deliveries and increase the use of unmanned drop-off points for letters and small parcels. Establish "commercial only" locations for large volume and bulk mailing clients.

Making the USPS self-sustaining will be a tough nut to crack, and will require drastic and unpopular measures, but we really don't need to lose it.

~TW~

The only part of the government that works is the military. The P O Needs to be organized and run like the military,
with the P Os version of a service academy. The only other option is to privatize the whole thing,

adammil1 said:

They say that there are some negotiations on foot to have the USPS deliver for other services.

Click to expand...

Did you know that the USPS uses Fedex for some services? when I need to ship to OZ for example, and the package must be insured for more than $600, I can't do it online. I have to do it at the Post Office. And i can only do it at offices where they have a Fedex drop box outside. That's because they give it to Fedex to handle after receiving it at the window.

My guess it's because of the limits of the foreign country's mail system, not ours. Not sure, but I'm told some domestic mail is handled the same way.