It bothers me every time I hear about how the post office needs to make changes to remain a viable institution. Back in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act specifically forbid the Post Office from offering non-postal services (Section 102). Previous Postmaster Generals had researched and documented all manner of other lines of business where they could leverage the fact someone was driving by every house in the US every day — the one I remember was wellness checks. If I paid the Post Office some fee, they’d knock on my mom’s door every day/week/etc and just check in. I think the idea of plastering advertising on the truck that drove through your neighborhood every day was floated (and I’m convinced privatizing the post office will yield ad-space on both stamps and the cancellation marks). Let cellular companies pay USPS to have cellular data collector units in trucks — I’d set up a system from Siemens at Alltel fifteen years ago and run up against an unexpected problem. We had assumed the data collector units would be installed in all of the repair trucks and collect data as the techs drove around to their repair jobs (and possibly we’d have to dispatch a ticket that was ‘drive out to XYZ tower’ just to gather data for an area where we didn’t have a good data set). The union rep, however, was adamant that these units that sent GPS tracking data would never be put into a truck to allow the company to micromanage the tech’s day. AFAIK, the whole installation got scrapped after a year or two because we couldn’t collect enough data to make it valuable. I expect we’d have paid the post office a few grand a month to provide transportation for cellular data collectors. Point being – there are a lot of non-postal services that could be offered at a small incremental cost to the post office. I understand the impetus of the law — if I were a company that’s business was contracting with cellular companies to drive their data collectors around, the post office would be able to underbid me. I’m paying someone and fuel to drive 50 miles — so an hour or two of time and a gallon or two of gas. At minimum wage, I’ve got 7-14$ in labor and another 2-4$ in fuel (which doesn’t include potential benefits for my employee, vehicle maintenance, administrative costs, etc). They are already paying for the person/driving/vehicle/administration, so their expense is 0. We’ve both got some advertising expenses to ensure the cellular carriers knew we offered this service. I’d be really upset to have my business go under because the Post Office was able to underbid me. But moving into lines of business that are specifically not profitable because of the labor/transportation expenses seems like a win all around.

The Post Office have been mandated to fund future retirement fees in a way no other company need to do. They’ve been prevented from diversifying their product offering to increase profitability. Funny how some people think the government should be run by a business — but, when it is run like a business and has the potential to provide beneficial services, pass laws to prevent operating like a business.