While I don't doubt volumes have fallen as a result of things like email, the US postal service also hasn't done itself any favors. You read anecdotes like this, and it's a wonder that volumes haven't plummeted even faster: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-a...
Good criticisms. But a publicly-funded post office has some advantages, too. They will operate at a loss in tiny areas, which means you can still get mail to Grandma, even though there is only one traffic light in her town.
Also - 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country? Still a pretty good deal.
You can cherry-pick intervals where stamp prices outstripped inflation, and I can cherry-pick intervals where stamp prices stayed well below inflation.
A 12.8% increase (not sure how you came up with 15%) over a period where inflation was only around 7.8% (based on month-to-month consumer price index report) sounds pretty bad, but you seem to have missed the previous four years, where inflation was 10.1% and the price only went up 5.4%. For the interval between raising to 37¢ and raising to 44¢ (an 18.9% increase), inflation totaled 18.7%. If a difference of 0.2 points makes all that much difference, you probably shouldn't be using the first class rate anyway.
And I have equally aggravating anecdotes about issues with private companies' customer service. It doesn't prove anything. I'd take the people at my MVC (NJ's "new" DMV) and post office over the people at my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company in a heart beat. Those companies aren't doing themselves any favors but somehow they manage to make it. The Zappos in the world are few and far between. So better to look at the facts than the attitude of the clerk you interact with on a daily basis, fact is no other service reaches every address in the US and that is a necessity that we need to keep up.
If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.
my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company
These aren't exactly archetypes of free market competition, being oligopolies, at best. I can't speak for NJ, but, in California, I consider it telling that they all have a state regulatory agency.
Number portability has improved telephony competition, but I don't think we're yet free of the effects of the old A/B cellular duopoly in the US.
But the same can be said for UPS and FedEx. I actually have more options for TV, internet, and phone than for shipping. My point is that these anecdotes can not be extrapolated to a larger point. Really your dealings with these large corporations or government agencies are few and far between with a handful of people that may or may not be nice as people and may or may not be having a good day. Should we decide public policy based on that?
I don't get it. I am routinely subject to silly, unfriendly, inexplicable () policies and restrictions when dealing with private corporations. It sounds like there's supposed to be some conservative message here about the superiority of the free market, but it falls flat.
Actually, such polices are usually quite easily explained by the simple logic that there isn't any money in caring too much about edge cases.
Every time the US postal service comes up in discussion, someone invariably mentions how life would be so much better if the service was privatized. I think this argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of public services; the post office is perhaps the canonical example of an extremely important service that only can exist in the public sector. As others have mentioned already (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236487), delivering a piece of paper from California to Maine for under a dollar is not something the private sector can provide.
As a rule of thumb, if your gut tells you that a particular service is essential to a civilized society the service belongs in the public sector. As a nation we've decided the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country is such a service. Education is another. These two examples are extraordinarily complex problems which the US public sector solves well, all things considered. Yet every time we discuss these services someone always wants to privatize them.
For the most fundamental components of our society, privatization is never the answer.
I think GP's claim is not that private parcel services cannot exist, but rather that if they were to deliver first-class mail, they would charge more than $1 per letter.
Gotcha. I would argue back that the "under $1" isn't even a legitimate path of arguing, because the post office doesn't deliver mail for under a dollar either; you'd have to factor in the cost of the taxes that subsidize that under a dollar price.
Taxes don't really subsidize the USPS, losses are paid for by tax money but they're supposed to run at a profit, which is why they have to cut mail delivery or increase stamp price.
They can afford ridiculously low postage because they have a government granted monopoly on mail so they can price their rates at a level to subsidize Remote, Oregon with profit from Portland. If they didn't have to deliver to the middle of nowhere they could probably lower prices significantly.
Which is why they need the monopoly, if I could set up a mail company in just the top 20 cities in the country I could undercut the USPS and then they'd suffer enormous revenue shortages because they'd still be mandated to deliver everywhere.
Actually, my claim is not that the cost would be more than a dollar, but that private carriers would flat-out refuse to deliver to many locations in the US (and with good reason; it wouldn't be profitable). We already see this problem with the lack of internet connectivity in many rural areas.
So if you believe that this sort of communication is a fundamental right for all citizens, than the service needs to be provided by the public sector. It's impossible to build a profitable business in the private sector out of it.
No, the essential service is mail delivery under a dollar to anywhere in the United States. That is a fundamentally different service than what is provided by Fedex or UPS.
Simply because it's different doesn't mean it's essential. Is there an inalienable right to mail delivery whose rate structure ignores distance? Why doesn't the same right protect people from paying a premium for mailing heavy objects?
The essential service is universal mail delivery for a uniform (not cheaper to mail something to Chicago than Bumblefuck, WY), reasonable cost. Could/would private companies do that? Reply hazy, try again
With the dramatic drop in mail volumes, hasn't the market (businesses and citizens alike) "voted" that traditional first-class letter (USPS only monopoly) is not a "fundamental component" of our society?
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
With the dramatic drop in mail volumes, hasn't the market (businesses and citizens alike) "voted" that traditional first-class letter (USPS only monopoly) is not a "fundamental component" of our society?
No, mail is not the fundamental component I've identified. As I said, the fundamental component is: "the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country".
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
Oh, we'll get there. I think it's high time the USPS started providing free email accounts to every United States citizen with no advertisements. The USPS can provide privacy guarantees for the data on their servers that private companies cannot offer. Plus, imagine the optimizations that would be possible in business and government methodologies if every US citizen was guaranteed to have an email address. Hell, in this day and age I'm far less likely to change my email address than my mailing address. If I had a government issued email, it would never change.
Do you really expect a government organization with all its bureaucracy to come up a solution for 'the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country'?
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Do you really expect a government organization with all its bureaucracy to come up a solution for 'the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country'?
Yes I do. It's called the United States Postal Service. It was founded in 1775. Given its track record, I think the government could implement a digital system that will be good for another couple hundred years.
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
The public sector has its share of successes as well. How about the postal service, the census, and national elections? The US government has been handling large scale projects since the 1700s.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Hrm, well lets think about what happened when we privatized part of our elections (Diebold) or our defense (Blackwater). Let's compare that to the USPS which has been running successfully for over 2.5 centuries. Damn right the government can handle some problems better than the private sector. Diebold is an gross embarrassment to this country and you're fooling yourself if you think similar things wouldn't happen with a privatized postal service. The government doesn't need to have a technically superior product to Gmail, just as the USPS doesn't need to have a superior product to UPS (hint: UPS is better). The government simply needs to provide a reliable, stable service with the privacy and civil guarantees that can only be provided by a public entity. The government cares about integrity. Diebold cares about profits, and look where that got us. Untraceable election fraud in the world's most powerful democracy.
Yes, a monkey can run an organization for 2.5 centuries if they don't have to worry about making money and someone else (i.e. taxpayers) will pay their bills. It's not rocket science.
If you actually think about it, USPS has government granted monopoly on delivering first class mail and somehow they still manage to lose billions.
I completely fail to comprehend how USPS is a success. Could you please explain what is your criteria for success is? For me, success for any organization is when they create value (produce more than they consume).
Again, the programs you have mentioned (Diebold and Blackwater) are actually government run private programs. And I am not surprised that they have failed. Compare this with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon and other businesses where they serve their customers extremely well and has produced billions of dollars of wealth.
Also, if you already accept that government is not able to produce a superior product, why should they be allowed to spend the taxpayer's money? In light of national wiretapping done by Bush administration, I would really question your stance that government will be able to maintain privacy of my emails.
The problem with government issued emails is that while everyone has a physical address (except the homeless and people 'off' the grid) not everyone has access to the internet, and mail is an important communication medium between the government and the people (pretty much any official notice from any level of government).
If I had a government issued email, I probably wouldn't bother checking it, and nor would most people. Judging from the spam the USPS gleefully stuffs into my mailbox every week already I cringe to think what would happen to my email inbox.
The USPS does what it does very well, and any naysayers should try living in a country with an unreliable postal service. That having been said, I wouldn't trust them to do anything innovative. That dog's too old to learn new tricks.
I would argue that the most essential service is 'grocery delivery'. And it's not run or subsidized by Government and we seem to be doing just fine. There is no reason what so ever for USPS to exist.
This is a gross simplification. Let's expand this discussion to public verses private. I'm going to talk about education instead of the USPS because I know more about education. Goal of a public education system: provide actual learning, understanding, and life-long skills to everyone. Goal of a private education system: maximize profits by providing competitive diplomas as cheaply as possible.
See the issue? The priority in the private system is on making profit and providing diplomas to people. The priority in the public system is on actual learning. The rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools is a great example of learning taking a back seat in favor of producing graduates that look good on paper.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that "public" universities are any better. At my university (UIUC), research grants account for the vast majority of the funding for the engineering college. Consequently, research is the priority, not the education of the students. Simply put, the priority is where the money is. If the money is tied to the learning of the students, the students will actually learn. If it's tied to producing diplomas or publications, that's where the priority will be placed. UIUC can get away with it because its engineering graduates are still extremely highly paid. The prestige of UIUC's faculty is responsible for that, but it would be erroneous to attribute it to the educational curriculum. I can tell you from personal experience that the vast majority of graduates are average programmers at best and many haven't really internalized essential CS skills like algorithms, data structures, etc. One example that really sticks out in my mind: I went to a talk by Alan Kay last semester. Hardly any undergraduates attend, or even know or care who Alan Kay is. Alan puts up a few slides with pictures of McCarthy, Sutherland, Church, etc. Not a single undergraduate can name their primary contributions to the field. No one even knew the importance of Lisp! As Alan aptly put it, "you all are lucky your field isn't Physics; if it were you would be kicked out of the department and sent back to high school for not knowing the fundamentals of past research" (paraphrasing).
So why doesn't your grocery store example hold up? The success of a grocery store is strongly coupled to the quality of its product. Spoiled food is spoiled food. Education? Turns out the diploma, not learning, is what matters the most. The USPS is a similar situation, true value of the service (essentially free communication for all citizens everywhere) is only loosely coupled with the financial success of the service.
It's interesting. When you simplify USPS as essential service, it's fine. But if I take your 'essential service' argument and simplify it even further, I am doing 'gross simplification'.
Please don't even get me started on public education in United States. I would gladly allow 3 more USPS organizations to waste taxpayer's money if they get rid of public schools and adopt a school voucher system.
Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. Also, how many times have you heard people moving to certain district because they have better public schools? Have you ever heard anyone moving to certain district just because they have better grocery store?
I fail to comprehend why you think profit motive is a bad thing. Just like a private school has a profit motive, the customer (parents in case of private schools) have an incentive to get best value for their money and trust me, they will.
Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools.
I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point expending any more energy on this issue wasted effort since you seem dead set in your ways.
I went to public schools. The goal seemed to be keeping young people off the streets while their parents were working while also "creating jobs" for dozens of unionized schoolteachers of varying, often poor quality.
Some government programs accomplish a useful goal, and the USPS is one of these. But many government programs accomplish goals which are orthogonal or counter to their stated, useful purposes.
The postal service derives a significant amount of its revenue from pitching direct mail to businesses as an effective way to reach customers (4)
This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts:
"In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled."
Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless)
"One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online"
Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:
"A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year"
"Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address)
Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone:
"A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents."
> Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:
But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.
> Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three.
... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
Good point! However, those spammers are doing some good because they're paying money to stamp their mail, which goes to employ mail personel, etc. For that reason I feel good when I throw away credit card letters while saying "Dear greedy creditor, No I don't want your raping fees, but thank you for paying money for me to throw this letter in recycling."
That money didn't come out of thin air.. It results in higher fees for their customers which means the customer spends less with other companies who then don't hire people, etc etc.
Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!
Even better: Write what you say at your trash can on the offer, stuff that and every other piece of paper the CC company mailed you, and put it back in the business reply envelope. Now you've gotten the CC company to help the USPS twice.
I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution).
On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.
Last I paid attention the USPO claimed the spam was making them money, and I tend to believe it. The "subsidy" is just a price break for large customers, which many businesses do.
> No need to handle the spam, simply stop subsidizing it with a bulk mail discount.
The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that.
Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it.
If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.
I don't think anyone is saying they don't make money off of spam, just that they shouldn't be encouraging it. If spammers had to pay full price perhaps we'd see less of it, or if not then the postal service would make more money.
If there were no bulk-mail discount, though, there'd be no way to get them to follow the USPS's constraints. The discount is what gets them to presort their mail, put bar codes on it, etc.
Why not the stick, instead of the carrot? Make any bulk mailer that doesn't follow the rules guilty of abusing federal communications channels, similar to how we prosecute people who are misusing radio spectrum today.
We make things corporations do illegal all the time; it doesn't hurt corporate feelings, unlike restricting the rights of individuals. (And individuals, as far as I know, don't bulk-mail.) What would be the downside to this?
In other words, you want the USPS to discriminate on something other than cost of delivery.
Why should we enact your preferences instead of, say, mine?
Note that it's quite possible that spam is helping to keep first class postage prices down. (Eliminating 30% of the USPS's revenue does not eliminate 30% of their costs. FWIW, I suspect that direct mail is a greater percentage of their revenue than 30%.)
While you may willing to pay more to send USPS mail in return for getting less spam, other people probably aren't.
The problem is that bulk mail subsidizes the rest of the system. Now, you might say, then the system is flawed and perhaps a private solution would be better!
The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )
I doubt taxes would be raised for that since the USPS is a quasi-independent "federal corporation" and therefore doesn't use tax dollars to sustain itself.
Law does not make reality. If it did, Obama can tomorrow sign a law saying that Government will reduce spending by 50% while providing more services. Obviously, the real life(TM) will safely ignore the law.
And I don't see a difference between whether USPS is directly funded by taxpayer dollars OR taxpayer are on the hook for unpaid USPS bills.
I've outsourced my snail mail spam handling to a mail forwarding service called St. Brendan's Isle (there are others like Paperless Mail). They shred and recycle junk mail for me automatically. I never even see it.
I tried going through the process of unsubscribing and opting out of everything I could find, and while it slowed for a few weeks, it eventually picked up again (just like email spam, when you make use of "opt out" options). J. Crew were the most damnably aggressive spammers...after repeated attempts to opt out, they were still sending me two catalogs a week. I'll never make the mistake of buying someone a gift from J. Crew again.
Anyway, I needed a mail forwarding service, anyway, since moving into an RV, but this turned out to be an awesome bonus and I wish I'd set it up years ago. I will never be without a mail forwarding service again...for less than $20/month it's just too convenient to have someone else sort and scan my mail, and get rid of the garbage.
They shred bulk class mail. If it's anything important, I'm sure it is not being sent bulk class. And if someone wants me to get something enough to pay full price, then I guess I'll look at the cover, and maybe have the service scan the contents (the way it works with non-spam is they scan the cover of the mail, and then I can choose to receive the actual item in the next forwarded batch of mail, scan it so I can look at the contents online, or shred it and recycle it). The most egregious and annoying stuff is bulk mail.
Though I did, apparently end up on a Nationalist organizations mailing list, somehow (maybe through one of the various libertarian causes I've supported over the years; somehow there are ultra-right-wingers who think libertarians are sympathetic to their BS), so that's an annoying letter I've gotten recently that made it into the "look at the covers" phase. Since the word "Nationalist" was in the from address, I knew I could shred it immediately without opening it.
Oh, I just realized you might be theorizing that they might censor my mail. What they do is regulated by the federal government, and it takes roughly the equivalent of a power of attorney to let them open my mail. If they were ever caught tampering rather than acting as an honest agent, they'd be facing federal mail tampering charges. I don't have any reason to believe they would do that; they've been extremely polite, responsive, and they have excellent reviews. I can recommend them.
Here is what I hate about the USPS and spam. I opened a PO Box to receive rental payments on some properties I owned. The only people who got this address were tenants. It wasn't used for anything else. I'd check it once a month and it would be crammed full of ads. By crammed I mean seriously tightly wedged full of junk. I'd have to pick through it all to try and find my rent checks and not throw them out with the ads.
That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all.
At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(
In Canada this is called Unaddressed Admail, and it allows companies to send flyers to entire neighbourhoods without having to address the mail individually. I'm pretty sure there is a way to opt-out.
I assume there's a list of valid PO boxes provided, much the way addresses are taken off of a list somewhere, addressed to "Current Resident", and delivered that way though the mail was not only obviously mass spam but not even addressed specifically to the resident.
US Postal makes money delivering marketing materials from local businesses (supermarkets and the like) to P.O. Boxes. They also offer no way to let you opt out of this.
This happens to me, too. I am sure I've lost important mail because it got mixed in with the crapmail. (OK, I probably don't get any important mail. But still, it worries me a little.)
I guess this isn't as bad as people that break into my building and shove their ads under my door. That really annoys me.
> ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail.
One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them."
He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though."
I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?
The shipper is the paying customer here, not the person who receives the mail. How would you like it if the post office decided they didn't want to deliver something you mailed out? Or maybe you want them to start collecting money in exchange for not delivering mail? But only some mail - how are they supposed to know which you (and everybody else) want delivered? Can you imagine how expensive keeping a detailed list of what not to deliver to what address would be?
I agree. I think netflix has made it quite apparent that they are looking for instant streaming as the model for the future. They already have aligned their website to feature the instant streaming over their mail service, they have teamed up with the gaming consoles to enhance the instant streaming experience and it sounds as if they have made a way for the iPad to have instant streaming.
This change might hurt them in the short run, but I would think Netflix would love to be a streaming only company!
I think streaming is _one_ of their products for the future, but I'd bet blue ray dvds are also a significant growth area both for them and the movie studios. There's going to be a war before those studios will let netflix stream recent releases in HD.
Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.
What's nice about mailing physical media is that the movie studios don't have much control. You can buy a widget and do whatever you want with it, including mailing it around.
You can't do this on the Internet, though, because computers are magical and Someone Could Copy It!1111!!
Right. It may be temporary, but how long it's temporary is something that could really hurt them. Hardly anything I want to watch on Netflix is On Demand, and I already hate Sundays.
you would think they would catch on that physical media is easily copyable where the instant downloads aren't so why not do instant for everything first then DVD.
They do. But they release it to Pay-Per-View and On Demand services for more money than they get from Netflix, then they get Netflix's money anyway.
They view Netflix as more of an analogue to the "TV Syndication" stage of a property's life. Until Netflix has a 'premium' club paying more for early access to new material (so that Netflix can pay more in streaming license fees), they'll continue to see it as such.
Netflix and Redbox cut good deals in exchange for those windows -- they pay less for the discs, and Netflix got expanded licensing for its streaming service. First sale rights aren't at issue. Just look at the Weinstein Company discs that announce "this disc for sale only" before the opening credits, which Netflix happily buys and rents out.
Seriously. If Netflix instant streaming and the iTunes TV store supported closed-captioning, I'd seriously consider canceling my cable TV and going with those.
Unfortunately, I'm starting to think the only thing that's going to get consistent CC support in online video is a mandate from the federal government -- that was what it took in the early 90s to get caption decoders included in every TV 13" or larger.
This is one of the few cases where I think making a law would be a good thing. It sucks that things like closed-captioning have to be forced, but it seems they rarely happen naturally. Maybe because everyone knows the law is coming, so why bother (because you will have to change your scheme)?
I'm about to move from a place with 18Mbit down to a place with 2Mbit down. I expect my use of Netflix Watch It Now to drastically decline.
Mail is only a temporary problem if you define "temporary" as "ten to twenty years". There are plenty of people still stuck on dial-up.
Nobody is going to run fiber ten miles outside of a city of 20,000 people just for me, and apparently the movie studios don't trust me enough to slowly pre-download Watch It Now movies during sleeping hours.
Netflix's streaming is reasonably efficient; one forum user mentions that HD streaming consumes 3.8 Mb/s (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1115352), which is comparable to what I see on my Tomato bandwidth graphs (~4.0 Mb/s). I have a coworker that lives out in the middle of nowhere. He gets ~1 Mb/s and lives on Netflix streaming.
So you're probably not doomed. That being said, I am against any reduction of USPS service and in favor of caching Netflix Watch It Now movies, as you have mentioned.
In 10-20 years I question whether there will be a Netflix. Already cable and tv companies are moving in with On-demand movie rentals. While the film industry will fight the decline of physical rentals tooth and nail eventually they won't have a choice.
I honestly had no idea that mail was delivered on Saturdays until I got a Netflix subscription. I thought there must've been some sort of mistake when I saw "For Saturday: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen", but when I checked the mailbox that Saturday, there was mail in it.
I still only check the mail on Saturdays when I know a movie will be waiting for me.
Awesome. I never saw why the mail system should work longer than the normal working week anyway. Hopefully the UK will go the same way sometime soon. The threat of having mail turn up on a Saturday (that you might need to wait in for) isn't worth it.
And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Currently I can tell USPS to just deliver it again when I know I will be home (on Saturday).
And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work.
Surely this is a universal and solved problem though? Most couriers (e.g. for most larger/heavier items you'd buy online) will not deliver on Saturday unless you pay quite a bit extra, so weekday-only delivery is already an institution of sorts.
That aside, maybe your issue is, secretly, USPS's primary motivation. If they don't have a Saturday service at all, people like you can't request Saturday delivery and will need to go pick up your packages from the depot. That'll save them a lot of time and money.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the postal service operated like a business instead of an institution. Why not commercialize it more? Where are the Coke stamps and IBM Express Mail envelopes? Why isn't the mail truck wrapped with an American Idol promo? Seems like the USPS could be a huge advertising vehicle. Why is this sacred?
I saw the chairman of their board speak not long ago, and it turns out the biggest problem is that USPS can't fire any of their union employees, who consistently get awarded UPS salaries + 15-20% in arbitration.
It's even better - when they literally have no work for employees they are asked to find work elsewhere but the USPS will pay them any difference in pay/benefits essentially forever.
This is a huge problem, and we need to shift the power balance away from unions. The original purpose of unions was to compensate for the imbalance of power. I don't have a problem to the extent that they merely divert executive pay down to the workers, but where they significantly increase the cost of doing business, unions are economically inefficient.
In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund."
In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels.
If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection).
They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.
There is very little difference between union strikes (especially in "closed shop" states/countries) and the mafia extorting protection money from businesses.
I'm not sure I'm really disagreeing with you, but I feel fairly confident that without unions, postal workers would not make enough money to live in many communities they serve, at least here in the sf bay area. Same goes for school teachers and peace officers. How valuable it is that these worker actually live in the same cities where they work is open for debate, of course.
The extension of this idea is that we'll eventually have a company of 600,000 employees who only do their actual job - delivering mail - one day a week.
Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant).
Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
When I saw the title, I first thought it was another April Fool's joke. Like it currently takes six days on average to deliver something, but there is not enough mail anymore to keep that up, so they're forced to deliver it in five days...
Privatize the system and outsource it to UPS/FedEX,etc. (I know easier said than done). If I ever need to send snail mail, I just send it via those guys.
The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html
There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
You are not subsidizing their ability to receive mail from you. You are paying for your ability to send mail to them. It's the same rationale as the universal service fund for phones. A network like the phone or mail network reaches it's full potential only when it connects everybody.
Well fair enough, if you want to send a package to a far-off area, you should pay for that too. Pay a premium to sent to or from remote areas. That's what happens with UPS, right?
I haven't used a land line in a long time, especially for long distance, but aren't the rates different by state?
Perhaps, like with electronic connections, when the price difference becomes small enough, they can make one flat rate because the simplicity pays off more via customer satisfaction. But international calls, for instance, still cost extra.
A private contractor would be happy to do that for a profitable price. Postage at a flat fee subsidizes some customers at the expense of others. If you want to send mail to the remote part of Idaho get ready for a very infrequent delivery or a high charge.
Isn't that a bit like driving a nail with a tactical nuke?
If you want a government program to deliver mail to obscure locations at a loss, create a program to do that. There's no reason for the government to assume responsibility for delivering all mail, and especially no reason for it to make it illegal for others to deliver mail!
And especially, especially no reason to protect the program from being cut as mail slowly becomes obsolete.
Must government insist on solving 100% of the problem when it doesn't trust the free market to handle that 0.5% case?
It would be more expensive, not less. The post office currently operates as efficiently as it does because of the economies of scale, and as such is close to break even.
It's not like the free market doesn't compete. UPS and FedEx are still around, for example, just not on bulk mail and first class. It also connects with other postal services in other countries, and reciprocity agreements are governed by treaties, making a true free market solution incongruous with the rest of the world.
PS -- the post office is the second oldest institution in the US, and government-controlled postal services go back to (at least) Darius I in Persia. There's more precedent for a privatized military.
It doesn't have to be more expensive. if they cooperate with the companies that the deliver the profitable part of mail, the gain access to those economies of scale.
Why Saturday? They should cut out a day in the middle of the week. This way, you'll have to wait up to two days longer for a given item. It's better to distribute that wait time.
This has more to do with staffing and hiring than with getting us our mail in an optimal way. Most people don't like to work on Saturday unless they're getting paid overtime.
Not only that, but Saturday is the only time I'm home when the mailman arrives, in case of the need to sign for a delivery. By eliminating any intersection between the mailman and I, it greatly complicates the delivery of signature-requiring mail.
With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.
Maybe-- but that's a tough conclusion. While the USPS is a government agency, we still don't have enough data about the agency, or any agency's efficiency to be an accurate judge. It'd be great, for instance, if we could see what the average price per employee at the USPS was vs. UPS vs. FedEx. Sick leave comparisons, purchasing efficiencies, etc.
Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
That information isn't all that useful, since UPS and FedEx don't compete (and are forbidden to compete) in the marketplace for mail (as opposed to package) delivery. Regardless, though, I'm making a very modest claim: competitors would take away part of USPS's marketshare if they were allowed to compete. If you feel like there's a natural monopoly on mail delivery such that that wouldn't happen, you need to support that assertion.
Well, there's the cherry picking argument, something we can see with broadband build outs.
E.g. they'd offer low low low rates for delivering snail mail on Manhattan Island and leave it to the USPS to handle mail in Eagle Butte, South Dakota.
Hmmm, didn't AT&T do the same back in the bad old days?
I claim your thesis has a critical corollary that goes beyond "competitors would take away part of USPS's marketshare if they were allowed to compete". Specifically that the competitors would cherry pick the most profitable business of the Post Office and force it out of business leaving much of the nation unserved, or into a business model we don't think would be good for our society (first class mail to Eagle Butte, SD costing, say, $10/oz).
There's also friction issues. If I'm going to send out every month a set of bills to my customers, I know the cost will be X customers * the rate I pay (which I can decrease by making things cheaper for the USPS),
Doesn't have to be government: when MIT had to tighten their belt in the late '80s or so they started cleaning a bunch of bathrooms every other day instead of daily (and that was largely OK, many have very little use (e.g. patterns changes as the Institute changed and grew)).
This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning".
It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.
"Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three."
Why can't I get/pay for a USPS.com email address of my physical address?
123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com?
Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location?
Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.
Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online.
Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)
It's dubious to rely on a company's electronic records for your statements imo. They can delete or change anything they want. They can easily make an accusation that your e-mailed statement was forged. It'd be harder to make the same accusation on mailed statements, especially since most use paper with special watermarks or letterheads.
I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
And I've never ever gotten such an offer that also includes a discount to recognize their savings and the problems you point out.
Well, come to think of it my account with Consumer Cellular is 100% paperless, that's probably their default and I'd probably have to pay to get paper from them.
(They're a great AT&T reseller for people who spend very little time using their cell phones.)
This happens regularly in business. The established players completely miss huge opportunities that later overtake the market. This is also why businesses must be allowed to fail and new enterprises must be allowed to be formed.
Isn't their logic confusing latency and throughput?
Not enough mail to deliver suggests less mail volume, so less need for throughput, therefore we can hire fewer postal workers per post office.
Cutting out one day of deliveries reduces throughput and increases latency. For example, Netflix becomes a worse deal. A power user could once cycle 2 roundtrips of DVDs in one week and is now down to 1.5.
Maybe if this went through I could have home USPS delivery. The town I live in apparently adds enough new addresses to add two routes a year, but they can't hire that quickly. So half the residents have to use a PO Box for their address, and stuff shipped to their physical address gets returned.
Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.
178 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadAlso - 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country? Still a pretty good deal.
http://www.usps.com/prices/first-class-mail-prices.htm
A 12.8% increase (not sure how you came up with 15%) over a period where inflation was only around 7.8% (based on month-to-month consumer price index report) sounds pretty bad, but you seem to have missed the previous four years, where inflation was 10.1% and the price only went up 5.4%. For the interval between raising to 37¢ and raising to 44¢ (an 18.9% increase), inflation totaled 18.7%. If a difference of 0.2 points makes all that much difference, you probably shouldn't be using the first class rate anyway.
Why go back only 4 years more - postal rates were 2 cents in July 19 and 44 cents in May 2009 - a 2200% increase. However, inflation was only 1129%.
So who is cherry picking?
Historical Postal Rates: http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/_pdf/DomesticLetterRates18...
Inflation Calculator: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Inf...
If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.
These aren't exactly archetypes of free market competition, being oligopolies, at best. I can't speak for NJ, but, in California, I consider it telling that they all have a state regulatory agency.
Number portability has improved telephony competition, but I don't think we're yet free of the effects of the old A/B cellular duopoly in the US.
Actually, such polices are usually quite easily explained by the simple logic that there isn't any money in caring too much about edge cases.
As a rule of thumb, if your gut tells you that a particular service is essential to a civilized society the service belongs in the public sector. As a nation we've decided the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country is such a service. Education is another. These two examples are extraordinarily complex problems which the US public sector solves well, all things considered. Yet every time we discuss these services someone always wants to privatize them.
For the most fundamental components of our society, privatization is never the answer.
How do you explain FedEx and UPS?
I can see both sides of this argument.
I think GP's claim is not that private parcel services cannot exist, but rather that if they were to deliver first-class mail, they would charge more than $1 per letter.
They can afford ridiculously low postage because they have a government granted monopoly on mail so they can price their rates at a level to subsidize Remote, Oregon with profit from Portland. If they didn't have to deliver to the middle of nowhere they could probably lower prices significantly.
Which is why they need the monopoly, if I could set up a mail company in just the top 20 cities in the country I could undercut the USPS and then they'd suffer enormous revenue shortages because they'd still be mandated to deliver everywhere.
So if you believe that this sort of communication is a fundamental right for all citizens, than the service needs to be provided by the public sector. It's impossible to build a profitable business in the private sector out of it.
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
No, mail is not the fundamental component I've identified. As I said, the fundamental component is: "the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country".
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
Oh, we'll get there. I think it's high time the USPS started providing free email accounts to every United States citizen with no advertisements. The USPS can provide privacy guarantees for the data on their servers that private companies cannot offer. Plus, imagine the optimizations that would be possible in business and government methodologies if every US citizen was guaranteed to have an email address. Hell, in this day and age I'm far less likely to change my email address than my mailing address. If I had a government issued email, it would never change.
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Yes I do. It's called the United States Postal Service. It was founded in 1775. Given its track record, I think the government could implement a digital system that will be good for another couple hundred years.
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
The public sector has its share of successes as well. How about the postal service, the census, and national elections? The US government has been handling large scale projects since the 1700s.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Hrm, well lets think about what happened when we privatized part of our elections (Diebold) or our defense (Blackwater). Let's compare that to the USPS which has been running successfully for over 2.5 centuries. Damn right the government can handle some problems better than the private sector. Diebold is an gross embarrassment to this country and you're fooling yourself if you think similar things wouldn't happen with a privatized postal service. The government doesn't need to have a technically superior product to Gmail, just as the USPS doesn't need to have a superior product to UPS (hint: UPS is better). The government simply needs to provide a reliable, stable service with the privacy and civil guarantees that can only be provided by a public entity. The government cares about integrity. Diebold cares about profits, and look where that got us. Untraceable election fraud in the world's most powerful democracy.
If you actually think about it, USPS has government granted monopoly on delivering first class mail and somehow they still manage to lose billions.
I completely fail to comprehend how USPS is a success. Could you please explain what is your criteria for success is? For me, success for any organization is when they create value (produce more than they consume).
Again, the programs you have mentioned (Diebold and Blackwater) are actually government run private programs. And I am not surprised that they have failed. Compare this with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon and other businesses where they serve their customers extremely well and has produced billions of dollars of wealth.
Also, if you already accept that government is not able to produce a superior product, why should they be allowed to spend the taxpayer's money? In light of national wiretapping done by Bush administration, I would really question your stance that government will be able to maintain privacy of my emails.
The USPS does what it does very well, and any naysayers should try living in a country with an unreliable postal service. That having been said, I wouldn't trust them to do anything innovative. That dog's too old to learn new tricks.
See the issue? The priority in the private system is on making profit and providing diplomas to people. The priority in the public system is on actual learning. The rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools is a great example of learning taking a back seat in favor of producing graduates that look good on paper.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that "public" universities are any better. At my university (UIUC), research grants account for the vast majority of the funding for the engineering college. Consequently, research is the priority, not the education of the students. Simply put, the priority is where the money is. If the money is tied to the learning of the students, the students will actually learn. If it's tied to producing diplomas or publications, that's where the priority will be placed. UIUC can get away with it because its engineering graduates are still extremely highly paid. The prestige of UIUC's faculty is responsible for that, but it would be erroneous to attribute it to the educational curriculum. I can tell you from personal experience that the vast majority of graduates are average programmers at best and many haven't really internalized essential CS skills like algorithms, data structures, etc. One example that really sticks out in my mind: I went to a talk by Alan Kay last semester. Hardly any undergraduates attend, or even know or care who Alan Kay is. Alan puts up a few slides with pictures of McCarthy, Sutherland, Church, etc. Not a single undergraduate can name their primary contributions to the field. No one even knew the importance of Lisp! As Alan aptly put it, "you all are lucky your field isn't Physics; if it were you would be kicked out of the department and sent back to high school for not knowing the fundamentals of past research" (paraphrasing).
So why doesn't your grocery store example hold up? The success of a grocery store is strongly coupled to the quality of its product. Spoiled food is spoiled food. Education? Turns out the diploma, not learning, is what matters the most. The USPS is a similar situation, true value of the service (essentially free communication for all citizens everywhere) is only loosely coupled with the financial success of the service.
Please don't even get me started on public education in United States. I would gladly allow 3 more USPS organizations to waste taxpayer's money if they get rid of public schools and adopt a school voucher system.
Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. Also, how many times have you heard people moving to certain district because they have better public schools? Have you ever heard anyone moving to certain district just because they have better grocery store?
I fail to comprehend why you think profit motive is a bad thing. Just like a private school has a profit motive, the customer (parents in case of private schools) have an incentive to get best value for their money and trust me, they will.
I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point expending any more energy on this issue wasted effort since you seem dead set in your ways.
[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/no-childs-behind-left/
[2] http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461
[3] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/private-school-tuition-1...
Some government programs accomplish a useful goal, and the USPS is one of these. But many government programs accomplish goals which are orthogonal or counter to their stated, useful purposes.
Like health care, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, indeed everything? Welcome to the World Soviet, comrade!
"It also will save more than $3 billion a year"
If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.
This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts:
"In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled."
Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless)
"One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online"
Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:
"A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year"
"Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address)
Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone:
"A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents."
(1) http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_U...
(2) http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm
(3) http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_...
(4)http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?f...
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail...
But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.
... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.ht...
Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!
On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.
The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that.
Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it.
If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.
We make things corporations do illegal all the time; it doesn't hurt corporate feelings, unlike restricting the rights of individuals. (And individuals, as far as I know, don't bulk-mail.) What would be the downside to this?
Why should we enact your preferences instead of, say, mine?
Note that it's quite possible that spam is helping to keep first class postage prices down. (Eliminating 30% of the USPS's revenue does not eliminate 30% of their costs. FWIW, I suspect that direct mail is a greater percentage of their revenue than 30%.)
While you may willing to pay more to send USPS mail in return for getting less spam, other people probably aren't.
Which reminds me - you have gone to the very slight trouble of the first two steps listed at http://www.epa.gov/region1/communities/stop_spam.html , right?
The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )
As such, bulk mail is a subsidy.
(Although when there is a budget shortfall the government helps pay its bills.)
And I don't see a difference between whether USPS is directly funded by taxpayer dollars OR taxpayer are on the hook for unpaid USPS bills.
-Stop credit card offers: https://www.optoutprescreen.com
-Stop supermarket coupon packages: Redplum (aka Valassis) by calling 888.241.6760
-Stop PennySaver: 1.714.996.8900, press 3, leave a voicemail message with your name & address, be sure to tell them you're trying to "stop".
Most of those coupon packages come from the same place. Hunt down the fine print phone number and you'll be off the list in no time.
I did this a few years ago and have been enjoying a relatively empty mailbox. I still get junk mail but very seldom.
I tried going through the process of unsubscribing and opting out of everything I could find, and while it slowed for a few weeks, it eventually picked up again (just like email spam, when you make use of "opt out" options). J. Crew were the most damnably aggressive spammers...after repeated attempts to opt out, they were still sending me two catalogs a week. I'll never make the mistake of buying someone a gift from J. Crew again.
Anyway, I needed a mail forwarding service, anyway, since moving into an RV, but this turned out to be an awesome bonus and I wish I'd set it up years ago. I will never be without a mail forwarding service again...for less than $20/month it's just too convenient to have someone else sort and scan my mail, and get rid of the garbage.
Though I did, apparently end up on a Nationalist organizations mailing list, somehow (maybe through one of the various libertarian causes I've supported over the years; somehow there are ultra-right-wingers who think libertarians are sympathetic to their BS), so that's an annoying letter I've gotten recently that made it into the "look at the covers" phase. Since the word "Nationalist" was in the from address, I knew I could shred it immediately without opening it.
Oh, I just realized you might be theorizing that they might censor my mail. What they do is regulated by the federal government, and it takes roughly the equivalent of a power of attorney to let them open my mail. If they were ever caught tampering rather than acting as an honest agent, they'd be facing federal mail tampering charges. I don't have any reason to believe they would do that; they've been extremely polite, responsive, and they have excellent reviews. I can recommend them.
That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all.
At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(
I guess this isn't as bad as people that break into my building and shove their ads under my door. That really annoys me.
The post office told them -- hey sell their customer list.
:(
A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail.
One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them."
He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though."
I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?
This change might hurt them in the short run, but I would think Netflix would love to be a streaming only company!
The other downside of physical DVDs is that often, the discs we received are scratched or damaged beyond usability.
You can't do this on the Internet, though, because computers are magical and Someone Could Copy It!1111!!
They view Netflix as more of an analogue to the "TV Syndication" stage of a property's life. Until Netflix has a 'premium' club paying more for early access to new material (so that Netflix can pay more in streaming license fees), they'll continue to see it as such.
Have you noticed the Netflix and Redbox release windowing? First sale, what first sale?
Unfortunately, I'm starting to think the only thing that's going to get consistent CC support in online video is a mandate from the federal government -- that was what it took in the early 90s to get caption decoders included in every TV 13" or larger.
Mail is only a temporary problem if you define "temporary" as "ten to twenty years". There are plenty of people still stuck on dial-up.
Nobody is going to run fiber ten miles outside of a city of 20,000 people just for me, and apparently the movie studios don't trust me enough to slowly pre-download Watch It Now movies during sleeping hours.
So you're probably not doomed. That being said, I am against any reduction of USPS service and in favor of caching Netflix Watch It Now movies, as you have mentioned.
I still only check the mail on Saturdays when I know a movie will be waiting for me.
Surely this is a universal and solved problem though? Most couriers (e.g. for most larger/heavier items you'd buy online) will not deliver on Saturday unless you pay quite a bit extra, so weekday-only delivery is already an institution of sorts.
That aside, maybe your issue is, secretly, USPS's primary motivation. If they don't have a Saturday service at all, people like you can't request Saturday delivery and will need to go pick up your packages from the depot. That'll save them a lot of time and money.
http://www.slate.com/id/2166475/fr/rss/
Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.
In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund."
In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels.
If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection).
They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.
The only stuff I get in the mail these days is some envelope warning me that I will go to jail if I don't tell the government my phone number.
Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant).
Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
OK, so I didn't have my coffee yet... =)
Monopolies always have weird issues like "we'd like to, but we can't"
There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
In either case, I agree that the two go together. Perhaps there's just too much ambiguity in the term "privatization."
I haven't used a land line in a long time, especially for long distance, but aren't the rates different by state?
Perhaps, like with electronic connections, when the price difference becomes small enough, they can make one flat rate because the simplicity pays off more via customer satisfaction. But international calls, for instance, still cost extra.
If you want a government program to deliver mail to obscure locations at a loss, create a program to do that. There's no reason for the government to assume responsibility for delivering all mail, and especially no reason for it to make it illegal for others to deliver mail!
And especially, especially no reason to protect the program from being cut as mail slowly becomes obsolete.
Must government insist on solving 100% of the problem when it doesn't trust the free market to handle that 0.5% case?
It's not like the free market doesn't compete. UPS and FedEx are still around, for example, just not on bulk mail and first class. It also connects with other postal services in other countries, and reciprocity agreements are governed by treaties, making a true free market solution incongruous with the rest of the world.
PS -- the post office is the second oldest institution in the US, and government-controlled postal services go back to (at least) Darius I in Persia. There's more precedent for a privatized military.
With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.
Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
E.g. they'd offer low low low rates for delivering snail mail on Manhattan Island and leave it to the USPS to handle mail in Eagle Butte, South Dakota.
Hmmm, didn't AT&T do the same back in the bad old days?
There's also friction issues. If I'm going to send out every month a set of bills to my customers, I know the cost will be X customers * the rate I pay (which I can decrease by making things cheaper for the USPS),
Government program names just kill me sometimes.
This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning".
It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.
It ain't linear, buddy.
i now live in a place that delivers and picks up mail twice a day, including saturdays.
i don't notice any difference.
123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com?
Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location?
Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.
Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)
I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
Well, come to think of it my account with Consumer Cellular is 100% paperless, that's probably their default and I'd probably have to pay to get paper from them.
(They're a great AT&T reseller for people who spend very little time using their cell phones.)
Not enough mail to deliver suggests less mail volume, so less need for throughput, therefore we can hire fewer postal workers per post office.
Cutting out one day of deliveries reduces throughput and increases latency. For example, Netflix becomes a worse deal. A power user could once cycle 2 roundtrips of DVDs in one week and is now down to 1.5.
Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.