Is it time to end the US Postal Service monopoly? Or simply increase the price of a 1st class letter 20 cents to help them break even?

Photo above - Screenshot from "Miracle on 34th Street". Children's letters to Santa are delivered to the courtroom where he is on trial. Postage was 3 cents in 1947. It's 78 cents today, double the official rate of consumer inflation.

The Post Office stopped putting the actual price of a stamp on them some time ago. Stamps are now blank and called “forever stamps”. They look like Christmas seals or craft stickers from a toddler's book. In case you didn't know, it costs 78 cents to mail a each first class letter. Yowza! What’s worse, they’re still losing 20 cents per letter. There were 44 billion first class letters sent last year, and the USPS lost $9 billion (see link below).

Please don’t hijack this thread into a debate on 3rd class junk mail or Christmas packages. Adverts for gutter guards and gifts mailed "rush" on December 18th should full cost. On any given day the ratio of advertising to legit mail in mailbox box is 5 to 1. I’m currently besieged with lawn service deals, even though I live in an apartment.

Coincidentally, the USPS is in the midst of deploying 106,000 electric mail trucks. The total cost is going to be around $10 billion. It's not clear if that includes a charging station for each truck. In any case, $10 billion divided by 106,000 is $95,000 per vehicle.

Starting pay for USPS drivers is $19 an hour ($38,000 a year), so that may not be an immediate part of the $9 billion crisis. But possibly drivers in California could begin leaving their jobs to work at McDonalds, which will soon pay $30 an hour?

The usual advice for most imminent business failures is to “charge what the product costs”, and "fire the bottom 20% of your underperforming workforce". Both of these approaches seem untenable in the case USPS. Drivers and clerks are probably like teachers – can’t be fired unless convicted of a felony. And jacking up the cost of a first-class stamp to more than a buck isn’t going to fix what happens next year, and the year after. There’s going to be a need to constantly replace those copper charging cables which get sawed off to be sold as scrap. The repair costs on $100,000 electric mail truck fender bender won’t be cheap. Anyone who took 5 years to pick the most expensive next-gen mail truck possible has no intention of holding the line on costs.

Maybe it’s time to consider a distance based first class postage rate. It should cost less to send a letter in-state then it does 3,000 miles across the country. If credit card companies want to send 200 million bills each month from some place like Sioux Falls, SD - which is as far as possible from where most of their customers live on the coasts - they should pay for that convenience, no?

I’m just sayin’ . . .




https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usps-lost-9-billion-last-year-and-now-your-postage-is-at-risk/ar-AA1ZLgnr?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=69cb928d38e7472aa3adf9cddda13c85&ei=179