Don’t Knock the Post Office
This article from Bruce Bartlett about the case for an Investment Tax Credit is pretty interesting. But this is a pet peeve of mine:
Historically, government-directed investment has been very inefficient. That’s why Amtrak and the Post Office don’t work very well and why there was a privatization movement in the 1980s and 1990s, which led governments everywhere to sell their state-owned enterprises.
As for Amtrak, if you compare passenger rail in the US to passenger rail in Europe and Japan it’s pretty clear that the difference isn’t that government-directed investment doesn’t work, it’s that Europe and Japan have decided to invest a lot in passenger rail and we haven’t. As for the US Postal Service, at the end of the day it does a pretty darn good job. Want to send a letter somewhere? Put it in an envelop and stick it in a box, and it’ll go where you wanted it to go. They’ll pick the letter up from your house if you want it, and hand-deliver it to the destination. For not much money! Anywhere in the country!What you can say about the Postal Service is that in the modern day it’s not clearly necessary to have a public agency guaranteeing the availability of this service in the way that it was before phones and email. But for quite a long time this was a really mission-critical element in our communications infrastructure and it still works just fine.
112 Responses to “Don’t Knock the Post Office”
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January 17th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Agree with your thoughts on Amtrak, but USPS is simply awful. “Six” day-per-week delivery is actually closer to 3 or 4.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
What, you only get mail delivered 3 or 4 days a week?
I get mail every day.
When I was working for the Forest Service, there was a tiny town in remote Idaho called Yellow Pine. It was a good 4-5 hour drive to the nearest large town capable of supporting a Post Office. They would get weekly mail, sometimes by ground, occasionally by air.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Count me in with Matt: I think the USPS does a decent job given the hand of cards they have been dealt since the dereg, downsize, and outsource era got rolling. But contrary to Matt I don’t think that if the USPS were to disappear that any private business would provide any similar universal service at reasonable rates. Benjamin Franklin’s observations about the necessity of a universal national post office are as true today as then.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
This smarmy attitude toward everything publicly run just needs to god damn go.
I’ve shipped everything from overnight letters to huge, heavy parcel post packages through the Post Office and had no problem. If I went in and there was a big line, within 15 minutes or so I had been taken care of. Sometimes the employees looked a bit sullen or bureaucratic, but you’d be surprised at how often if you really say hello and be nice, they often perk up.
UPS and Fed Ex have, in the same period, delivered my packages to wrong addresses and simply lost items, which they did their best to help out on, but I didn’t have those same problems at the Post Office.
I’ve also had nothing but good experiences at the DMV, too. In fact last couple of times I’ve been in and out within 10 minutes.
I like libraries too. I wish my local ones got even more resources so they could be open like they used to be, you know, so regular working people could go there in the evening instead of many branches closing at 5 or 6 pm.
The most dreadful customer service situations I’ve encountered over the past 10 years or so were cellphone stores and a mall chain clothing store. In each case, the publicly run firm was better.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Bartlett really gets the entire public investment concept wrong.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I think the USPS is a needed yet poorly run organization. Re: my post above, my home is on what the Post Office calls an “auxiliary” route. Meaning, I don’t have a regular mail carrier and if they don’t have enough man-power on any given day, my route is underserved. Now, JDNelsen makes a good point that tiny towns in remote Idaho are probably served quite well. But I live in a large city, my ZIP code office is 10 blocks away, and most of my neighborhood is served sporadically. Agree with El Cid that anti-government sentiment needs to get tossed out; my only point is, throwing good money after bad is a bad solution any problem. The issue with USPS isn’t its concept, it is is with its management.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
When people talk about how ineffective the USPS is, I often point out that if you tell a bill collector “I sent you a check, the post office must have lost it” they don’t believe you, because they know that almost never happens.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Yeah, I’ve never understood the whole idea that USPS does a terrible job. Does anyone honestly think that a standard letter would still cost LESS THAN 50¢ if you were sending it through a private company? And that it would pretty much always get where it was being sent?
Sure, the staff can be surly and the lines can be long. But…hello? Anyone been to a FedEx/Kinko’s lately? If you found the service at FE/K to be prompt, friendly and helpful, then you’re definitely not going to the same branches as me.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
USPS Priority mail basically made eBay. Beats UPS with a stick.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I’ve also had nothing but good experiences at the DMV, too. In fact last couple of times I’ve been in and out within 10 minutes.
You may wish to read Megan McArdle’s car registration horror story.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Postal Service aside isn’t the investment tax credit just another corporate tax loophole Matt is against?
January 17th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
That’s why Amtrak and the Post Office don’t work very well
And my wife’s the worst cook in the world! And do you know how hippies smell funny? The other day I was so hungry (”How hungry were you?”)…
Really. Bartlett’s just reaffirms my view that most pundits get their “facts” from TV monologues and other fonts of cliche (including, God knows, each other).
January 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Re: Sometimes the employees looked a bit sullen or bureaucratic, but you’d be surprised at how often if you really say hello and be nice, they often perk up.
Agreed. I’ve endured far more rudeness and incompetence from counter help at fast food places and convenience stores than I’ve ever suffered at the post office. Once I even heard a guy at Taco Ball tell complaining customers to shut the f*ck up. I can’t imagine any postal worker or DMV clerk getting away with that.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
> I think the USPS is a needed yet poorly run organization.
> Re: my post above, my home is on what the Post Office calls
> an “auxiliary” route. Meaning, I don’t have a regular mail
> carrier and if they don’t have enough man-power on any given
> day, my route is underserved.
Again though, that is the post-Carter “deregulate everything”, post-Reagan “privatize everything” USPS. The old United States Postal Service was a different thing altogether (remember when mailmen were required to wear uniforms and keep them looking sharp?). What you see today is an organization trying to provide some of the services laid down by charter in the past with about 1/3 the resources that the designers of the system anticipated.
Cranky
January 17th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
my nyc (”big city”) address 10014 gets excellent service. once we had an obviously ‘disturbed’ mailman but still got efficient delivery (his ‘illness’ erred on the side of obsessiveness). in fact, i’ve never heard of bad usps delivery service–except for lines, rudeness etc in some post offices.
compare this to mail service in italy where you’re lucky if letters get through in reasonable (couple weeks) time, if packages arrive intact.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
So here’s something I can’t figure out. Last time I went to India, I left in such a hurry that I didn’t have time to pay my bills. So, I brought them to India and mailed them from there. But here’s the weird thing, sending a letter from India cost me 30 cents, and they all got there. How is that even possible? I assumed I’d have to pay 42 cents plus whatever fee the Indian post would add to it. But that’s not the case.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Cranky Observer Says:
January 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Agreed.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
When I lived in Rome, one of the crew I was with took it in turn each day to hand-carry our outgoing mail to the Vatican, and drop it in their mailboxes.
Never did find a work-round for incoming mail. I knew a guy over there on a Fullbright who actually received about every third check.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
If you deal with FedEx and UPS regularly, you know that at best they are as efficient and accurate as the Postal Service — and that is with the Postal Service as a huge competitor. Get rid of the USPS and watch FedEx and UPS start to suck.
I think the problem is the use of the word “efficient.” Everyone uses it, but no one defines what they mean by it. Conservatives seem to think it means “produces more stuff, or more profit, more quickly.” But efficiency is the ratio of an output to an input, and you can’t use the term coherently if you don’t make clear what the desired output is.
From the perspective of someone like Bruce Bartlett, government funded rail and shipping and health care and so on are inefficient because they are inefficient in terms of his unstated desired output, which is private wealth. But in terms of the actual missions of the organizations in question, they are not inefficient. The USPS is efficient in terms of providing low cost letter and package delivery. National health care systems are efficient, way more efficient than private systems, in terms of providing health care.
Obviously, if you think that the purpose of any activity is to provide profit, and that people are motivated only by financial gain, you are not going to understand that some things are valuable for their own sake, and that the government is better at providing those kinds of things.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
The PO in your area is under manned BECAUSE it doesn’t have enough money. Giving them more wouldn’t be ‘throwing good money after bad’, even under your example the post office works fine, they just lack the manpower to service your route every day. Under that scenario, throwing money at the problem is EXACTLY the solution. Inherent to the idea that throwing money at problems won’t always fix them is the fact that it sometimes can.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I’m always amazed at Americans complaining about the bad postal service of the USPS. They’ve clearly never been out of the country. When I lived in the Netherlands, a country the size of New Jersey, it would cost me more to mail a letter across Amsterdam than for my parents to mail it from Hawaii. The pricing in the Netherlands is typical of European and Japanese prices. Mail here in Hawaii typically goes inter-island in 1 day, 2 is unusual. Basically, the USPS does an amazing job for any price, and their price beats most other countries I’ve been to. (I’m surprised at fostert’s tale from India, but I assume that is PPP mismatch — 30 cents of India currency would be worth more like 1-2 dollars in equivalent wages and services…)
January 17th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I debated whether to use the Post Office and Amtrak examples. I probaly should have left them out because they distract from the larger point I was trying to make, which is that in the Keynesian model, which everyone is operating from these days, one can equally stimulate short-run growth through consumption or investment. Since the Democrats are more interested in promoting consumption, I thought it made sense for Republicans to emphasize investment. That’s really all I was trying to get at.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
As for Amtrak, if you compare passenger rail in the US to passenger rail in Europe and Japan it’s pretty clear that the difference isn’t that government-directed investment doesn’t work, it’s that Europe and Japan have decided to invest a lot in passenger rail and we haven’t.
This doesn’t contradict Bartlett’s claim. He said government investment in Amtrak is inefficient not the claim you seem to be rebutting — that if you poured endless amounts of resources into it you couldn’t get good service.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
soullite Says:
January 17th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Anyone who has any idea how the USPS operates knows it’s very poorly managed.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Complaining about the Post Office is like complaining about the weather. Nothing will get done about it either because the first solutions would require differential rates, higher in 90% of the US map, and the highest rates to where the highest order wingnuts live. Taking away RFD totally in some cases, like from the militia compound. it would be war.
One big problem with the PO is that it is not a slick sleek ultra efficient organization, like CityGroup, the GOP, Bear Sterns, Circuit City, A&P, Studebaker, GM, Pan Am, Penn Central Railroad, the State of California, the New York Jets, The Chicago Daily News, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, the SEC, the Thousand Points of Light Foundation, the Coalition Provisional Authority, Worldcom, Enron, Health South, LTCM or Harken Energy.
In other words the whole concept of a slick sleek efficient organization is a myth. The erotic ideological fantasy adolescent minds. People are not prefect-able. Peoples organizations are not perfect able. They can always be improved and we should never stop trying.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
The post office is great as long as you don’t need to mail anything outside the hours of 9-5 Monday through Friday. Or during the holidays.
If the question is, do they provide a minimum standard of service, then of course the answer is yes. But in terms of catering to customers, they’re right up there with the DMV. Find the one of about 10 area post offices that’s open for 3 hours on Saturday–and get there early, because you’ll be in line almost that entire time.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Agreed. My local postal service is excellent and I use it all the time. And yes, saying hello, how are ya to the desk clerks usually elicits a favorable response. Funny how that works, huh?
January 17th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
At least the Post Office delivers on Saturday.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Rural conservatives wanting to privatize postal service should worry about getting what they wish for. If it happens, the cost of mail will rise dramatically in rural areas, if it is available at all. With universal service, we city-dwellers once again subsidize the cost for those proudly libertarian anti-government types out in the sticks. And I don’t mind, except when they shout “private enterprise could do it better” at me.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I’ve never had a letter take longer than three days to be delivered, and that’s to the opposite end of the country. When I check postmarks, they are generally from two to three days ago. That’s a remarkably high level of consistency.
My only beef is that when I have to go to the Post Office to mail a package, I know there is going to be a long line. But then, I also know if I try to drive to downtown Los Angeles it’s going to take me an hour to go just about 30 miles. At least with the Post Office, I can get some reading done while I wait.
And I must agree with the commenter above who pointed out that if you’re nice to the folks at the window, they’re quite pleasant and helpful. But then, that goes for just about everyone.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Anyone who has any idea how the USPS operates knows it’s very poorly managed.
Ah, the elusive anti-argument, the precise opposite of an actual argument; note the implied tautology and absence of fact or logical assertion.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I don’t know how the USPS is operated in an internal sense. All I know is that from the point of view of a consumer the service is excellent. It is also – and this is an under-appreciated point- cheap.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Go to the Post Office to ship a box and then go to FedEx or UPS to ship a box.
Don’t tell me you don’t dread having to wait in absurd lines and deal with rude people at the Post Office.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
In general, few cube rangers have a frackin’ clue about actually moving something physical from A to B. USPS does a fantastic job for the cost. It gets a bad rap because people compare FedEx or UPS overnight service to USPS general delivery and then moan about USPS coming up short.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I too am always amazed by people complaining about the USPS.
First i get pickup and delivery service 5 days a week and i don’t live in a big mega urban area.
Plus, i am always shocked when i take packages or letters in to mail them and am reminded that for what i deem a relatively low price can ship anything around the world in days. Granted it isn’t the internet but damm.
Plus, some big cities do have 24 hour USPS service (at least in the form of Post Offices).
My two cents.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Don’t tell me you don’t dread having to wait in absurd lines and deal with rude people at the Post Office.
Don’t tell me what not to tell you.
UPS today, via Staples — 12 minutes.
Friday, via USPS at local post office (4:15 on Friday) 10 minutes.
Near as I can tell you can’t distinguish on service, both ar heavily unionized, USPS has an edge on price, but UPS has an ideology behind it, and better advertising.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I love the USPS, but there are parts of the country that are poorly served by it. I live in Chicago, and my neighborhood gets mail delivery at best every-other day, sometimes every third day. (I fairly regularly receive nothing, then nothing, then a large stack of letters.) Letters and packages are routinely lost–I once mailed my girlfriend (she lives in town) a letter from the main post office downtown, and it never arrived. I’ve also not received products that I’ve ordered, and concert tickets–guess who got them?
Also, and it can take weeks for things to arrive here. My parents, who live in PA, are frequently amazed by how long it takes for me to receive anything they send (usually about two weeks, even for letters.) I’m still waiting for a package that was shipped three+ weeks ago from Florida–it’s here in Chicago, and I signed for it (1.5 weeks ago), but the employees at my post office haven’t pulled it yet to give it to the carrier. This is typical service in Chicago.
I sometimes joke that the service in Thailand is better: when I lived in there, I didn’t know how long the mail would take, but I felt confident that it would arrive.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
the usps does NOT always get even first class mail to the destination. even the pay for overnight, tracking number somehow never arrives. fed ex has never failed however
January 17th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Jar Jar Binks,
Mail a letter to someone in Ames, Iowa:
Using the USPS I stick a 42 cent stamp on it and place it in my outgoing mail box in Portland, OR; 2 or 3 days later the person in Ames, Iowa gets it delivered directly to their mail box.
Do the same thing with UPS, what does it cost?
Does the phrase apples and oranges come to mind?
Of course UPS and Fed Ex are better at the niche’s they have chosen. But that’s the point of a private company; first of all they get to pick and choose which business they are in. Second their very reason to exist is finding a niche that the Post Office doesn’t serve and meeting that need.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Fed Ex and UPS will be gone in 10 or 30 years. Legacy costs and bad management will always prevail. Entropy.
3 day a week delivery is a good option actually. Available for pickup if needs be on the off days. Could it cut gross costs more than 25%. If anywhere close it’s worth a look see.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I suspect I’m the only one here who has actually worked for the post office. At low to middle levels it is simply not true that they are poorly managed. The postal union has some good qualities, some negatives.
The biggest problem I noticed was that their upper management (this was during the republican hegemony) was under significant pressure to certify that high tech efficiency schemes worked, whether or not they did. Not unlike the old days when I worked for what used to be AT&T.
By the way, the anthrax incident in 2001 cost them a mint.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I live in Cambridge, MA, so for letters or Netflix DVDs going between me and major cities or distribution centers the sub-50-cent First Class rate usually means overnight delivery, six days a week. That’s pretty hard to beat.
Besides, isn’t the whole point with the Post Office that its operating costs (though not all of its capital costs) are self-funding? Just imagine if your internet access were similarly subsidized by the sp@m you get …
Now, I guess we should be paying more attention to Bartlett’s comment, above, where he says that he referred not to the efficiencies of the organizations mentioned but to the efficiency of spending more on them to achieve stimulus. Taking him at his word, a lot of the dissent in this thread (including mine in this comment, above) is misplaced – but I maintain my suspicions that he’s still wrong. More spending on Amtrak or the USPS would come to a significant degree in the form of unskilled and semi-skilled laboring jobs, of the sort that give a good rate of return as stimulus, and would create and strengthen infrastructure and institutions that can’t be outsourced. Doesn’t sound worse than tax cuts for rich folks to me.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Taking the train from Chicago to Seattle may not be the most “efficient” way to get there. But if you’ve ever done it, you know it’s the most powerful (and efficient) three-day course in being an American you can have.
And if you live in a small town, fifty miles from the nearest scheduled bus service and a hundred miles from the nearest air service, you might bless your Congressman for keeping an Amtrak train rolling through. In this country it’s perfectly legal to vote for the guy who does what you want.
Amtrak was set up as the fall-guy, to inherit all the inefficiency the railroads had accumulated when they were trying to prove they couldn’t afford to provide passenger service. Amtrak ended up holding all the sweetheart labor deals, the pension and healthcare obligations, the seniority rules, the commissary arrangements in Chicago, and the obligation to provide services that Greyhound and the airlines refused to do. But it’s never been Amtrak causing the delays in getting over the line- that’s been the fault of the freight railroads failing to honor their contracts for shared rails with Amtrak.
The real inefficiency comes when you waste time reading a pundit like Bruce Bartlett who serves up a platter of platitudes without a clue as to whether these old chestnuts might be as rotten as something you buy on Fifth Avenue in the winter. But strange to say, the much acclaimed ‘magic of the marketplace’ is perfectly happy to waste our time and money by paying lavishly and often for writing so misinformed it might better be classed as propaganda.
Some kind of market failure going on here, no doubt.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Ha ha, my first job was as a letter-carrier. Believe it, it’s a bit harder to deliver a 400-box route than you might imagine at first.
All the letter-carriers were convinced that in ten years their job wouldn’t even exist. They considered it pretty inefficient to go from house to house delivering mail. They thought the Post Office would simply require everyone to come in and pick up their mail from PO boxes.
That was 40 years ago. I’ve never seen anyone else talk about that solution to the costs of the Post Office.
But in rural America a lot of people have PO boxes because they don’t want their mail to get stolen.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Those of you complaining about long lines to mail packages at the post office — do your post offices not have automated postage centers, and do you not use them? My wife mails packages fairly often for her business and always uses the APC when she’s at a location that has one. It’s almost always open, while sometimes two dozen people stand in line for the counter. They seem to be so little used that our downtown PO actually removed theirs. I don’t get it — it’s easier and much faster than the counter for almost all services (you can’t do, e.g., international) and nobody uses it.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
The notion that the USPS sucks is so prevalent, despite the lack of any actual evidence, because its suckiness is integral to the conservative project of devaluing government. It’s vitally important to them that the USPS, Social Security, public education and everything else that doesn’t directly produce private profits be viewed as failures; at the same time, it’s vitally important to them that things like health care and our financial machinery, which have plainly failed relative to their potential in an advanced society, be viewed as successes against all evidence, and when they simply must acknowledge failure, those must be pinned (however implausibly and fantastically) on whatever public influence is exerted on private activities.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I’ve had pretty good experiences with USPS. A little undermanned so I have dealt with lines, but they have been generally polite and reliable, with a good price. We may have reached a point where more privatization and deregulation is warranted in mail delivery service (it’s arguable), it’s certainly been a reliable and valuable service.
I’ve had good experiences with FedEx, too. UPS, on the other hand, annoys the hell out of me, and instead of spending money to improve their service, they’d rather spend it trying to get me to call them “Brown” for some reason.
DMV’s not bad, but it can be slow. I miss the express lines for simple change of address service. The new computerized system seems engineered to maximize everyone’s wait time. But aside from speed, I don’t have any problems with the service they actually provide.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Foster I think your Indian post office experience was a bit of an anomaly. I spent half of last year there and found the mail service to be incredibly inconsistent. It was great maybe 20% of the time. 50% of all letters would be returned with canceled stamps for no reason (people at the post office couldnt explain what was wrong), and 3 colleagues of mine had incredibly mundane things stolen out of packages they sent (one package containing food had a can of cranberry sauce taken but no other food stuff’s removed). So while their service is cheap, it hardly provides the quality of service found with the USPS. Also, labor costs are cheap. A delivery man probably gets paid no more than 40,000 rupees a year ($800 dollars) and has no health insurance or retirement package.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Maybe the PO in white-bread Idaho is all great, but here in downtown LA, it’s dreadful. I don’t get mail on Saturdays,Mondays or any day following a federal holiday. Or if the regular carrier is sick or on vacation. There’s no replacement–we’re welcome to fight our way through the buyms on 7th Street and collect it. The local manager blames the Postmaster’s budget cuts. The local Rep’s (Lucille Royal) office did investigate and suggested that we just get a Mailboxes Inc. address.
Polite? After a lunch with a Bud light, maybe.
My office, around Fairfax and Olympic, is served by a carrier who’s on her cell phone all day and gets very peeved if you interrup her conversation. Oh, and she doesn’t pick up packages (even pre-paid) because of her disability.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I agree that at the core of what it does, the USPS is pretty good, but I’ve had a ton of horrible experiences recently. My girlfriend ordered my Christmas present on Amazon and Amazon told her it was at the PO. She went there and they said they sent it to upstate NY (she lives in the Bronx). She finally got it last week. It initially arrived in the Bronx 2 weeks before Christmas. BTW, Amazon’s customer service was so good that they offered to send a new one overnight to her free of charge. Sadly, it was out of stock.
On Friday I was standing in line to get my passport processed. I arrived at 4:03. I missed the tiny sign that said it was open until 4. However, rather than telling me that they were closed when I first arrived, they waited until I was the next (and only) person left in line. It was then, after I had wasted 25 minutes of my time, did she decide to tell me they were closed.
That doesn’t even count the horrid mail carrier I had in Los Angeles.
January 17th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Kate: that is really odd. Ever since I first got a credit card/subscription to the “even the liberal” New Republic (kidding), I think I’ve received some sort of mail every day, certainly haven’t in any pattern you mention.
Sounds like there may be an issue in LA, but I think for most the USPS is pretty efficient, if nearly obsolete for its core mission.
January 17th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Re: the usps does NOT always get even first class mail to the destination. even the pay for overnight, tracking number somehow never arrives. fed ex has never failed however
I’ve had stuff lost or misdelivered by both the post office and FedEx. Not often at all, but a couple of times with both.
As for my biggest complaint with the USPS (and it’s pretty minor), why don’t the stamp vending machines take credit/debit cards? It’s not like the technology isn’t tried and proven. I had one of these machines eat a 10$ bill once, and I never did get a call back from the 800 number listed on the thing to call in the event of problems. As a result I will not buy a book of stamps from the machines (a single stamp, OK), but will stand in line instead. At least if the machine malfuncioned on a credit card I could dispute the charge.
January 17th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Matt is right, but Bruce’s examples are not crazy. The economic question – see Krugman and Wells, “Microeconomics,” (pp. 349 – 351) – is how to deal with natural monopoly. The US typically tries to do it through regulation of privately owned industries (as with most local utilities); but Amtrak and the USPS are the two big exceptions. With those two we try to deal with natural monopoly through public ownership of the monopoly (as is typical in Europe).
Both approaches have their pluses and minuses. Regulating privately owned utilities has an asymmetrical-info problem – regulators tend not to know as much as owners about costs and profits, and can be manipulated to allow the monopoly to set too high a price for users. But publicly owned companies tend to be “less eager” to control their costs than private ones, and are very susceptible to “serving political interests.” Krugman/Wells give Amtrak as an example: “Amtrak has notoriously provided train services at a loss to destinations that attract few passengers, but that are located in the districts of influential members of Congress.”
So yes, Bruce is right, it’s inherently difficult to make Amtrak efficient. But what private industry is going to open up much-needed high-speed train lines in the US today? And Matt is right – public ownership IS how Europe and Japan do it, and they have awesome rail transport.
None of which is to talk about the investment tax credit. But to get congressional funding, Amtrak will always have to run some lines that relatively few people actually take. The Post Office will have to deliver letters at a loss to places where hardly anyone lives. Well worth public funding, but not economically “efficient.”
January 17th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Mark (19) got it right. If somebody is not making some money out of doing something for you, is not good…… and is not just anybody making money, is got to be their friends….
Talk about efficiencies and improvements is nothing but code for how much money will I make…. not how well my customers are served……
January 17th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
The stamp vending machines at my post office take credit/debit cards.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:44 am
The fallacy here is: How do you know USPS does a pretty darn good job? How do you know they offer fast service for not much money? You don’t know, because no one is allowed to compete with them. Maybe a private company could deliver mail faster and cheaper. We won’t know until the government loses its monopoly on mail delivery.
January 18th, 2009 at 5:15 am
Just as a counterexample, I’ve lived in L.A. for 34 years now and have never had a problem with my postal delivery, 6 days a week.
Now my newspaper delivery, that’s another thing altogether. The L.A. Times does a great job if you live in a single-family house. If you live in an apartment, or if your neighbor steals your paper and you need a replacement, God help you because the L.A. Times won’t.
January 18th, 2009 at 8:44 am
I get so tired of hearing about the inefficiency of the USPS.
Does anyone really believe that, given the chance, a private company would compete for the opportunity to send a representative to your house, pick up a letter, and deliver it anywhere in the United States — anywhere — for less than 50 cents?
FedEx performs that service, a little quicker, but it costs 15 bucks — better than 30 times what first-class postage costs. Think they, or anyone else, is anxious to move into the 50-cent delivery market?
January 18th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
dmitchell says, “Maybe a private company could deliver mail faster and cheaper. We won’t know until the government loses its monopoly on mail delivery.”
But it already has lost its monopoly: FedEx and UPS in fact ARE competitors. As Megan McArdle notes in her blog, this competition from the private sector has significantly improved the service we get from the USPS. But as ermventures says in his comment above, we still need the post office to deliver to places like, oh, Wasilla, Alaska for 50 cents. Certain routes will always be loss-generators, and private business won’t do them merely for the public good. But they are a public good that matters.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Keep seeing people say- we don’t need the Mail because of E-mail. How do you send in your plea for a traffic ticket by E-mail? When your closing on a house can you get the paperwork by E-mail? Just a couple examples. A lot we can do, but a lot we still need the USPS for, and likely don’t want to trust Walmart mail delivery service with.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I can’t believe how easy people are being on USPS. As far as I’m concerned, it’s basically a garbage delivery service, and for me, checking my mail is basically throwing stuff away. Far less than 5% of what comes to my mail box is stuff I want or asked for. The centralized boxes in my neighborhood (3 blocks from my actual house) fill up fast with direct marketing crap that is almost impossible to stop (USPS sure isn’t going to help you). We keep two huge recycling bins next to the mailboxes and they are always full to overflowing. Yet despite this obvious clue that what they do is increasingly more a nuisance than a service, USPS posts officious little reminders that it’s OUR responsibility to empty our boxes every day. Screw that.
I don’t really need the postal service much anymore and I look forward to the day when I can just opt out. If they can come up with a business model based on what I actually need rather than what the direct marketing industry needs, all well and good, and I’ll pay the costs happily, but right now they just feel like another old, tired organization that hasn’t figured out where it belongs in the Internet age.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I meant to say “profitable” not “popular”.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Part of the reason UPS and FedEx are popular is that they don’t have to provide the necessary services (such as delivering letter-based mail, delivering to rural residences, and offering convenient local pickup in the form of your nearest post office) that the USPS does.
The USPS is a better option, by and large, for residential delivery. I prefer UPS and FedEx for business.
January 18th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
But it already has lost its monopoly: FedEx and UPS in fact ARE competitors.
Not in first-class mail delivery.
But as ermventures says in his comment above, we still need the post office to deliver to places like, oh, Wasilla, Alaska for 50 cents.
They don’t really deliver to Alaska for 50 cents. It obviously costs much more than 50 cents to deliver something to Alaska. It’s just that other people subsidize the cost of delivery. Everyone else pays more so people sending letters to Alaska can pay less. Not really fair in my view. But in any event, why do we need 50 cent delivery to Alaska? People living in far away places should pay more, because they are demanding more. There is no reason why it should cost the same to deliver to Alaska as it does to deliver to my next-door neighbor.
January 18th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
What people fail to realize is that your postal mail is an advertiser supported medium. All of the standard, 2end, and 3rd class mail you receive and most likely throw away is subsidizing the rest of the service. Something like 80% of the mail stream is made up of direct marketing activity.
With the current economy many direct mailers are turning away from USPS and looking for other channels to market to. In the last fiscal year (ending Sept 2008) the USPS lost 2.8 billion dollars. It is early yet but the economy has only accelerated the decrease in mail volume and given USPS high fixed costs they are on track to loose a lot more this year. Of course the economy could recovers but the trends lines have turned, mail volumes have been dropping the last few years and it is unlikely they will recover. Sooner rather than later they are going to require a bailout.
That being said given the parameters USPS works under they do a pretty fair job. I just believe that their model (developed circa 1900’s) is not sustainable and in 10 years things are going to look very different.
January 18th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
The USPS certainly beats the public mail service in Peru. If you want to send a normal-sized letter or postcard within the country it’ll cost you $2-3, in a market where the average salary is about 1/10 that in the US. Don’t bother though, because in a year and a half I’ve never had a single letter or package I’ve sent or had sent to me actually arrive.
January 18th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Tim is spot on. USPS has only be afloat in the last 10 years because of spam. FedEx and UPS will increasingly be used as USPS service deteriorates below its already awful quality. As their number of customers increases FedEx and UPS will lower cost and draw more to their brand. Daily mail pickup and delivery is a massive waste of resources. A mail truck shouldn’t come by my house unless I have a letter or package or have gone online or called them and said I need something picked up.
January 18th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
The person who wrote response number 6: I work for the Post Office, and you just hit it on the head. Thank you for sticking up for us little workers.
January 18th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
That UPS and FedEx will LOWER prices? Are you nuts? Look at how much more you have to pay now? You have a huge fuel surcharge with them plus you have to pay more for a residential delivery. My customers prefer ME over them. Im glad you are not on my route. You thankless Customer!!
January 18th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Response 64: It is like that because the law says we have to do that. Read a little research before spewing your crap!
January 18th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I am a rural carrier in the midwest. I have 880 deliveries everyday. I am on a route that is only given 5 hours to deliver all of those homes (apartments). I can tell you, that at our office we have a great group of people that truly do the best they can everyday. We are under a huge amount of stress from top management to take every piece of mail everyday-which is fine-thats what we are paid to do. There are times that we have situations beyond our control, that can delay our best efforts, such as extreme weather conditions, late trucks from processing plants, days with many sick calls from other carriers, etc… But, as with any business, there are those few “bad apples” that just don’t care and make the rest of us take the heat for their poor performance. We have had so many cut backs in the past 12 months, and are so understaffed, it is amazing to me that we can still get done what we do. I would like to say “thanks” for all of the positive posts on here for the USPS. When you go in to work and hear that phone ring with yet another complaint from a customer about how their mail is late (even though the whole town is under a state of emergency from the ice storm the night before), or “Where is my check?”, well let’s just say it makes for some long days.
January 19th, 2009 at 3:39 am
Some European train systems are not publicly owned and run. Deutchesbahn is private. So go figure.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:10 am
The USPS is in real trouble. I have been employed as a carrier, and supervisor over a period of 30 years. There has been tremendous change in that time. One major change is that the service is self supporting. No tax dollars. to the complainers about “junk” mail, it provides needed income to support the cost of moving first class mail. We are, and have been, grossly over-managed. In a world that is walking away from micro managing operations, the postal service is embracing the concept. We have too many layers of supervision, which in my opinion, contributes in great part to inefficiencies and cost of operation. Sadly to increase speed and number of deliveries serviced, the service is forcing employees to do more, faster and quality of service is suffering. Volume is way down, we are losing business to electronic media, and frankly to the frustration of customers that cannot see the situation that the service is experiencing. We Postal Workers for the most part are dedicated, honest, and yes, hardworking people. In any organization of this size there are problems, and there are some bad apples. But for the most part the USPS does a great job. We are and have been the best Postal Service in the World. We move more mail in one day than the combined Post Offices in the world do in a week, for a lot less money.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:12 am
In response to 61. RonCo Says:
The day you can opt out is here. Tell the Postal Service you don’t want your mail delivered, and they will return it the sender as refused. Done!
You post indicates that you think that the Postal Service generates the business advertisement in your mail box. It is a paid mailing by someone trying to sell merchandise or services. If someone PAID for delivery why would the Postal Service not deliver it? How else would the Postal Service pay wages and gas for delivery with out this? Maybe you could pay for delivery? Then you could specify what you want and don’t want? $30.00 a month for JUST your bills and the occasional correspondence? Yeah let’s forget about free universal delivery and charge the end customer, that will solve everything, yep that sounds like privatization all right.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:52 am
My local post office opens at 7:30 in the morning and closes at 7 at night.
My biggest gripe with the PO these days is that they took away the stamp vending machines. Yeah, they replaced it with that big machine that allows you to ship packages yourself, but that only spits out specialize (over $1) postage or standard stampbooks.
So, if you need a weird stamp (like a postcard stamp), then you have to wait in line.
But, if you need to ship a package and you have enough technical competence to use a touch screen, you can ship a package in a few minutes time, without having to deal with customer service.
If you do need to deal with customer service, I typically find that lines move fairly quickly, and only bog down when a stupid customer is in line and causing problems.
The post office workers are typically quite pleasant and helpful, though some are a bit surly at times.
All in all, I’d much rather go to the post office than to just about any retail operation. People at Best Buy are idiots, and when there is a line, it moves SLOOOOOOOOOOW.
People at Target are useless. Department store employees are only helpful if there’s a sizeable commission in it for them. And then they can be very obnoxious.
The Apple Store is the worst – surly, unhelpful employees and terribly long lines.
But my local post office is great. People who bash the post office are either doing it instinctually or they just haven’t seen how well the post office works.
Some offices don’t work that well. My old one was terrible. Spotty delivery service, a lot of packages and mail came late, the office itself was staffed with lazy, nasty people.
Unsurprisingly, an internal PO review resulted in it being determined one of the worst Post Offices in the country. New management came in, and things improved significantly. I got mail daily!
The post office is cheap, many locations have very flexible hours, they come to you, they deliver on Monday through Saturday, execpt for certain holidays.
Big retailers with their drive to reduce employee costs to the bare minimum can only dream of having such good service.
And F*** Federal Express. They suck.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:55 am
When Ben Franklin organized and implemented the Post Office written words on paper were the only way to communicate if a face to face meeting was not possible. Now, of course, we have choices. Obama could not have found and mobilized his base if he had to depend on direct mail. The United States Postal Service has been co-opted by the direct mailers in order to gain access to a larger market. There has to be a national dialog on exactly what we want our Post Office to do, if anything. Only when we have reached a consensus on this can we begin to decide the best way to provide and pay for this service. As a citizen I think I would fear this means of communication being in the hands of big business. I am in my third decade as a Rural Carrier and I recognize the power of being in contact with almost every home in America almost every day. The country needs to decide how we want this power used. As an aside to Post 61. You can indeed opt out. Today. Right now if you want. Just go outside and remove your box. You can bet your carrier is just as tired stuffing your mail in your full box as you are in having to throw it out.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Why don’t Americans skewing more poor, rural or elderly than the regulars here, chime in about whether they need the USPS? (No hint given.)
January 19th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
the problem with the P.O. is the multi. layers mngmnt. President of coffee filters, vice president of fellatio. what it does is drag down the letter carrier who picks up and delivers the mail, packages etc. we, the letter carriers keep this bloated system afloat. do you know how to become a Postal supervisor ? first be unwilling or incapable to work hard. second kiss a** so that you get picked to go up the ladder. third be dishonest.
the P.O. has purchased machines to sort letters and flats, on paper the numbers are great. In reality, after “the numbers “get cooked” so that local (mis)management gets their bonuses. get rid of 40% of management and what do you have ? 20% more to get rid of. there will be no noticeable difference in delivery, it will improve. less bad decisions. then use the saved money to pay the workforce it’s due. then you get improvement everywhere
January 19th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Well scratch. you said it probably a little better if a little rougher than I did. 12 years ago I returned to craft after seeing what postal management is. To great extent, a haven for those who can’t or won’t perform. The books are cooked, and yes lying is a common skill. Many in postal management are driven only by securing higher pay and bonuses. They would happily let the whole show sink for a little personal gain. Thanks for putting in clear understandable language.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Typical Neo-Con Drivel: They always claim everything should be privatized without DOING ANY RESEACH. It’s a Mantra to them. Privatize, Privatize, Privatize!
These are the same idiots that want to Privatize Social Security. If they had gotten their way, half the people in the country would have NO RETIREMENT SAVINGS after the latest Wall Street collapse. Think about that! 175 Million people with no money for retirement! To add to the 100 million with no Health Care.
The same Neo-Cons were all for a Hands Off approach to regulation on Wall Street. Well look what happened! Now the taxpayer is on the hook for 1 Trillion dollars to clean up the mess.
Never take the advice of a Neo-Con when it comes to money or financial matter. They’re brain is disengaged by GREED! They’re advice is always based on an “opportunistic” self-interest view on how to MAKE MONEY from any given situation.
NOT what is best for the nation, people, etc.
These are the same people who will gladly “rape” the environment into extinction to MAKE A PROFIT!
All they care about is MAKEING MONEY! And everything else be DAMNED!
January 20th, 2009 at 11:34 am
As the old saying goes “You does miss it till it`s going”. Look what dereg did our phone service. UPS and FEDEX are run by corporate exes who think of profits first at the expense of the american consumer. Do you know what thes people make?The USPS is about providing universal service at break even margin. Dont get fooled about the slick adds by UPS and FEDEX about service and costs. Think about using old reliable more often.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
As for efficiency, or better yet, effectiveness, USPS only lost $2.8 Billion last year because Congress forced them to pay in over $5 billion to prefund benefits. Private compnaies don’t have to do that. Absent the funding, USPS is in the black $2.8 Billion.
No service? Can’t wait in line? Not open long enough? Try USPS.com. You can have shipping materials brought to your home. You can print your postage from your PC. You can schedule carrier pick up. Why go to the post office? You can order stamps by mail.
Wait in Line? Try the APC mentioned earlier. It will sell you stamps, mail your packages, even print 1 cent or 2 cent stamps unlike the comments you see above. As long as you use a credit or debit card, you can even get delivery confirmation or insurance. It does almost everything your window clerk can do.
Fed Ex and UPS do it better? Then why do you pay them to have us deliver it the last mile? Do you realize how much of their mailings get dropped at the post office for the carrier to deliver? Do you realize that USPS mailings get flown on both carriers’ planes? Do you really know how interconnected they really are?
Have you seen the USPS annual report?
Do you know that the mailing industry is a $9 billion industry? Many of your friends and neighbors depend on that ad mail you recieve for their business and many of them work for the direct mailers that provide it. Should we put them out of business as well?
How about that ad mail? Do you get too much of it? I see too many commercial on television as well. Should the television industry go out of business as well if they can’t just provide the meat and potatoes and get rid of the sides? SAme with radio? How about all those ads on the borders of internet home pages? I know how to access Google and Yahoo. I don’t need a pop up or marginal link to show me.
The post office was initiated in 1775, before the birth of our country, to provide secure communications within our borders. Can the internet do that? What was the percentage of the population experiencing ID theft 20 years ago, much less 100? The USPS is still the most trusted federal agency in the country.
No, they’re not perfect. No person or business is. But they go about their appointed rounds to provide universal delivery like nobody else can. These are your neighbors as well. Should we put all 700,000 of them on the streets drawing welfare as well? Then the $9 billion mailing industry can follow right along. Take down those businesses who use the mail for cost efficient advertising as well. Heck, with over 32,000 different vehicles in the fleet, including Sedgeways, hydrogen fuel cells, biofuel, electric, natural gas and compressed gas we can put a dent in the auto industry and ensure they go out of business as well. Heck, I could go on and on relating the impacts to our world. I think I’ll just go about doing my job the best I can and helping my customers as best I can. WE’ve got enough doomsayers here to cover while I’m gone.
January 20th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I use the USPS all the time, and for the money you can’t beat it. Try to send a car part, or 5000 pennies through UPS or FedEx. Up to 70lbs for less than 10 dollars, in a large city you could not drive it from one end to the other for that.Gene.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:33 am
one person wrote here how horrible it was that postage has doubled in fifteen years. can anyone here think of something that actually hasn’t more than doubled in fifteen years? check out your phone bills, newspaper cost, the price of an auto, school taxes, turnpike fees, etc and you will find that everything has doubled or worse.
now that our government is printing money at an incredible rate, inflation will catch up and costs will be more than doubling in the next fifteen years.
if 42 cents is too much, then pay online. that won’t help the post office, but eventually, online banking will be charged to users too. remember when ATM’s were free?
if you want to privatize the post office, remember this: the phone company that we all complained about(bell telephone)when it was charging six to ten bucks a month for phone service is long gone. how much do you pay for a land line/cell phone now combined? sure, the convenience of a cell phone is nice, but for $600 bucks a year, is it cheap?
the post office fulfills a lot of needs for americans and for the most part, the people who work for the post office work extremely hard at their jobs and are appreciated by most americans for their loyalty to the customer. how many companies really care about those that use these businesses? give the post office a break and look at the importance of that person in blue who comes to your home or business each day. they care for those they serve and they earn the benefits they work for. no carrier will ever be rich with material wealth, but they will be rich having served the people they care so much about. gregg morrisville pa
January 21st, 2009 at 12:32 pm
The USPS delivers more mail in one day than all the other delivery companies combined deliver in one YEAR !! And yes all other major mailers do arrive at our USPS docks every day to give us hundreds and thousands of their parcels daily to deliver the last mile because they CAN’T !! Do we have issues, you bet. But we are working with 100,000 less employees than just 5 years ago and still making every delivery every day. Plus service as recorded by outside testors is at record highs for on-time delivery. Try sending a parcel internationally with anyone else and see who cost the least !! Our hands are tied by congress and out dated laws. Let us run this like a real company and watch us bury the others because nobody does it better than the USPS.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm
As a carrier, I am glad my customers are more appreciative of my services than some of you are on this site. Most do agree that 42 cents is a bargain to mail a first class letter. Most people are also unaware that the postal service’s version of overnight, called Express Mail, is actually less expensive than any of our competitors. In fact, give me a parcel weighing 5 lbs or less and I can beat my competitors any day. As for delivering to the correct address, few realize that when UPS or FedEx can’t find you due to a bad address they mail you a postcard to that same bad address knowing that the carrier/USPS will be able to find you. I have delivered these cards to residents of apartment complexes having well over 100 units. I know where my customers are and UPS knows it too. I’m proud to be a carrier for the USPS even if our managers are a little screwed up.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Kudos to those postal carriers who have commented on and defended themselves in this column. Dave and scratch138, you guys sure hit the nail on the head. I retired in Dec 2008 under VERA. I could have stayed longer and got a substantially larger pension, but I had enough. I wanted to bail while I still have the sense in my head and I’m still reasonably healthy. I was a square peg in a round hole for much too long. I got offered an early retirement, without penalty, and I took it, at fifty. Not fifty-six which is my MRA. I was a clerk, dispatcher, Hazmat/ERT, tour guide, trainer, and a former 204-B (Acting Supervisor). If I could summarize the management system in a somewhat hiarchy it would be something like this:
1. A Postmaster General is appointed by a Board of Postal Governors, who do a great job wasting your tax dollars.
2. He/she usually has a slew of Vice Presidents, District Managers, Directors of Marketing, Publicity, EEEO, etc.
3. Each District has a manager of operations, delivery, retail, etc, etc
4. One of these honchos comes up with an idea how to improve postal operations, raise revenue, etc, etc. Example: Purchase automated equipment. So they accept bids from various contractors. Usually the cheapest (and least effective) bid wins.
5. Micromanager A from District 2B, decides he will purchase 1000 of these X machines. No research, no quality control, and most notably, no backup plans for if something goes wrong.
6. Micromanagers B-D who are at a lower paygrade than A automatically agree with the boss. No questions, no one has ANY cohones to question his/her decision.
7. Mister Easy the Senior Plant Manager in BFE says all his facilities will install these X machines. No one there questions this either. Mr Mack, the senior machine mechanic says he has researched it and these machines don’t work. They break down way too much. He tells his boss, Mrs Yes who robotically follows Easy’s orders. Mack vehemently protests against it, and Ms Practical questions how the mail goes out if the machines break. Easy says that will not be a problem.
8. The X machines are running fairly smooth thanks to Mr Mack’s extra efforts to fix them when they break down, which they do frequently because no one assessed the quality control.
9. Meanwhile Mr Money, in Sales/Marketing is working on bulk retailers to use our machines. Mrs Slick the retailer loves the idea because she gets discounts. Money never advises her of the type of mail these machines are designed for.
10. Mrs Slick is pleased, and Easy is pleased. Mrs Slick decides that she wants to make these mailings into three pieces stapled together. Money never advises her its not a good idea.
11. Mr Easy, seeing dollar signs decides to speed up these machines faster to process more mail. So he has these crappy three page stapled flyers running on a machine that wasn’t designed for this type of mail, at a faster speed than recommended by Mr Mack.
12. These machines start jamming mail like crazy and stopping the machines. Mr Easy has Mr Mack do a quick fix on the machines. Mack does it and they all break down. Now, Easy has crappy mail breaking down new machines, slowing down automation, causing more man hours, and Ms Slick is getting discounts for it.
13. Lack of planning ahead on Mr Easy’s part costs extra overtime, broken machines and loss of revenue. This goes on a day by day basis, and finally the USPS is in the red umpteen billion dollars. Micromanagement can’t get the revenue back so it tries a different approach. Put less employees to work with more work (particularly carriers)and allow them less time to do it.
The whole situation could have been resolved with careful planning, research, logistics, and most important, honest communication and….integrity. There is much more than that, but I think I painted a clear picture.
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