“There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.” (opens in new tab)

Here is what I hate about the USPS and spam. I opened a PO Box to receive rental payments on some properties I owned. The only people who got this address were tenants. It wasn't used for anything else. I'd check it once a month and it would be crammed full of ads. By crammed I mean seriously tightly wedged full of junk. I'd have to pick through it all to try and find my rent checks and not throw them out with the ads.

That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all.

At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(

I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution).

On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.

> ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.

A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail.

One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them."

He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though."

I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?

Good point! However, those spammers are doing some good because they're paying money to stamp their mail, which goes to employ mail personel, etc. For that reason I feel good when I throw away credit card letters while saying "Dear greedy creditor, No I don't want your raping fees, but thank you for paying money for me to throw this letter in recycling."

ye its probably one of the only ones that spam is a good thing for it.

I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.

And I have equally aggravating anecdotes about issues with private companies' customer service. It doesn't prove anything. I'd take the people at my MVC (NJ's "new" DMV) and post office over the people at my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company in a heart beat. Those companies aren't doing themselves any favors but somehow they manage to make it. The Zappos in the world are few and far between. So better to look at the facts than the attitude of the clerk you interact with on a daily basis, fact is no other service reaches every address in the US and that is a necessity that we need to keep up.

If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.

Good criticisms. But a publicly-funded post office has some advantages, too. They will operate at a loss in tiny areas, which means you can still get mail to Grandma, even though there is only one traffic light in her town.

Also - 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country? Still a pretty good deal.

Every time the US postal service comes up in discussion, someone invariably mentions how life would be so much better if the service was privatized. I think this argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of public services; the post office is perhaps the canonical example of an extremely important service that only can exist in the public sector. As others have mentioned already (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236487), delivering a piece of paper from California to Maine for under a dollar is not something the private sector can provide.

As a rule of thumb, if your gut tells you that a particular service is essential to a civilized society the service belongs in the public sector. As a nation we've decided the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country is such a service. Education is another. These two examples are extraordinarily complex problems which the US public sector solves well, all things considered. Yet every time we discuss these services someone always wants to privatize them.

For the most fundamental components of our society, privatization is never the answer.

I don't get it. I am routinely subject to silly, unfriendly, inexplicable () policies and restrictions when dealing with private corporations. It sounds like there's supposed to be some conservative message here about the superiority of the free market, but it falls flat.

Actually, such polices are usually quite easily explained by the simple logic that there isn't any money in caring too much about edge cases.

Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.

I honestly had no idea that mail was delivered on Saturdays until I got a Netflix subscription. I thought there must've been some sort of mistake when I saw "For Saturday: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen", but when I checked the mailbox that Saturday, there was mail in it.

I still only check the mail on Saturdays when I know a movie will be waiting for me.

Maybe that's ok, since in the future most of their customers will probably want to watch everything online (through them) anyway.

Well you could get a PO box and still have your Saturday movies. Or just use the streams, mail is on its way out.

In 10-20 years I question whether there will be a Netflix. Already cable and tv companies are moving in with On-demand movie rentals. While the film industry will fight the decline of physical rentals tooth and nail eventually they won't have a choice.

Not only that, but Saturday is the only time I'm home when the mailman arrives, in case of the need to sign for a delivery. By eliminating any intersection between the mailman and I, it greatly complicates the delivery of signature-requiring mail.

Most businesses want delivery (and pickup) during working days.

This has more to do with staffing and hiring than with getting us our mail in an optimal way. Most people don't like to work on Saturday unless they're getting paid overtime.

Good suggestion!

Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online.

Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)

Just wondering: how would they handle it when you move?

Government monopoly.

The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html

There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.

This is a huge problem, and we need to shift the power balance away from unions. The original purpose of unions was to compensate for the imbalance of power. I don't have a problem to the extent that they merely divert executive pay down to the workers, but where they significantly increase the cost of doing business, unions are economically inefficient.

In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund."

In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels.

If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection).

They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.

It's even better - when they literally have no work for employees they are asked to find work elsewhere but the USPS will pay them any difference in pay/benefits essentially forever.

The extension of this idea is that we'll eventually have a company of 600,000 employees who only do their actual job - delivering mail - one day a week.

Because the Postal Service is provided for in the Constitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause

Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.

> Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:

But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.

Keep in mind that they also have a government-granted monopoly. They probably wouldn't be a big otherwise.

It's hard to address throughput that way when the Throughputers are in a union.

1 person can only deliver to so many houses in a single day.

If the USPS would make it legal to deliver small pieces of mail.

And this is opposed to the threat of having mail that needs to be signed-for turn up at your house only on a weekday while you are at work. Currently I can tell USPS to just deliver it again when I know I will be home (on Saturday).

They still deliver 177 billion pieces of mail a year. By raising the price of delivery by 2 cents, they could make up the difference.

Doesn't have to be government: when MIT had to tighten their belt in the late '80s or so they started cleaning a bunch of bathrooms every other day instead of daily (and that was largely OK, many have very little use (e.g. patterns changes as the Institute changed and grew)).

This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning".

It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.

Why not? I could see mail sending / receiving to be highly correlated with age, which is linear.