

The U.S. Postal Service will default on Wednesday unless Congress acts - SuperChihuahua
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/31/news/economy/postal-service-default/index.htm

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tptacek
Before you develop an opinion on this, you'd want to know that the bill the
USPS is defaulting on is a prepayment for future health costs, which the USPS
is required to account for idiosyncratically. The USPS has structural
financial issues, but is not on the immediate brink of collapse.

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streptomycin
You'd also want to know that even without this pension payment, they would
still be losing many billions every year, with future projections of even
larger losses in the future. Internal USPS estimates say they will have an
annual deficit of $20 billion/year within a few years (it's about $10 billion
for 2012), but the new pension payment is only about $5 billion/year.

You'd also want to know that "pay as you go" pensions are illegal in the
private sector for good reason, so it's not ridiculous for the government to
insist that USPS put money in a pension fund.

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tptacek
We are spending a lot of money staffing (i) universal delivery at (ii) a
single fixed rate on (iii) a 6-day-a-week schedule.

Any of those three could be _drastically_ relaxed without compromising the
core value of the USPS in modern US life.

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grandalf
Precisely. I'd be happy with 1-2 day per week delivery.

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debacle
You could do 5 day delivery with 1/day pickup and save a ton of money.

But the biggest problem is the post offices. There are so many of them!

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davidw
The postal service is what it is because at one point in time, it was deemed
something that was worth providing to everyone, everywhere as part of being in
the same country. Even if that was not always economically sensible, the idea
is that there are other benefits to society.

The debate, therefore, is really about that: is that still the situation? If
not, then just cut it loose - privatize the sector, and do not require anyone
to deliver to places like Lonerock, Oregon (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonerock,_Oregon> ). If so, the debate becomes
how to best provide those services to minimize losses.

However, that debate is clearly a _political_ one, which would mean that it's
probably not a suitable article for this site (comes from cnn.com, too, to
boot).

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ck2
For the USA degrading into a service-only economy, there sure is a funny
attitude against preserving a pretty good service.

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solutionyogi
You think USPS is a pretty good service? Have you ever used them? I HATE going
to USPS location. The staff is rude and slow. It takes forever to get even the
smallest thing to be taken care of.

Compare this to UPS/FedEx. Generally, there won't be any lines and you can be
in and out in less than 3 minutes.

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ck2
I guess the experience varies widely. I love USPS, very accessible and
affordable, send anything up to 3 ounces in just a few days anywhere in the
continental USA for $1.60

However I absolutely loathe, beyond description UPS. I wish Amazon used
anything but UPS for prime, it ruins the whole experience.

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antidaily
[http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.jpg)
nuff said. I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.

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masklinn
> I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.

No need to "swear", they've been caught in that exact act several time by
people who'd cleared their daily schedule entirely (or taken a home-work day
for office drones) to get their package, either catching them trying to leave
after having pinned/dropped a notice or plain not saying them the whole day.

And that's beyond their basic "rules" such as a home number not being clearly
visible from the truck means you don't exist and fuck you very much.

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grandalf
As I've mentioned before, the USPS is an environmental disaster. 6 days each
week thousands of trucks set off to deliver millions of pounds of unwanted
paper waste (junk mail) to homes and businesses all across the country.

Every day I clear out my mailbox and 95% of the contents goes directly into
the recycle bin. I have tried all the DMA removal forms, various generalized
opt outs, etc., but the junk mail keeps coming.

Recently with paperkarma (an IOS app) I've been able to reduce it somewhat, so
now junk mail is about 75% of the contents of my mailbox on a bad day.

There is certainly no reason for daily deliveries. I'd be happy with once or
twice each week. This would save massively on fuel and labor costs and would
not degrade the service significantly since the trucks could still operate
between cities every day if necessary.

The USPS and the paper direct mail industry should both have gone away long
ago. Alas, it's illegal for any companies to offer standard letter delivery
services, so the USPS is also a monopolist, with all the expected bloat and
inefficiency.

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tptacek
I recommend Jonathan Franzen's postal service essay in _How To Be Alone_ for
some perspective on how important the postal service actually is. There are a
number of business processes that actually touch normal people's lives that
depend on postal mail.

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hexis
I just sat down and read that article and I didn't get any sort of sense of
how important the USPS is. I did get a sense of how badly it's run, how
powerful the employees's union is, how quickly (even in 1994) businesses were
moving to electronic communication in order to route around the USPS, and how
unlikely any sort of improvement is. Franzen even writes, near the end, "The
attachement of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia." I have my
own nostalgia for post offices of my youth, but the move away from the USPS
for important communications has been going on for a long time.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not defending the USPS, just observing things like the tens of millions of
people who get bills and checks in the mail.

I believe we need some minimal standard of universal postal service, but I
certainly do not believe we need the postal service as it exists today.

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RyanMcGreal
FTFA: "While default would be a first for the Postal Service and a sign of how
deep its problems are, it's largely symbolic. Postal officials have pledged
that employees and subcontractors will continue to be paid and mail will be
delivered as normal."

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jakeonthemove
USPS, to put it simply, sucks. Nobody I know uses them, and when I have to
ship something via USPS, I use their more expensive options - things do tend
to get lost a lot, unlike UPS and Fedex for example, which have been pretty
exemplary as of late.

I hope the Congress does nothing - but then again, I'm one of those who think
bailing out the banks was a mistake...

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pessimizer
Everybody I know uses Flat Rate Priority. I participate in unregulated board
game auctions on a forum (geeky, I know), and out of the last 50 packages sent
from average boring people across the US, I don't think a single one came UPS.
They're all Flat Rate Priority, defaulting into Parcel Post for larger
packages.

Bailing out the private and wealthy isn't comparable to bailing out a public
service that wouldn't even need to be bailed out if Congress hadn't instituted
pension funding standards on it that are harsher than the standards they
impose on banks doing the same thing.

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antidaily
edit: said elsewhere. “The Postal Reform Act”. end of story.

