The stated mission of the United States Postal Service is to “provide the nation with reliable, affordable, universal mail service.” While it is legally granted a monopoly to deliver mail and has exclusive access to the public’s mailboxes, mail services have become a secondary issue for the government enterprise based on its financial losses and poor operational performance. Instead, delivering parcels appears to have become its primary business, an unregulated service that competes with the private sector.
As the USPS quietly refocuses its primary mission from delivering mail to delivering parcels, and while it aggressively looks to the House and Senate for a financial bailout, at what point does it no longer serve the public interest? In fact, a new report by two economic scholars — Dr. Robert Shapiro and Isaac Yoder from Sonecon — found that the USPS is subsidizing its unregulated parcel services at the expense of its monopoly mail services — a conclusion that should raise the eyebrows of policymakers and one that may explain why the post office is in such poor financial shape.
This is exactly the reason why I quit recently. The post office is trying to pretend they are UPS without the infrastructure and the vehicles to do it, at least in the context of the rural environment. Rural carriers all have little Subaru wagons or similar…we can’t carry these huge packages for lazy f****** assholes that are ordering 40 lb dog foods every week. You get four or five of those on a route every week, of course to show up on Monday, you always have five or six dog foods plus Amazon sending out furniture now, beds desks etc… Read more »
All the service talks about is revenue and volume with no comments on liability. Every second spent on Amazon Sunday actually means everything delivered on Thursday and Friday is under overtime conditions since the ordinary pay rate hours were given away to Amazon