E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper
buttondown.com120 points by rfarley04 a year ago
120 points by rfarley04 a year ago
This kind of service does have at least one very valuable niche application - armed forces personnel on active deployment. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, British troops received hundreds of thousands of letters every month through the e-bluey service. Letters could be sent via email (including attachments) and were printed as close as possible to the recipient. It greatly reduced logistics costs and improved speed of delivery, often facilitating next-day delivery to extremely remote Forward Operating Bases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The...
It isn't an entirely novel idea - during the Second World War, mail was often sent to very remote destinations on microfilm.
Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
I was in Afghanistan for a different country. It was my job to keep the satellite communications working, including so people could send emails to their friends and family.
>Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
Because they weren't in one of the larger bases that had satellite internet. Combat troops in the wilds of Helmand might go weeks without seeing a fresh egg or a slice of bread. Satellite terminals circa 2002 were bulky, expensive bits of kit that just weren't that widely distributed, at least in the British armed forces.
Before long distance phone service was widespread, but local service was becoming common, people often sent a telegram over the phone.
Person in City A would phone the local telegraph office and dictate a message. It would be sent over the telegraph wires to the nearest telegraph office to the recipient in City B, where it would be written down by the operator. Then someone would phone the recipient and read the telegram over the phone to them.
This was in use at least into the late 1940's that I know of.
It would presumably be more secure to have the recipient receive them directly with a cell phone or satellite device. Printing them creates a literal paper trail and footsteps.
Besides mandatory censorship, I've heard in WW2 they just delayed all mail by 2 weeks intentionally. By that time all secret information is not relevant anyway.
Another interesting thing about WW2 mail - they would photograph letters onto microfilm, then reprint them on the other end to save valuable shipping capacity.
What did a printer look like in WW2?
You didn’t really need a printer per se.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanhope_(optical_bijou)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform
> Portable readers are plastic devices that fold for carrying; when open they project an image from microfiche on to a reflective screen. For example, with M. de Saint Rat, Atherton Seidell developed a simple, inexpensive ($2.00 in 1950), monocular microfilm viewing device, known as the "Seidell viewer", that was sold during the 1940s and 1950s.
Apparently that’s not what they really used for mail in WW2, though. This video shows how it was really done.
In the context of peer or near-peer conflicts, Ukraine has shown us many reasons why a cellphone or satphone can get you killed. Anything with a radio transmitter is a giant beacon announcing your location if your enemy has a half-competent ELINT operation. Allowing personal devices with internet access to be used in the field is a gargantuan COMINT risk, because it's basically inevitable that some idiot is going to post a geotagged photo of something sensitive on social media. Mail delivered through specific authorised channels can be monitored and censored much more easily than real-time communications.
FWIW smartphones are nearly universally used in Ukraine by both sides because too much useful stuff runs on them. Artillery calculators, for example.
Russians also use theirs for actual comms a fair bit because their equipment (like older tanks from storage) often lacks encrypted digital radios, or sometimes any working radios at all. Ukrainians invested heavily into DMR after the Donbas war in 2014-15 where they had similar troubles.
Why do you even need two way communication? Just have an encrypted signal with per device decryption keys. Kind of like how satellite tv works but for messages. You won’t have proof of delivery or a way to reply, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
There is something like this being used in jails and prisons now. The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl or other potent enough substances.
Inmates do not receive originals - incoming mail is scanned at some service provider’s office that a PO Box forwards to, and things are reprinted at the detention center and walked to the inmate. Or people sign up for a faster service where photos / letters are uploaded through an app to skip the snail mail + scanning step.
One of these is called pigeon.ly
At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.
>At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.
This is how some imprisoned authors have managed to publish their samizdat — by sending thoughts/outlines to their lawyer [under the pretense of legal mail] — when their written ramblings might otherwise have been destroyed [as contraband].
> The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl
Or is it to make even more profit on the backs of prisoners & their families for companies who win juicy contracts from the government? This was being done by private companies before fentanyl.
Look into Jpay - they do a lot of slimy things and make a lot of money doing so. The free market in action I guess.
https://theappeal.org/prison-tablets-ipads-jpay-securus-gtl/
With the switch to this paradigm at a certain detention center, the time to get an inmate mail simply addressed to them with an envelope effectively tripled, up from what was already like a week, and if you included any irregular shaped paper or cute stuff it’d get mangled in the process. Ask me how I know.
It’s certainly an exploitative service taking advantage of a captive audience. I do think the substances thing is making many more smaller jails consider it.
I developed so many similar services for the UK Royal Mail in the 1990's
We used Yellow Royal Mail branded envelopes to gain attention.
Would love to hear more about your experience! Any chance you'd be up for an interview on the Buttondown blog?
What I wanted (and still want) is a secure place to hold statements from banks for savings accounts, credit cards, etc. and brokerages.
I bank with two credit unions. Years ago, they implemented a fee of $2/month for paper statements. I get it, printing and mailing statements costs money. But it also comes to me without me having to log into an account and navigate my way to where the statement is.
I'd prefer to have them send the statement each month to an email address I specify. I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are whitelisted.
I used to think there was a business idea here, that the banks should be willing to pay $.10/statement to save on the cost of paper. I'd be willing to use the service because the statements would automatically go to it and be retained for forever.
The reality is, I'm afraid, that the banks don't want you looking at statements because then you might find errors and dispute them and that costs the banks money.
Yeah I’ve had this same idea for the same reasons, and came to the same conclusions that without legislation, no incentive exists to send statements as attachments in emails or to store them with a 3rd party where they can’t be tampered with when a mistake is discovered
> I get that they should take security seriously, so practically maybe that only means Gmail, Apple Mail, etc. are
What does that have to do with security? Geniune question. I really don't see what attach vector this prevents
If I were a bank, I would want to send statements containing financial data only to secure places. So that means something like Google, where they have a serious security team protecting accounts and not something like Ed's ISP and Bait Shop.
The threat would be from people cracking Ed's and getting the statements there, possibly without the sysadmins at Ed's ever knowing that it had happened.
French postal service offers this, which is very convenient for legal letters because it stores a copy of it so people can't pretend they received something else.
I use this constantly when I have an online document I need to send through the mail. I just use the online postal service to send it directly. It's probably a lot environmentally friendly since they can just print as close as possible to the destination. Instead of sending it across the country etc...
We use this for summer camp. The kids aren't allowed anywhere near computers or phones, let alone internet access. So we write them emails and attach photos that are printed out and delivered to their bunks.
The service is https://www.bunk1.com/
I'll start by saying I am not a parent.
I attended summer camps as a kid and worked at one for years as an older teenager. I love summer camps. Looking back, part of the magic for me was being away from my parents for an extended time in a way that wasn't really possible in any other setting. The service you linked (a way for parents to constantly follow along with what's going on at camp) just feels... wrong? unnecessary? detrimental? to me. Do parents really need to be updated all the time with what's going on while their children are away for a week or two?
I don't think it's immoral or unethical to offer this service, I'm sure there's a market for it, but I just don't see why anyone would choose to use it. Let the kids go off to camp and have a good time, and they can tell you about it when they get home. It would really take the wind out of my sails if I got home and my parents already knew everything I had done, instead of getting to tell them all about it myself.
Why not simply sit down and write an actual letter with a pen on paper, encouraging your child to also write?
Some camps are a week long. You'd only really be able to write on Monday/Tuesday to be sure it got there by Friday.
The campers are definitely encouraged, and sometimes required, to write letters by hand. In fact their handwriting is much often better than adults, because they write by hand much more frequently.
The Polish Post actually introduced a system like this recently.
It serves as boring technical infrastructure for government agencies which still need to send physical mail. Instead of each agency employing their own people to handle printing their mail and stuffing it in envelopes, they can just send it electronically to the post office, which will handle it far more efficiently.
The eventual goal is to move most people to e-deliveries, which you're encouraged to set up when using government services online. For those who haven't done so, the letter will be printed as close to them as possible to save on delivery time and costs, regardless of where in the country the sending agency is located.
I have mixed feelings about the USPS.
On the one hand, it seems like a good public service -- and certainly essential when it was created and up until recently.
But 99% of what comes in my mail box goes straight in the trash. We do everything we can to stop email spam, why not stop postal spam?
If the government offered email as a public service, perhaps there wouldn't need to be any reason for postal mail in terms of ensuring a means of communication that reaches every one.
The Postal Service could still exist but would be quite expensive and only used for things that actually matter (i.e., original legal documents like car title, etc.)
This reminds me of the time FedEx spent $200m trying to integrate fax into their delivery network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail
This reminds me of the old FedEx Zapmail service they had in the 80s. They didn't get much traction and the service was shut down after 2 years at great expense.
jfc all we want is the opposite. Think of the massive emissions reduction if we reduced all physical spam to emails.
1. diesel needed to cut the trees down
2. diesel needed haul logs to saw mills
3. natural/gas/coal needed to make the water to turn logs into paper
4. diesel needed to haul paper to printer to make spam
5. diesel needed to haul spam to post office
6. diesel needed to haul spam to to your door
7. diesel needed to put spam in the landfill
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Not the full thing - but I use Informed Delivery[1] from the USPS.
You get to see a picture of the envelope via email. With a little bit of Multimodal LLM usage I have their email summarized with important mail flagged for me.
There are lots of services that do this, usually targeting people who travel a lot (especially boats and RVs).
I’ve had great experiences with https://www.virtualpostmail.com. They filter out all the junk, open and scan the rest, and email a pdf. It’s nice.
The only real downside is payment validation issues, when your parcel delivery address doesn’t match billing address.
Here in Sweden I get all mail, except occasional missed payment notices, electronically by way of https://kivra.se/en/private
Costs nothing extra.
I would also go the other way, you have something you want to be sent to somebody via paper, but it's only printed at the last mile in the delivery vehicle.
A birthday card for example doesn't need to be sent across the country or across the world, it only needs to become physical as close to your door as possible.
Maybe this could be a security measure too, you have a document that can only be printed by a secured machine and is only produced at the last mile based on current position. It would reduce the risk of the mail being intercepted or mis-delivered.
Who are you to decide how I get my mail?
You do yourself. This service exists in Germany and likely in many other countries since a quarter of a century. Cost: 15€/month. The paper letters are collected and once per month forwarded to you.
[1] https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postscan.html (english version)
OP did not phrase it as optional.
Correction: I did say “for a service fee”.
You can’t force change on transferring from a medium to another medium en masse, particularly when the service needs info for opt in.
The US Postal Service isn't in the business of delivering mail and hasn't been in a long, long time. In the words of a former US Postmaster General, their customers are "the 400 or so direct advertisers who send bulk mail". They're a spam company. Arguably the first spam company ever.
But they do have a 250k strong union which is a very reliable voting bloc, which is the most important thing. New excuses will be invented to keep them around as circumstances require that.
>It would save money on the last mile delivery. And speed up delivery to a matter of hours.
Delivery of what?
> Delivery of what?
A host of niche but useful services like election mail, delivery of official documents, and prescriptions. They'll never add up to the volume or economic profitability of junk mail, but they have inherent value – the argument against them is economic feasibility.
>A host of niche but u
Sorry, it was lost in the 100 pounds of spam they deliver to my house every year. If they even do what you claim (if), they undermine that with their true priority... junk mail.
>They'll never add up to the volume or economic profitability of junk mail,
That profitability comes at the expense of our privacy, irritation, costs to dispose of (in a landfill) the trash, and our ability to be reasonably notified of those same official documents you mentioned above.
You don't even know why you want the US mail to continue, but you're scared that if it stopped bad things would happen. They have virtually no value whatsoever, and whatever infinitesimal value remains is sabotaged by their obnoxious spamming enterprise.
>When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'”
> You don't even know why you want the US mail to continue, but you're scared that if it stopped bad things would happen. They have virtually no value whatsoever, and whatever infinitesimal value remains is sabotaged by their obnoxious spamming enterprise.
That's exactly what my comment mentioned: I know why I want the US Mail to continue, and I know the contradictions inherent in that. I don't think paraphrasing "you don't know what you're talking about" is particularly warranted here.
And yes, they do that: I live in a state with widespread voting by mail, I receive prescriptions by mail, and I just received my Real ID.
Do you really not understand the value to a democratic government of having a direct means of sending a message or physical item to every single member of the society without having that be mediated by a private for profit company?
> Do you really not understand the value to a democratic government of having a direct means of sending a message
What does that have to do with the US Postal Service? I understand this problem perfectly, I've thought about it for many cumulative hours over the last 10 or 15 years. I follow the news stories.
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-po...
>When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'”
The postal service, obviously, is capable of transmitting messages and packages.
If you understand the problem perfectly what’s your solution for a system that accomplishes that in a way that’s not at the whim of some monopolistic corporate entity.
Posting a link to an article describing how they successfully avoided an attempt by the sociopathic Silicon Valley mob to privatize the service isn’t exactly convincing.
No I don’t want fucking Peter Thiel to have anything to do with delivering my mail to me, thanks.
> The postal service, obviously, is capable of transmitting messages and packages.
So is the New York Philhmaronic Orchestra and the Cincinnati Zoo. That they are capable of these things is irrelevant. They don't do these things. Which, it turns out, is also pretty much true of the US Mail.
>If you understand the problem perfectly what’s your solution for a system that accomplishes that
Best I can tell, that doesn't happen to any great degree at the moment anyway. So why make a fuss that it would continue to not happen?
>that’s not at the whim of some monopolistic corporate entity.
How does that not describe the US Postal Service?
>Posting a link to an article describing how they successfully avoided an attempt by the sociopathic Silicon Valley mob to privatize the service
If that's what you take from the article, then nothing reasonable I would say could ever convince you. You're more concerned with maintaining this monster at all costs. I have no idea why. I don't even think I really care.
>No I don’t want fucking Peter Thiel to have anything to do with delivering my mail to me, thanks.
What mail? What actual, honest to go mail have you received in the last 36 months? The only mail I've received was an overdue notice (allegedly) for a credit card that after changing their billing information the auto-pay disconnected and they didn't send the notice to my email as they claimed they would with me having signed up for paperless billing. Maybe they did send that, who the fuck knows... buried in tends of pounds of direct mail advertisement.
Why the fuck that the "save the Earth" crowd would want to pay out of their own pocket to landfill this garbage, over 100 pounds per household per year, I can't even begin to guess. You're irrational.
The postal service can deliver anything from a letter up to a decent sized package to anywhere in the country in a couple days at a very reasonable cost. And unlike your nonsensical reference points of the zoo or an orchestra they do in fact do this millions of times a day.
The ability to do that is a core function of government and a basic building block of society that was so fundamental it was written into the constitution.
You seem to not need it or not like it. That’s fine and having that opinion is your right.
But pretending not to understand the concept (and really dwelling on some story about obviously predatory people who have destroying our government so we can be ruled by corporations as their literal stated life goal) is what’s giving the lie to this conversation as not being in good faith.
>And unlike your nonsensical reference points of the zoo or an orchestra they do in fact do this millions of times a day.
Facts not in evidence. It seems very improbable that they deliver "millions of letters per day". It's been many years since most bills or bill payments have been delivered that way (and notice that I'm not being stingy in defining what "letters" means).
>The ability to do that is a core function of government
In the 18th century, perhaps. Not in the 21st. Time to disband the pony express.
>and a basic building block of society
Nothing about our current society relies on this. Not even for nostalgic reasons.
>that was so fundamental it was written into the constitution.
So was the third amendment.
>is what’s giving the lie to this conversation as not being in good faith.
That's fine. You can pretend that it's not in good faith, but it just reminds me that there's no need for discourse with people like yourself, things need to be fixed despite you, without your consent, and ignoring your protests. The future may become unpleasant.
> So was the third amendment.
Indeed. And if I find government troops in my living room with Peter Thiel somehow involved I will object to that as well.
There are several services that do that for businesses. I don’t see why you couldn’t use one of those for your personal mail.
> The Postal Rate Commission took 15 months to review E-COM—long enough that standard postage went up 5¢ in the interim. It barred the USPS from operating its own electronic networks, just in case the Post Office decided to deliver messages electronically and in print. And it raised the price on the service to 26¢ for the first page, plus 5¢ for a second page.
> Sending the messages wouldn’t be simple, either. Customers had to register their company with the USPS using Form 5320, pay a $50 annual fee, send a minimum of 200 messages per post office, and “prepay postage for transmitted messages received, processed, and printed for each transmission,” dictated the 1981 Federal Register.
Almost sounds like a parody
now the junk mail subsidizes USPS. I wonder if they could be profitable without all the credit card preapprovals in the mail.
USPS doesn't technically need to be profitable. It's a service guaranteed by the Government. Government services do not need to turn a profit.
Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
Either it is able to fully fund itself through sender fees and other operations, or the net losses are ultimately paid for by other government revenues, primarily taxes.
I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
As a business that ships physical products through USPS because they have been WAY more reliable than UPS or FedEx, I wouldn't mind paying more for the service (well passing it on to customers), so long as it improved the service. But the non-government run parcel services can't compete (in my experience) with the USPS, even with the recent rate hikes that have been going on every few months.
Right now I have about a 1% lost/damaged package rate (averaged over 12 months - it's a tiny amount and it is insured), but come Christmas, that shoots up to around a 10% lost/damaged package rate through USPS - some of those packages do eventually resurface, and I let the customers keep them (I've already filed the insurance claim and shipped a replacement).
UPS was at 5% on average - never used them around Christmas - so no data for that - they might be better than USPS and the were close enough in cost just further away from my workshop.
FedEx (only used for 2 weeks) cost double and 30% of my packages were lost or damaged - can't average it out since there isn't enough data, but having to file claims for 1 in 3 packages after already paying 2x USPS rates wasn't going to fly.
It always surprises me how different people's experiences very so widely between UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
We ship packages via UPS, and have <1% lost/damaged. Not sure how long it's been now since a damaged/lost package - maybe 300?
It probably helps that our smallest packages are ~1000 cu inch and 6 pounds. Hard to lose.
I don't like dealing with UPS customer service, but I really like the actual shipping service. And it's very fast and predictable. Very rare that it takes any longer than UPS WorldShip predicts. 1 day shipping to most of our customers in our state, and some in neighboring states.
From my memory (I didn't record lost and damaged separately, just "claims") it was mostly damages (I think same with all of the carriers), but I have no idea how solid oak/walnut/cherry trays that are 3/4" thick wrapped in bubblewrap and in a bubble mailer gets damaged by anything other than someone stomping on it.
ETA: Except Christmas, that is basically 100% loss, though, about 50% of those losses seem to show up after the claims have been submitted.
We ship perishables (cheese) in styrofoam coolers. When we have a damage claim, what usually happens is that the cooler is broken or even smashed completely, and the cheese got too warm and separated.
And then UPS won't pay out a claim, since they don't cover perishables, even when it's their fault for smashing the cooler. So we started self-insuring at $3 per order, plus we've learned how to package the cheese in the cooler better so it's less likely to break.
And as I mentioned it's very rare now to get a damaged one.
I tried to follow the link in your profile to find your store but it seems to ultimately go nowhere. Could you post it?
It's my family's business, not my own, hence the link not taking you anywhere. It's www.jasonwiebedairy.com.
More charitably, it's a cost-sharing scheme for last-mile delivery to rural communities and deep suburban sprawl – as, to be fair, is often true for other rural services with significant federal funding like healthcare and higher education.
At some point, we should do what we can to promote urbanization. Being able to deliver government services more efficiently is one benefit.
A lot of the people who don't want to live in urban/suburban areas also view "government services" as a bad thing to begin with. Probably because they've never had good access to services.
I think they view government services as a bad thing for a few reasons, despite having access to good government services. These two stick out to me:
The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits.
They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
Alternatively, they view government services as a bad thing when they are terrible, which they very often are because of the retreat from public investment that's been going on since the 80s; and when they view them as good, they also view them as temporary. Because they will be.
No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.
The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.
Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.
Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.
edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
Don't we all believe that! I think the challenge to do it politically without ending up getting entangled into culture warring over urbanisation (e.g. "15 minute city" conspiracy theories [1]). The best we can do is endless suburbia...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-c...
It actually was profitable for most of its existence. It zealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail because that's where the money came from. And it did so before it was spun out as a quasi-private entity.
This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund.
However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
For the USPS, it would be profitable if it wasn't required to self-fund and pre-fund all retirement benefits for current and future employees 75 years in advance, paying for retirement health care for "workers" who aren't in the workforce, or even born yet.
It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
That requirement was repealed in 2022. The USPS still isn't profitable. While it reaped the benefit of that repeal and reported only a small loss in 2022, it reported much larger losses in 2023 and 2024, comparable to its loss in 2021 (when the requirement was still in effect).
Last quarter was slightly profitable [0], but yeah the losses in 2023 were pretty big.
https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-...
If I'm not mistaken, they still carry the debt they acquired to pre-fund, and still spend about $10B on retirement benefits each year.
But to me, none of that really matters, because I don't believe a government entity should be turning a profit on me, because then it is a tax. So I want the USPS running at a loss (pulling from appropriations as needed), but as close to breakeven as possible. If it ever pulls a profit, I expect prices to drop in accordance.
If you see it as a tax, and the tax funds the service, and you like the service, why wouldn't you want to pay it?
About half of their liabilities were forgiven as part of the 2022 legislation. They still have debt and retirement liabilities, but those are more in line with other large services (private or public) now. However, they've each increased over 20% per year since 2022, which is quite a lot.
Personally, I would like to see a return of postal banking, in which case the postal service would pay out its profit to its accountholders.
----
FY23 report showing the halving of liabilities from '21-'22 (p. 29): https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2023...
FY24 report showing the significant increase in other liabilities from '22-'24 (p. 28): https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2024...
Could USPS offer limited check accounts and debit cards?
I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree).
Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does.
Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US?
Just an idle thought I had for a while
Yes, I’ve also thought postal banking could help drive down the visa/mastercard tax on nearly all small businesses must pay now. The government has run an expensive payment network (the mint) since before 1776, no real reason they should stop now that it’s cheaper to do.
This sounds like a “postal banking system,” some countries have done it. The US had it at one point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
> The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967.
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have suggested bringing it back.
Postal banking existed in the US in some form until 1967. We could (and should) bring it back just for the reasons you stated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
There are places in the US where the bank drives to the town once or twice a week, since there's otherwise no way to get cash or transact.
I'd argue that its passport services are a success – at this point, delivering random services at POs would have few downsides.
I'm from WV. I always figured Wal-Mart would pick it up eventually, but I think there may be laws that make that difficult.
Walmart has partnered with a few "financial services" companies to offer bank accounts in the past, but the partnerships never seem to last, except Green Dot.
I usually actually have a handful of checking accounts for splitting up bills, not relying on a single bank, etc. And a couple years ago I started a Chime account for my "allowance" because they were partnered with Walmart, and you could deposit cash at Walmart, well not anymore (at least not at my Walmart). I can go to walgreens, but I never need to go to walgreens, so that card has been removed from my wallet.
I imagine the question is how much money there would be in it for Wal-Mart.
A lot of stores in the US used to take payments for utility companies. The idea was that as long as you were there paying that, you'd be tempted to buy things from the store.
Paying by check in the mail put a huge dent in this and then having the utility automatically debit your account pretty much put an end to it from what I've seen. I'm sure there are some areas where it still is a thing but they'd also have a high number of people without bank accounts.
For a while, utilities would only debit checking accounts, presumably because ACH payments are so much cheaper than credit card ones. A few years, they opened up to credit card payments. There seem to be a lot of people who do everything on credit cards and they must have had to change with the times.
It used to be standard for merchant banks to prevent almost anyone from charging more for credit cards transactions, as part of their contract terms, even though the merchant pays a percentage for every credit card transaction. That is what changed (I believe there were lawsuits and ultimately legislation).
Many countries have something similar. In some countries it's where most people do their banking.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS.
This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything.
If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research.
If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military.
If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".
Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients?
But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.
I wouldn't consider the USPS to be deeply in the red when compared with other government operations.
> It's not a remotely level playing field
What's causing the unlevel playing field?
Various acts of Congress that force them to take on a huge amount of debt and force them to run unprofitable routes. A private company has no such requirements.