Cutting Saturday Mail Delivery? Sure, If It Makes Good Business Sense.
from the kramer-wants-to-cancel-his-mail dept
With a loss of $3.8 billion last year, the US Postal Service is facing a challenging business climate. Mail volume fell to 177 billion pieces for 2009, from 203 billion a year before. Outside consultants have estimated a deficit of $238 billion in the next decade. So, the postal service is now considering making many changes to its business, including cutting Saturday delivery from its regular service in an effort to reduce this shortfall. Eric Zorn, of the Chicago Tribune, goes further and asks "Why stop at Saturday?" Sure, with the advent of the digital age, less and less things really need to be sent in the physical realm. However, don't be so quick to write off the USPS. The postal service still did $68 billion in annual revenue for 2009, which is bigger than either UPS or FedEx. At 44 cents, first class mail is still one of the best deals around -- sending a 1 ounce object anywhere in the country within a few days for that amount of money is a modern marvel. Of course, considering that one-third of USPS revenue comes from advertising mail, any change to delivery windows or rates will surely generate flak from that industry. That said, the USPS has had a history of profitability, so these changes just reflect a desire to return to that state, which is good practice for any business, whether they are in the public or the private sector.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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the USPS as a business? not so sure
Of course, the USPS can never do this -- because it's NOT a business and cannot _really_ be run like one...
"so these changes just reflect a desire to return to [profitability], which are is good practice for any business, whether they are in the public or the private sector"
I'd have to disagree there (and I bet so would Mike) -- Exhibit A: the USPTO.
"At 44 cents, first class mail is still one of the best deals around"
And how do we know this? Lest we not forget they have a monopoly on mailboxes (and are none-too-shy about enforcing it).
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Re: the USPS as a business? not so sure
How much would USPS save if they cut the "mailman" staff in half tomorrow? Big Bucks.
How much would they save if they raised the retirement age to 70? Big Bucks.
How much would they save if a person's pension were fixed. No COLA. Big Bucks.
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Re: the USPS as a business? not so sure
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Good Deal
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Re: Good Deal
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Mail
As it is against the law to go into direct competition with the post office, I don't see things getting better.
The post office has no efficiencies other than direct first class mail. If you have ever used their tracking program you will find that it's not updated very often, sometimes not until days after you package is delivered.
Internal costs are high with no incentives to reduce them.
Large circulation mailers get lower rates than smaller ones, which is fine if it were not a government sanctioned monopoly. But this does not help the bottom line.
Let's face it the post office started it's long march into death when UPS and FedX were allowed to use large (Heavy) aircraft to move packages.
If a private company were allowed to compete with letter type shipments the post office would die.
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Re: Mail
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from wiki
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USPS
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Lets see.
Raise the price of SPAM, and lower the price to mail personal letters.
Raise the price of sending BILLS, magazines, SPAM..
I find it Strange that it costs me $1 to pay a bill on the net, when it cost them $0.27 to mail the letter.
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Re: Lets see.
I know that it took the time before last stamp price being raised for my store owner to finally give into my pleases to use MailChimp to send targeted e-mails at $0.07 each, instead of $0.40 each, plus the cost of printing and paper. Now he's a convert to the Internet. Cheaper and better response.
Anyway, the point is that raising prices for adverts is going to cut profitability for USPS and raise the amount of advertising mail in your e-mail inbox. Bad for everyone.
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Re: Re: Lets see.
If in turn we start to get more spam, well spam doesn't waste paper, it can be dealt with in about half an eye blink and we all have filters specifically to deal with this issue. It's not smallpox come to the New World, this is a problem we're used to.
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YEP
That would be wonderful..
Also they would ONLY send advert if they had a REAL DEAL..
They could also ADVERT that they can send you adverts FROM THE NET...
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Re: Re: Re: Lets see.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Re: Re: Re: Lets see.
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Re: Lets see.
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Re: Re: Lets see.
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I also find erv's suggestion that medical supply companies (or more specifically, their customers) rely on the postal service, rather then registered couriers for urgent deliveries to be alarming. If something is urgent, then a postal service is not how it gets sent. I also disagree with his comment about Netflix. Netflix in terms of being a mail-order system has never been about having a movie right then to watch, it has always been about having the movie for as long as you want with no late fees. All a lack in Saturday deliveries would mean for Netflix customers would be they would have to organize their weekend viewing on Thursday rather then Friday (assuming 1 day delivery times), hardly a difficult task for most grown responsible adults.
I agree with your point Jake that the contribution to the economy of a cheap postal service is essential, but it is also really beside the point if it is not able to run because it can't afford to meet its costs.
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Saturday Delivery is a FEATURE
What the post office really needs to do is compete in the same areas that UPS and FedEx do; really cheep stupidly slow package delivery.
I could see paying a dollar per pound extra to get my package in 4 business days or less instead of the 5-7 it takes UPS or whatever similar slowness it is for FedEx.
While on the subject of features, how about adding one that reduces miss-delivery?
Create a Globally Unique ID for each individual and corporate position in the US. Allow me to change the address at will, with the expectation for mail to follow within the week. Now all my relatives only need send first class mail to one 'address' reference regardless of how often I have to update it. My bills and anyone else that wants to communicate can just mail to that.
Plus as an added bonus, a one time boost to the economy would occur as various mail-product vendors would suddenly have to connect to the online database and query to find the current real-address associated with a target's identifier. A massive upgrade to equipment, or more jobs for those manually looking up addresses.
Just to prevent spammers abusing the system, a bunch of fictitious names and locations should be randomly generated based on invalid entries.
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Re: Saturday Delivery is a FEATURE
I could see paying a dollar per pound extra to get my package in 4 business days or less instead of the 5-7 it takes UPS or whatever similar slowness it is for FedEx.
I recently mailed a small padded envelope containing two CDs to Canada. I'm not sure which country's postal system is at fault, but it took over two weeks to get there.
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Re: Saturday Delivery is a FEATURE
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What Is To Be Done.
1. Deliver mail from Tuesday to Saturday to the full mail route. Large mailers, with mailing lists in the hundreds of thousands or millions of addresses, will of course coordinate with the Post Office, and plan backwards from the desired arrival date to determine when to print things and when to deliver them to the Post Office. They will make reservations, in short, in exchange for discounts.
2. People who want their mail on Monday should be able to pay a special fee (and thereby cause their nine-digit ZIP codes to be entered into the computers which control the sorting machines), and they could send someone to the central post office to collect the mail. At present, the Post Office requires people who receive really a lot of mail, eg. certain mail-order firms, to set up Post Office Boxes (or "Call Numbers," which are effectively virtual Post Office Boxes). Businessmen will of course pay this fee, and send their secretaries to the Post Office, because they want to cash their receivables faster. They need to have their receivables early enough in the day to take the enclosed checks to the bank by the bank posting deadline, typically two in the afternoon. This will account for most of the non-bulk, non-presorted mail. Of course, at present, to get the various discounts for bulk mail, it has to be mailed at a central post office, within regular business hours.
3. Create part-time jobs to go and empty collection boxes every evening, Sundays and Mondays included, ie at the last possible moment before the mail would miss a sorting/delivery deadline. The Post Office already has two hundred big central sorting centers. The staff of these centers, who account for only a small fraction of postal employees, already work the graveyard shift to more speedily process the mail. We would simply extend this system out to the collection mailboxes. The Post Office has about 175,000 collection boxes, most of them located beside through streets, or in shopping centers, and it ought to be possible for someone who does nothing but empty collection boxes to do one every five minutes, or twelve an hour. That would be about fifteen thousand hours a day, or seven thousand people on a two hour shift from seven to nine in the evening. Bearing in mind that the Post Office has more than six hundred thousand career employees, this is insignificant.
4. In many cases, it would be helpful for the Post Office to educate small businessmen about how to produce fully machine-readable customer-reply envelopes, with barcodes and all. Many small businessmen are too small to employ IT professionals, and their business practices are correspondingly backwards.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/jul/27/cash-strapped-post-office-pulling-collection-boxes/
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm
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MAIL
Then if people want to get something to me faster go express mail.
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They Should Do More, Not Less
Instead of shutting down on Saturday, they should deliver on Sunday too.
They should increase prices, offer better services, and re-organize. They do a horrible job of tracking packages, then again UPS and FEDEX is just as bad sometimes.
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Mind Blowing
80% of the USPS's costs are in their workforce, which is completely unionized and provided with benefits at the expense of the taxpayers far above those in the private sector. The answer is not to continue to pay a shitload for awful service and then watch as postmen retire early and feed off the public, but to privatize it and open up first-class mail to competition.
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Re: Mind Blowing
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One day a week
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With this kind of organization I can see why they're having problems.
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U. S. Postal Service.
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post office mail on saturdays
Vinnie--central NY
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mailing equipment
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It's the same here..
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post office mail on saturdays---vinnie
"Americans are stupid. Take some more jobs away from the People that are trying to make ends meet".
Vinnie, chances are no one is going to lose their job. Most government employess are salaried,so even if a day or 2 of mail service were cut,they'd still make the same money.
The automatic cashiers in the stores I have been to are rarely used,as having a real human cashier is much more convenient9is slow at times).Plus, you can't write a check at an automatic without a "real person" approving it.
As for job loss, there have only been 3 to 4 cashiers on duty at any given time at the Walmart near us(except for Black Friday and the day after Thanksgiving).
And yes, Americans may be a bit flawed,and at times led astray,but for the most part we're a fairly intelligent group of people.
If ya don't like it here, try Ethiopia,where all you have to do is worrying about starving to death..or Haiti or any number of countries not run by the US goverment.
Then tell us again how stupid we are and how bad you really think you have it.
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