I'm making a list of all the people here in favor of getting rid of the USPS. If we do, I'll have a drawing and the winner gets to either a) get my technophobic and set-in-her-ways elderly mother to use a computer to pay her bills (winner pays for computer and Internet access and must provide 24/7 tech support) or b) drive my mother to the nearest privatized post office to pick up their mail daily (winner pays for gas and must listen to my mother critique their driving). ENTER NOW TO WIN!posted by entropicamericana at 1:30 PM on February 6 [120 favorites]
Costs were heading down, and some analysts projected a “devastating” impact on the U.S. Postal Service’s first-class business. “We are being bypassed technologically,” reported an assistant U.S. postmaster general at the beginning of 1976. [...] Eventually the U.S. Justice Department, the FCC, and even the Postal Rate Commission opposed any significant government role in e-mail servicesThe USPS was hobbled right out of the gate.
Cutting Saturday service will also anger a man named Ron Bloom, who told us, "If you degrade the network and your customers leave and you get into the death spiral, you can't have [the network] back."
Bloom is from Pittsburgh. He likens what the service is doing to the steel and car industries. "Management can just decide to give up." After years at an investment banking firm, he managed contract negotiations in both fields, including as a central go-between in the Obama administration's crucial auto bailout. The letter carriers union brought him (and his old investment bank employer) in to be their hard-nosed fighter.
The postal service is not a federal agency. It does not cost taxpayers a dollar. It loses money only because Congress mandates that it do so. What it is is a miracle of high technology and human touch. It's what binds us together as a country.posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:22 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]
A report from the agency’s inspector general said that since 2001, private companies like FedEx and United Parcel Service had consistently captured 98 percent of the revenue from long-term shipping contracts with the government because the financially troubled Postal Service did not have a sales staff or a strategy to focus on the federal sector until 2009. The report said the Postal Service lost out on about $34 million in potential revenue over the last two yearsGee, it would be nice if our own frickin government would use the service.
The USPS, by one metric, is still the very best internationally at its most crucial task: Delivering mail.posted by zombieflanders at 4:44 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]
Researchers Alberto Chong, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer sent letters to 10 fake addresses in 159 countries. The whole idea was to test government efficiency, by seeing how long it took to return the letters to the senders.
All these countries, the researchers note, subscribe to an international postal convention (the Universal Postal Union, coordinated by the United Nations), which requires them to return letters they cannot deliver.
Not all are that great at it: Only 60 percent of the letters actually came back to the researchers. Among the countries that returned all 10 letters, the USPS was far and away the fastest to do so.
How did the USPS do so well? The researchers chalk it up to two main factors: Management and technology. Mail services with more robust databases have an easier task in returning mis-addressed labels. “If postcode database includes street names, in which case the non-existence of the street name, and therefore the incorrectness of the address, would pop out immediately as soon as the envelope is machine read,” they note.
"BIGGER. GREENER. MORE TEETH."Why would the USPS take such radical measures? The simple truth is that the postal service is a fundamentally sound business, though not without its challenges. If you look closely, you'll see a concerted campaign to drive USPS out of business, despite the fact that it operates without government subsidies and, potentially, at a profit. It's being subjected to a politically manufactured crisis in order to ram through drastic change. But without the USPS, citizens will face much higher costs without better service. Below, I outline three common misconceptions about the USPS and explain why they're misleading.posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:21 PM on March 5
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posted by Kitteh at 1:21 PM on February 6