Please text “USPS” to 50409 so that a letter on your behalf can be sent to your state officials petitioning to make financial support of the USPS a priority.
Privatizing USPS seems oddly short-sighted from a bunch of people supported by rural voters. Privatizing the post office may be a bit of OK for people who live up in NYC or down in Miami — they can stop subsidizing delivery out to a cabin in South Dakota that sits on 11,000 acres. Never got much mail, so I don’t know if post office had one employee whose daily route was like eight houses or if delivery was once a week. It’s *not* great, however, for large, low-population-density swaths of the country (i.e. a good bit of the Republican base).
As a private enterprise, increasing profitability is the goal. The Post Office has studies that go into new-line-of-business ideas that are quite clever. They’re paying someone to drive by grandma’s house anyway … you pay a few bucks a month and the delivery person will ring the bell once a week to make sure grandma is OK. It’s *possible* the privatized USPS, without restriction on what they’re allowed to do and what they’re allowed to charge for their services, will branch out into a bunch of lines of business centered around “we have someone driving by there every day anyway”. But petrol is expensive, vehicle maintenance is expensive, and people are very expensive. You see anyone going with an all-electric fleet powered by on-site wind and solar? I’d guess contract workers with no benefits.
If I were operating neo-USPS, I’d become the largest interest-based advertising agency around. Sure, targeted advertising wouldn’t be as many pieces of mail as the grocery flyer that is sent to the entire postal code, but my cost per unit would go up because it’s targeted. And reducing the number of recipients cuts delivery cost. I’d probably sell ad space that I stamped onto mail transiting my system. I’m paying someone to get this delivery to you either way; why not make an extra cent by throwing an ad for a pizza chain on it? Throw a jewelry chain’s logo on the cancellation stamp. Stamps themselves are ad space. And when I don’t sell all of this ad space? I’ll donate it (tax writeoff) and have promos for non-profits.
How will mail delivery work in my neo-USPS? Specifically in rural parts of the country? I’d noticed Amazon pick-up lockers outside the one grocery store in town — that might be a way to keep a relatively local pick-up point. But it eliminates “Postal Customer” delivery … which I suspect is a good bit of the current revenue and an increased share of my new company’s business model. Turning the post office into a package delivery service probably isn’t the way to go. The model I’d follow is called “general delivery” now. I have a few friends with remote off-the-grid type homesteads outside of the carrier delivery area who use this free service. Address a letter to “Bob Smith\nGeneral Delivery\nPost Office City, State ZIP” and the letter/package sits at that post office location waiting for Bob to pick it up. The post office holds mail in the back for x days until they swing by. Which then means they’ve got to swing by the post office every so often.
Unlike PO boxes where the outer area is open 24×7 and you can open your box at 7P on the way home from work or 7A on the way to work, you’ve got to arrive when they are opened and staffed. Office in my town is staffed between 8:30 and 5 with an hour-long lunch break at 11:30 (and open 9A and noon on Saturday). But I’m certain privatized USPS will have better hours. Down side, though, is they’ll have far fewer locations. There won’t be an office five minutes from my house — it’s inefficient. There will be a few offices in Cleveland and the major suburbs. I’ll be getting my mail out of Strongsville or Parma. Maybe Brunswick or Medina. And I live in an area with decently high population density. That cabin out in South Dakota? I’d be driving up to Rapid City about two hours (each way). Four hours of driving? That’s a day right there — my quarterly “stock up in town” trip would become a monthly run.