The US Postal Service continues to bleed craploads of money. By the way, they raised rates again the other day. Remember when these rate increases made front page news?
The US Postal Service is what happens when the Federal government tries to operate a business. Rigid, bureaucratic, unionized, and losing craploads of money. The USPS has much in common with Detroit.
The USPS will fail because they are in the process of making junk mail unaffordable. Junk mail pays the bills for the USPS, just as junk advertising pays the bills for newspapers. There's a lot less junk mail now because it's so expensive, so those personal First Class letters you send to your elderly relatives are losing their subsidy. Junk mail is already sorted and machine-readable, while delivery of your annual Christmas letter to Aunt Mildred is very labor intensive.
We'll be down to a 5-day delivery schedule very soon, and I suspect they'll cut it back to something like M-W-T-S delivery after that.
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I currently send one -- count 'em, one -- whole first-class letter per month to pay a certain local bill that doesn't have electronic withdrawal capabilities.
All other bills are paid online, and no one under 50 sends letters to friends/relatives anymore (OK, I'm generalizing a bit, but still). As an apartment dweller, I check my mailbox literally around once every 2 weeks. Pretty much everything in there is either junk mail or paper bill statements that were already paid for online.
They could drop to once per week delivery -- nothing much would happen.
Lou, the USPS is not run by the government. If anything the USPS has to balance it's books for it's biggest shareholder, the US Guvmint but they are far from a government bureacracy ala Social Security.
There are still luddites like myself who have never bothered to switch over to online bill paying. I know I'll be forced to sooner or later. Meanwhile I'll continue to support the archaic system in place.
Hey, I'm under 50, and I still send letters! I have one right now in my briefcase, ready to mail! Seriously. Oh wait, that's letters to elderly relatives who don't use e-mail.
That said, I still send (and receive) postcards regularly. There's something special about having a card in your hand with a nice picture on it and a handwritten bit on the back. I actually do like it when I get one of those delivered to my grim cubicle from (for an example I'm looking at now) a friend spending the month on a beach in Thailand.
As for bill paying: Electronic. I have one credit card (from a credit union) which, incredibly, has to take a manual payment; electronic payment attempts result in a mailed check that they sometimes put in my savings account instead of paying the card! So... I stopped using that card. I just like the reliability of electronic bill paying with everything else. And I also don't have to scour the house to find where the wife put the checkbook.
So it's not the 44 cent cost that bites me; it's the quicker electronic alternative. 44 cents is cheaper than a lot of other countries' postage. I still think it's a deal to pay that to get something from here to Seattle. OK, ask me again in 10 years when it's $1.85.
My bank's bill pay service will cut and mail a paper check (no charge to me) for those bills that require one.
I can't remember the last time I sent a letter (personal correspondance, not payment for or dispute of a bill)
Crap! I wasn't paying attention, and now I've got to remember to add extra stamps to those few paper bill payments still going out.
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