Even if you made all the changes that you listed, you would still have to close high overhead rural post offices, stop routine Saturday delivery, raise the price on 1st class mail and focus on package delivery between major markets. The Post Office is welfare for rural America.

Shut down the USPS and let a private company take over. You could cut down snail mail delivery to 2 or 3 times a week and make a profit, still covering rural districts.

Although I think the USPS needs to go the way of the Dodo bird, in their defense, for some reason Congress requires them to make rather large down payments on pension and healthcare obligations years in advance. I believe the USPS is the only organization in the Federal ranks that holds this pleasant honor. At least it might buy them some time, but I'm afraid that needed to be done about 5 years ago. Now, it would be like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

On the other hand, how much has the USPS lost in the last 5 years? Isn't it like 20 billion now? I think we could have connected every rural area in the US to the .com era for that amount. More government waste of precious resources.

Well... while I agree that the post office may not be "vital" its still pretty important. I mean look up the prices for sending a letter via ups. The cheapest LETTER that you can send any decent distance is 27 dollars. That's just for a one sheet of paper letter.

If we were in a situation where there was no longer a use for non parcel post, then yeah, but I think we all know that's simply not the case, and it would cause some serious problems if any piece of mail you wanted to send cost you so much, or even 1/5 of that price.

It's defiantly a dying service (in general) as we get more and more paperless, but its still something important to many people, and many many businesses. I read that the mailing industry accounts for 6% of the gnp, and that 75% of the businesses in that field are dependent on the usps infrastructure.

I know a lot of people would say "oh that's just junk mail", that's true, but those are businesses. Fairly big ones.

Anyway, its clearly not working as it sits right now, and they need to make some big changes someplace.

The main reason the U.S.P.S. is in these dire financial straits is because of the P.A.E.A., which was passed in 2006. This bill requires the U.S.P.S. to fully fund 75 years of retiree health care costs in 10 years. That's insane. What other Fortune 500 company is saddled with such onerous obligations ? Most use a pay as you go system. At least two accounting firms estimate the overfunding to be in the 50-75 billion dollar range. The U.S.P.S. simply wants these funds back.

If you want the union members to paid in line with private companies ( U.P.S., Fed-Ex etc. ) they'll be getting a raise.

I you only had a clue...

Some carriers are given us a bad rap wings, I just delivered over near airlite and lyle yesterday, funny how the car companies got bailed out.

sorry add, but its not us carriers who are to blame for the p.o. guys up above are clueless!!!!!!!

hey jab, so on a typical day we have to scan parcels and scan mailboxes that are on mailboxes out on are routes, miss a scan get written up, they say the scans are part of doing the job, but we all know the scan points are there so supervisors can tell where we are all during the day, but yet we have so many supervisors because they dont get rid of them, they just move them around doing nothing.
Getting rid of saturday delivery is not the answer, letting a private company take over, would be worse service! I love all the people who rip the P.O. but yet if they were a carrier it would be a different story.

the biggest difference between fedex/ups versus the usps is that the usps goes to every single house everyday. The competion only goes to houses with scheduled deliveries.

Hang in there, 26. :)

I'd like to hear obuuma tax "big labor", with their private jets, and mansions. The leaders have a mandated high income and the workers are dumb enough to pay it like sheep.

Comparing the salaries of high school grad ($20/hr.) union "workers" and CEO's salaries is too absolutely stupid to comment on, so I'll stop.

Your reply to BA is a classic. Hope he reads it and can understand it.

Why blame the union, they didn't have to sign the contract....same with GM and Ford.... all the had to do was call the bluff, you don't have to agree to a contract that won't work....seems like the Unions just had better people doing the horse trading.....
The Unions are not the problem, it is people that don't have the ability to write a contract that they can live with or close down and call their bluff.....

<letting a private company take over, would be worse service! >

Why?

Yeah, I'm not sure how it could be worse.

The only problem with privatizing the postal service is how are you going to bill the customers? By letter? By weight of total mail delivered? A flat monthly fee? Would you bill the sender and the recipient or just one of them? If the mail is sent by not accepted, do you still bill the sender? This isn’t like packages where 9 times out of 10 the receiver wants to get what it coming? What will junk mail or other mass mailers do? Would they get a volume discount? These are things a private company would have to work out.

Don't you think a private company is taking us further into the commerce identifier that knows what we eat, what we wear, what we believe etc...Look, let's go to the real source of the current problems most companies that work for that provide services for the public sector, like our gas& electrical, post office etc. Pensions. But is it the huge pensions that cause all of this or those who control those billion dollar pensions on Wall Street that used those funds to infuse money to the dirivtives schemes. Go to the source folks. Start blaming the reculprit not the pensioner.

This inculcate white wash doing well through redirecting the blame to others when the buck should and must stop to those who put us into todays mess.