DailyDirt: The U.S. Postal Service

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The U.S. Postal Service hasn't been doing well for a while now. Even though it achieved its first revenue increase in five years, it still lost $5 billion in fiscal year 2013. This marks the seventh consecutive year of losses for the USPS, which lost a record $15.9 billion last year. Part of the reason is that people just aren't sending as much mail these days. Why send a physical letter when you can send a message online? The Postal Service's most profitable product, first-class mail delivery, has been going down -- mail volume peaked in 2000 and has decreased by almost a third since then. On the brighter side, it seems that people are buying more things online now, and the USPS's package volume has been on the rise. As the Postal Service struggles to survive, it will be interesting to see how it adapts to the changing economy in the coming years. Here are a few links to some things about the USPS that you may not know.

• The USPS has the nation's largest distribution network, with 461 distribution centers that are linked to 21 major network hubs, 32,000 local post offices, and 213,000 delivery vehicles. In comparison, FedEx has only six network hubs in the U.S., and its global network has only a quarter as many vehicles and a third as many offices. [url]
• The official USPS website actually has a comprehensive page of interesting postal facts. For example, ZIP codes were introduced in 1963 to make handling increasing volumes of mail easier. A related fun fact: The easiest ZIP code to remember -- 12345 -- is assigned to General Electric in Schenectady, NY. And each year, GE receives thousands of letters from kids who think that the ZIP code for Santa's address in the North Pole is 12345. [url]
• Sunday mail delivery used to be the norm. In 1810, Congress passed a law that required post offices to be open for at least one hour on Sundays (and when everything else was closed on Sundays, post offices became the local "taverns" where people would go get their mail and then stay on to drink and play cards). Then in 1912, Congress passed another law that forced post offices to close on Sundays. [url]
• Sunday mail delivery is back! As part of a deal with Amazon, the USPS will begin delivering packages on Sundays again. Sunday delivery has already started in New York and Los Angeles, and the service should be extended to many more cities next year. [url]

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Filed Under: 12345, physical distribution network, post office, santa, snail mail, sunday mail, us postal service, usps, zip codes
Companies: amazon, fedex, ge

New US Postal Service Ad Campaign: Email Sucks, So Mail Stuff Instead

from the from-luddites-r-us dept

It seems the US Postal Service (USPS) is starting to get pretty desperate. Losing a ton of money, it's apparently decided that the time is now to attack the competition. The competition, of course, is email. It's put out two TV commercials that focus on bashing email for not being either secure or reliable: Of course, I'm pretty sure I've had a lot more physical mail "lost" by human carriers than emails just disappear. And you could easily argue that regular mail isn't particularly secure at times either. All in all, though, it seems like a bizarre commercial. Why even bother making silly assertions about email? Do they really think people are going to start saying... "gee, I can't trust this email stuff to communicate with my friends; now I'm going to start sending real letters through the USPS!"

Filed Under: email, snail mail, usps

Amazon Connects The Cloud To The Postal Service

from the i'd-like-to-send-this-priority-upload,-please dept

Amazon's done a lot with its Web Services offerings to advance the notion of cloud computing, and it's now realized that the state of broadband in the US could do a lot to hold it back. Slow upload speeds could hamper the growth of cloud computing: Amazon's CTO says that to upload a terabyte of data over a 10Mbps connection would take 13 days. So the company is working around that issue by letting people submit data to Amazon Web Services via US Mail. Users send in a storage device with data they want added to the cloud, and when Amazon receives it, the data gets copied over and put online. It's not an ideal solution, but an interesting stopgap until fatter pipes proliferate. Perhaps there are some interesting business ideas here, like setting up local "cloud upload" stations with superfat connections, where companies could drop off their storage devices to have their data uploaded quickly. The issue of slow uploads could pose an obstacle to the wider uptake of cloud computing, and until it's overcome, there will be a necessity for these sorts of solutions.

Filed Under: cloud computing, snail mail
Companies: amazon