No More Mail on Saturdays?

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Originally Posted by kingoffighters

The POs here have the worst customer service (the clerks are actually accusatory and belligerent). Coupled with ridiculously long wait for service means I basically avoid the POs like the plague.

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Complete opposite at my PO. Very friendly people who everyone knows and talks with.

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Originally Posted by Dolemite

Also, while blaming the increasing use of the electronic mail medium is a valid claim, the staggering degree of debt the Post Office is in reeks just as much of gross financial mismanagement.

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I don't really buy this. Hasn't packages sent through the mail quadrupled?

I think the USPS should be able to evolve with the times. While it still does important work, the fact is that the core of its business has been gutted by the internets and that is not going to change. The system was built to move small letters from any address to any other address and it's just not like that anymore.

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Originally Posted by Fe 26

I don't really buy this. Hasn't packages sent through the mail quadrupled?

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Originally Posted by original article

Mail volume was down 12.7% for the year, a trend the agency expects to continue over the next decade as more consumers opt for online bill payments and message delivery.

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That doesn't answer my question. The number of packages could have went up but paper mail went down drastically.

http://www.usps.com/financials/_pdf/...eport_2009.pdf

Look at the end. All their volume statistics are down.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

http://www.usps.com/financials/_pdf/...eport_2009.pdf

Look at the end. All their volume statistics are down.

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this may actually be more about the bad economy than it is about the internet. If you notice from that chart, they were making more and more money off of package mailing until 09.

From 07-08 they went down in revenue ~$250M on first class and ~$100M on standard, the $30M they picked up in packages doesn't really fill the gap very well. And yea they picked up $100M on periodicals but nobody should be betting on magazines to save them /halverson

I realise that.

What I'm getting at is maybe they need to rethink their business model and their goals. Until the drop in the economy, they were making more and more money off of packages. Well, maybe they need to stop and think about more ways to serve those customers?

It seems to me that they are losing money not because less and less people are using them, but because they continue to focus and depend on a part of their services that is becoming obsolete.

They don't work for profit, do they? They're a government institution. If there's a shortfall, cut your staff. My friend lost his job for the Post Office (he worked in the offices, nothing to do with handling the actual mail) and everyone but the incompetent bosses lost their jobs. Keep cutting imo.

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Originally Posted by Fe 26

It seems to me that they are losing money not because less and less people are using them, but because they continue to focus and depend on a part of their services that is becoming obsolete.

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Well, 2 problems there, one is that there is this big chunk of US law that says they have to focus on those services (and they get a nice monopoly to do that), and two is it still is the big chunk of their revenue.

They can't just say we are going to become a low rent clone of UPS.

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Originally Posted by Razor Ramon

They're a government institution

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Quasi-government, they don't actually receive taxpayer funds.