Until 1912, the United States Postal Service delivered mail on Sundays — and prior to 1950, the mailman came twice a day. Now, with the USPS expected to suffer a $160 billion deficit over the next decade, maybe Saturday delivery is on the verge of becoming a thing of the past too. Luckily, with the era of online bill pay, email, and other forms of electronic communication, most people won’t even notice.
The bottom line: Yes, the USPS may be undeterred by snow, rain, heat and the gloom of night — but it still must find a way to conquer those mountains of red ink.
Photo Credit: Jo@net
I think eliminating Saturday delivery is a good idea. I wouldn’t miss it.
Nor would I!
Why haven’t they done it already? If you need Saturday delivery for something just pay FedEx or UPS or one of the others who are set up for it?
I’m really not sure why it’s taking them so long to stop. They’ve been seriously talking about eliminating Saturday service since the beginning of 2010. I suspect it will happen next year.
Why ? Union. One day a week less means one day less pay for employees.
Same reason there were fireman (coal shovelers) for years and years after trains switched to diesel powered locomotives.
Good point, Andy.
The USPS is the worst run business in America. Fed Ex and UPS are profitable because they both do the same job more efficiently and for less than half the cost.
I do know that they spend much more money on labor (including pensions) than either FedEx or UPS. I believe it is almost 75% of their operating costs, which I believe is close to double that of FedEx. UPS is somewhere in the middle.
UPS pays on average $3 more an hour than the post office. I know peeps who work there, and the post office. Anyone who hired into the Post Office from 1984 on is in Social Security, and the Thrift Savings plan. The pension is very small compared to what it was years ago.
The biggest obstacle to the Post Office is Congress. The Post Office is being forced to prepay 75 years of future retiree health benefits in 15 years. Congress has forced the Post Office to over pay retirement benefits into the Treasury at over $100 billion. That’s right Billion.
If you saw how many members of Congress not only own stock in UPS and FEDEX but also receive campaign contributions from them, you’d know why.
Congress must approve the Post Office closing an office or merging them. A Post Office in Houston is underutilized, and within easy driving distance of another one. The Post Office wanted to close it. Their representative in Congress prevented it. You have small towns that are within 20 minutes or less of another town. Operations could be consolidated but then again, Congress.
Congress has long refused to allow the Post Office to have its own planes, and forces it to use the airlines. It gives a fuel subsidy to the airline industry. First Class Mail takes a backseat to luggage. Hence, delays.
Congress requires that the Post Office deliver to almost every address in the nation. The number of addresses increases by millions each decade. UPS and FEDEX pick when and where they will deliver. For years both companies have made drop offs at the post office to deliver for them. Relatives lived out of town. UPS made them use an in city business address for deliveries. Fortunately for them, a friend let them use their business address.
Every year the Postal Service increases the use of machines, and decreases the number of employees. In a decade they cut the staff by over 100k employees.
The Post Office is not allowed to run at a profit. Congress forces them to spend the money, and then request an increase to recover what was spent.
Every time they come up with another way to add revenue, Congress shuts them down. UPS sued over advertisements, and wanted the post office to not be able to have international express. A Federal judge denied their request. They got a member in Congress to stop the advertisements. The Post Office started offering the supplies for your postage machines. Pitney Bowes got that killed. For many decades, the Post Office had a postal savings bank. It helped provide banking to people who were low income, and in underserved areas. They wanted to bring it back, and once again, guess who killed it?
Massive cost cuts could be made but Congress, and the public won’t let them. If the whole nation went to cluster boxes at a central location, you could greatly reduce the number of employees, and delivery time. The public doesn’t want to walk down there. They want it in front of their house, and they don’t care what it costs. Up until the early 80’s, tax dollars subsidized your postage rates. When it was ended, the price of postage had to increase.
The biggest problem is Congress is corrupt, and the public is spoiled. Yes spoiled. They want their mail at a certain time every day, and special services but they don’t want to pay for it.
Regulation of what goes out in bulk mail is controlled out of the local office. Someone sitting in a far off place, in my case Houston, has no clue what is going on, and makes stupid decisions based on numbers that make them look good. It gets them promotions, and bonuses. They’ll suddenly make demands that are impossible to meet. Then, the public screams about the time they got their mail. It might be 4 times their regular amount, and they have 22 Amazon boxes but “You’re Late!”.
As far as the notion of shutting down Saturday delivery goes, it would take days to recover from the back log. The amount of overtime would be huge. People would scream about delayed mail and packages.
Last but not least, the United States Postal Service is a branch of the Federal Government. Contrary to the garbage on the internet and in the WSJ it is indeed a branch of the government. What branch of the government operates at a profit? Name one!
All of this information is available in the news and on the internet. Hunt for it instead of just making uninformed decisions. Our local news stays on top of it.
Bill, Thank you, for FACTS, and not opinion. People please his reply again and think.
FASB, is the financial accounting standards board set-up for government cronies to they make up unneeded rules , like retirement rules that make little sense but add into the bottom line.
Saturday working ( overtime pay), fat chance. In many business there is a 7 day work week. some times your scheduled mon thru fri to work and sat and sun are n/s, non-scheduled. work sat. and your scheduled off weds, NOO O.T..
Data as of 2021 (Employees/Pension Obligation):
FedEx (650,000; $30 billion)
UPS: (543,000; $46 billion)
US Post Office: (516,000; $120 billion)
FedEx and UPS are much much more expensive than USPS. Two years ago I calculated the cost of a letter delivery as price of stamp + (total USPS loss / number of mail items delivered). If I recall, it came out to well under a dollar. Compare that to $13 or whatever it costs to send something FedEx.
All this being said, the times are changing for USPS and we shouldn’t have a federal agency (even if it has been self funded for a long time) that exists mainly to deliver junk mail.
Well, if we have to pick a day and privatization isn’t an option, I would go with Wednesday. I know that has implications for overtime in the American Postal Workers Union contract (I think Saturday would still mean overtime), but with Wednesdays instead of Saturdays eliminated, the longest you would have to wait for mail would be 2 days. With no weekends, you’re looking at a Friday to Monday gap.
Either way, do something, haha.
Interesting point, Paul!
I like this point mainly because my copy of The Economist comes on Saturdays.
@Jack, like private vs public schools, I would argue Fed Ex and UPS cherry-pick the most profitable slice of shipping work — package delivery — leaving the USPS as the carrier of last resort for everything else.
@PKamp3, the USPS is already “privatized” as a self-funding entity. That’s why it’s usps.com instead of usps.gov.
The USPS is caught in a technology trap. It is defined too narrowly as a letter carrier instead of, say, a communications clearinghouse. E-billing and e-payments are killing off its primary business. Like horse-drawn carriage manufacturers at the start of the 20th century, the USPS will eventually have to undergo radical change or die.
The fondly-remembered Pony Express was in operation for less than a year before going out of business thanks to new technology, the telegraph. Again, an example of a too narrowly defined business model.
@DC I agree with half of what you said. The post office is stuck delivering less profitable letters, magazines and junk mail. But, their attempt to compete with packages is a miserable failure. The reason is they don’t guarantee anything. With FedEx and UPS, if you order overnight or second day delivery, it gets there. With the post office, express could take a week.
The post office should have killed Saturday delivery years ago. But, the union has strongly resisted it, because it will kill a lot of jobs. The post office probably thought they would get a bailout like everyone else, but Congress has limited their raises to the cost of inflation. So, now they will have to get real.
@Bret, I agree the USPS package delivery has issues, but Fed Ex and UPS in particular have their issues too. There’s a reason why UPS is also known as “United Parcel Smashers”. Have you ever tried to collect on that guarantee? It can take months and proving repeatedly they were at fault to be reimbursed for a smashed delivery.
I’m not so much trying to defend the USPS as point out they have to operate under different rules, and all other things being equal, that in itself causes a hit on profitability. Of course, things are not equal; the USPS still suffers from a monopoly mentality from the days when they were a true government agency.
But absolutely, yes, they have to get real.
They do operate under different rules. One of the biggest is that they are obligated by law to provide mail to all Americans.
They also have a Congressional sanctioned monopoly on first class mail, which discourages improvements in service.
Combine the two and you have inefficiencies, lack of innovation, a disincentive to improve customer service, and high costs.
Are you unhappy with their first class mail delivery? I routinely send items to my sister on the opposite coast and they almost always arrive in a single day.
Actually, m, I think their first class mail delivery is top notch. I can’t remember experiencing single-day opposite-coast delivery (more like two to three days), but I routinely enjoy single-day local and regional (within several states distance) delivery.
Today, and many other days, I have seen the UPS guy whip and and run. Run to a door to deliver a package and then run back to the truck and drive away. Aside from potential safety issues with how fast they drive sometimes, they are MOTIVATED! These guys get stuff done and quickly.
When was the last time you saw a postal carrier run (except from a dog). Granted, it may not be the most motivating job in the world. But there is something to be said for private industry and incentives vs. public sector union work.
That is true, Darwin. In fact, my post man has on a couple occasions over the years completely skipped delivery of my mail on days when he would have had to get out of his truck to reach my mailbox because, say, a vehicle (not mine) had blocked it. (Wouldn’t want him to have to exert himself you know.) Can you imagine FedEx or UPS pulling a stunt like that?
Home Saturday delivery? wow. Don’t have that up here in Canada — Monday to Friday only. Although at one point during the lovely postal strike we had a while back, a few blogs pondered if we should move to 3 day delivery instead of 5 days per week. I personally wouldn’t have a problem with it. But, it was just on a couple of blogs….
I think I could handle 3 days a week too, Kathy.
A way to conquer the red ink would be to change how they must prepay retirement benefits. They would have a surplus if they didn’t have to abide by these ridiculous cash reserved requirements
Bingo, YFS. Then again, if they are like a lot of other government pensions, they may be just a bit too generous to begin with.
They have a 21.5 billion deficit over the last 5 years. Over the last 5 years they have paid 20 billion to the pension-health care fund for future payments. Something that can be tapped by the government with an IOU. Hmm, where have we heard that before?
UPS and FedEx have found that it is cheaper to deliver packages(ground only) to rural customers by delivering them to the post office for the final leg of the trip.
I really don’t know how much would be saved by no Saturday delivery but it wouldn’t make a difference to me.
There should not be much impact on my family if USPS takes off Saturday. You are absolutely right in these days with the Internet, we end up paying majority of our bills online.
No, keep Saturday! It is the one day that many people can get there since they are open only 9-5 M-F. What they should get rid of is Monday. That way they can have two days closed down which will give them savings of opening/closing (and heating/AC). But it allows people who work during the week to stop by on the weekend to mail something. Actually, do half a day Saturday like 10-2 or something, even more savings!
Times two on this.
I lived for five years in a rural area and had a long commute to work. The postal service did not deliver mail down my dirt road. My only incoming mail was received by going to empty my Post Office box every Saturday morning.
No Saturday hours would have meant no mail at all, unless I wanted to put an RFD box out on the State Highway shoulder to attract vandals and thieves. That was not happening.
But PKamp3 might be on to something by skipping Wednesdays instead.
Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, if they delivered once a week, that would be plenty for me. That’s about how often I walk over to the mailboxes to get my mail now; and most of the time, everything that comes out of my mailbox goes into the trash anyway because it is junk mail. Maybe once a month, I get something in the mail that I don’t throw away (or shred if it is something like a pre-approved CC solicitation). All of my bills are paperless and they all get paid online or in cash. If I could figure out how to get unexpected notices (like jury duty) through email, I would be happy not to be bothered with snail-mail at all.
We need to reframe ending Saturday delivery as an envirnmental issue. Think of the amount of CO2 that would be eliminated by getting all those mail trucks off the roads one day a week! Dems would need to choose between big labor or the environment.
Joe: I can hear the sound of exploding heads all over America now.
The lifeblood of USPS are sales catalogs and fliers, delivered as second class mail.
Those catalogs use 53 million tress and tons of fossil fuel just to make their paper.
http://brgov.com/dept/recycle/catalogs.htm
Amazing, isn’t it?
Maybe the solution should include drastically raising the rates of second class mail. I’d guess 90% of my mail goes directly into the recycle bin. It seems like taxpayers are probably subsidizing those companies who primarily advertise by bulk mail.
I honestly think I could get by with mail delivered once a week – everything else I do is electronic.
What about all the packages that are delivered by the USPS to homes on Saturdays and Sundays by the USPS, from Amazon, who uses the Postal Service for the final stage of their delivery?
I propose that would be an exception, Ellis … since presumably the USPS would be acting as a private subcontractor for Amazon to provide delivery service on Saturdays and Sundays.
They contract with Amazon and those Prime members like me want our 2 day shipping/delivery.
Yep, MaryAnn … in some cases I now see Amazon offer SAME day delivery!
Len, if no one else has mentioned it you should make this a poll. perhaps list 2 0r 3 options such as M,W,F delivery or M-F or once weekly.
Just think of the money the taxpayers would save, says me with my tongue in cheek!
Good idea, Cyndy!