The US Postal Service
Posted 2/17/08 (By Travis)
Boston Man Receives Postcard From 1929
2/12/08 Associated Press
Nearly 79 years after it was sent, a postcard of Yellowstone National Park's Tower Falls arrived in a Boston mailbox recently with the one-word message, "Greetings."
A U.S. Postal Service spokesman says it's impossible to know what happened with the card. It somehow got into the mail and was sent with a one cent stamp from Seattle earlier this year.
Posted 6/11/07 (By Travis)
What Would Happen If the Post Office Had Competition?
6/6/07 LewRockwell.com
Posted 3/8/07 (By Travis)
Postal Commission Favors Selling Stamp That Locks In Current Rate
2/27/07 Washington Post
Under the plan, the first "forever stamp" would cost 41 cents. That is because the commission also proposed increasing the first-class postal rate by 2 cents. The independent commission trumpeted the hike as a victory for consumers because the Postal Service had wanted a 3-cent jump.
A 'victory for consumers'? We wonder why the price of most things drops, yet postal stamps always go up. In fact, with most goods, services, and commodities, the prices of things consistently fall as innovation, technology, and productivity all increase with time. When (inflation controlled) prices do not fall it is either because the product is getting better and has more features (cars) or because government is controlling or meddling in the industry (health care and postal service). In my opinion.
Postal
Service fixes long waits by removing clocks
3/1/07 Associated Press
The missing clock didn't stop postal customer Al Cunningham from noticing the amount of time spent waiting for service.
"It's always long here," said Cunningham, 49, an insurance adjuster and former postal employee who was standing in line at the Watson Post Office in Fort Worth.
The Watson Post Office is one of the nation's 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a "retail standardization program" launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.
"We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock," said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.
At the Fort Worth post office, the hook that once held up the small battery-powered clock now protrudes from a plaster wall. The clock was taken down months ago.
A customer-service expert at Texas A&M University was not impressed with the decision to take down the timepieces.
"It's silly," said Leonard Berry, holder of the M.B. Zale Chair in Retail and Marketing Leadership. "I guess they think people don't have watches."
Unions and your tax dollars at work. :)
Posted 1/27/06
1/15/06 Washington Post A fawning article on the bloated US Postal Service. Ironically, coming right as they've increased the price of stamps another 2 cents.
Then there is the Postal Service that has made huge strides in on-time delivery, runs one of the most impressively automated operations in the world and, for now, is bringing in a huge profit. This is the Postal Service that customers such as Tornga don't see, and, frankly, take for granted -- the one that moves 580 million pieces of mail a day with remarkable speed and accuracy to every address in the nation, six days a week.
I'm not sure why this reporter finds this so 'impressive'. Private industry and the free market perform much more complex feats every day. What would be surprising is if a government agency could do such a task without being vastly overpaid (the US postal service could not). And if a government agency could do such a task without a legalized monopoly (the US postal service could not).
Ending Royal Mail’s 370-year Postal Monopoly
1/4/06 Government Bytes
One week before the U.S. Postal Service is expected to increase rates by 5.4%, Great Britain ended
Royal Mail’s 370-year monopoly and fully opened its postal market to private competition on
January 1. Private enterprises now have the chance to compete for business-to-business and
business-to-consumer mail.
Great Britain joins countries such as Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Japan, South
Africa, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Jordan in moving toward the advantages of postal
privatization. Other EU member states are charged will fully liberalizing their postal systems by
2009.
As American customers enviously gaze over the pond to the increased postal choice
and price competition enjoyed by British postal consumers, chances of reforming the bloated and
outdated USPS monopoly in 2006 look increasingly slim. A thorough overhaul of the postal service is
needed now to avert a future taxpayer bailout, or the cost of our mail will reach far beyond the
loose change we pay today for a stamp.
(Added to 'The Post Office')
Posted 10/20/05
Japan PM's Dream of Postal Privatization Enacted
10/14/05 Washington Post Under the postal laws, Japan Post, which has 25,000 post offices and some $3 trillion in assets, will be split into four entities under a new holding company and privatized in 2007.
Privatizing the postal system has been the cornerstone of Koizumi's agenda to wean the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from its addiction to the wasteful public spending that had won votes but bred scandals and inflated government debt.
Why isn't this happening here? Let's look at our Postal Service:
The shelter from competition and other special advantages have yielded a bloated enterprise. By any measure, the Postal Service is immense. Its profile in 1994 figures:
852,045 total employees
nearly 40,000 retail offices
207,000 vehicles
annual sales of $49.4 billion
If ranked among the Fortune 500, the Postal Service would appear ahead of such corporations as DuPont, Texaco, and Citicorp. The Postal Service is bigger than the three largest airlines (American, United, and Delta) combined. It is larger than the five biggest package and freight companies combined. Indeed, as the Postal Service itself notes in its 1994 annual report, each of the Postal Service’s seven product lines would qualify as a Fortune 500 company on its own.
[T]he Postal Service has lost money in 17 of the past 23 years despite its statutory mandate to break even.
The general rule (unfortunately) in the American economy is that attempted monopolization is a crime. When it comes to delivering letters, though, it is attempted competition that is the crime. And if it [The Postal Service] suspects a customer is sending mail in contravention of its monopoly, it may engage in its own police searches and seizures.
Weep for the Poor Postal Service? Nah
4/20/05 Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
•
“If the Postal Service were a private company, stamp prices would be falling, not rising. A
December study by leading experts of the Postal Rate Commission explains: ‘The doubling of overall
volume coupled with scale economies should have resulted in the average price of the stamp dropping
in real terms.’”
• “Despite new technology – like modern reader/sorters that process over 30,000 pieces of mail
per hour – stamp prices have risen with inflation since 1970. Imagine if the price of a phone call
or sending an email rose with inflation for 30 years. It doesn’t take an economist to understand
that such price distortions would place an enormous strain on the U.S. economy.”
The question of whether the Private Sector is more efficient than the Public Sector should have been settled with the fall of the Soviet Union. If, as postal service managers and employees argue, the post office is most efficient as a government entity, then it also follows that Cars (If government had taken over the auto industry in 1920, today we'd all be driving Model-T cars -- and saying, 'If it weren't for the government, we'd have no cars at all.'-Harry Browne), Clothes, Food, Computers, and (cough, cough) Health Care should all be run by our efficient government. Of course, this cannot be true and government is also poorer at delivering roads, power, water, and telephone/internet service. In fact, government is remarkably incompetent in nearly every endeavor it pursues, besides those duties that it alone can perform, such as protecting property (and it is less than competent in this too).
Returning to the article:
• “The Postal Service is plagued by high labor costs – which gobble up
nearly 80 percent of revenues – lack of financial transparency and an inability to cut costs and
improve productivity. Currently, the U.S. Postal Service has over $70 billion in unfunded
liabilities.”
Hmmm... high labor costs, large liabilities, floundering productivity.. there can only be one cause: Unions.
As mentioned, Unions are and have been bankrupting private companies across the United States. They cannot bankrupt the postal service because it is owned by the government. More than 330,000 Postal Employees are members of the American Postal Workers Union. Like all Unions, the Postal Union members give almost all of their money to Democratic candidates through the AFL-CIO. Like almost all Unions, they are vastly overpaid for the jobs that they do. The resulting higher costs are paid by the taxpayer. Thus, in effect, the +50% of the voting population that is Conservative/Libertarian are forced to pay a tax that supports candidates they abhor. Yet, our elected 'Republican' officials refuse to abolish this wasteful government entity. I would understand if it was 'the right thing to do', but 'politically inexpedient', however eliminating the millions of dollars of involuntary campaign contributions flowing from their own Conservative constituents to the Democratic party makes political sense too. We can learn a lesson from our friends in Japan...
See also 'Unions'