People who have never been in business make a lot of assumptions about what business can and will do in a given situation.
]]>The post office may not have perfect service but I doubt Fed Ex, UPS or any private for profit service would deliver mail for anywhere near 44¢. And considering the amount of mail they process, they don’t do that bad a job. I file hundreds of tax returns a year and we use the postal service as that is considered proof of mailing by the due date, and rarely does one not arrive at it’s destination.
That said, I receive and pay my own bills online. It’s more convenient and cheaper.
LadyMin´s last blog post..Baby Robins
]]>Regarding why we have a U.S. Postal Service in the first place, Ben Franklin wrote it into the Constitution because he knew first-hand just how lousy private enterprise was at providing postal service to remote areas — some areas of the country didn’t get his almanac until it was pretty much obsolete, because the private postal carriers that preceded the U.S. Post Office simply wouldn’t go there, meaning that any mail to that area had to wait until someone from that area travelled to someplace that the private carriers *would* go and picked up all the mail for the folks in that area. Which might take six months, since travel back then was rather more arduous and expensive than today…
Right now the only reason UPS and FedEx will go to rural areas is because the major shippers simply won’t use a package carrier that won’t go to rural areas — if UPS and FedEx don’t go there, the major shippers will just use the USPS for everything and say f-u to UPS and FedEx, it’s simply too much a PITA to deal with multiple shipping companies. But eliminate that semi-government competition with the free market, and it becomes a race to the bottom between UPS and FedEx as to how low they can go with the amount of service they provide for the amount they charge…
]]>2. Postal regulations have to be approved by Congress, which means that many of the changes and most of the complexity in the system are a product of lobbyists getting favors from their pet Congresscritters, and have nothing to do with the people who actually work for the USPS.
3. You can’t successfully compete with the USPS, and no one with a minimum amount of business sense wants to try. What people want to do is grab the profitable parts of the operation, like the mail between major cities, while ignoring the losing parts, mail to small towns. At 44¢ an ounce you can’t pay for shipping anything from Hinckley, New York to Eagle, Alaska, no matter who you are, but the USPS is required to do that. The profits from the cheap city-to-city routes subsidize the money losing services to other areas. The USPS is not supposed to make money, it is supposed to provide a service.
4. Many public utilities, like my local water company, use post cards to send bills, which I find to be a egregious violation of my privacy, but it saves a lot of money.
5. Pay attention when buying cards, because many of them now note that they require extra postage. If an envelope can’t be processed by the automatic sorting machines you are going to need two stamps.
6. No, Mr. Duff, like me, Steve wants a single payer system which deals with paying for health care, not providing it. The problem in the US is how health care is funded, not how it is provided.
]]>Using our Postal Service is a real trial. I speak from personal experience, as an ordinary mailer of payments and letters, a holder of a P.O. Box (don’t get me started), and a volunteer preparer of bulk mailers for nonprofit organizations (a corporation that sponsored a musical ensemble and another that sponsors a major environmentalist organization). I suppose one could make those mundane activities more difficult than USPS does, but I don’t see how. And the whole notion that some sort of virtuous change was accomplished by creating the USPS to give the appearance that the Post Office had been privatized is just one more bit of Reaganesque claptrap. It isn’t really a private entity, and it certainly isn’t an improvement.
(Thanks for the notice, Bryan. I had let this increase slip past me. Fortunately, I still have a lot of “forever” stamps left from the last rate increase, which wasn’t all that long ago…)
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