{"id":787,"date":"2011-12-21T13:46:45","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T11:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=787"},"modified":"2015-04-27T21:54:36","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T19:54:36","slug":"the-ultimate-bargain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/the-ultimate-bargain\/","title":{"rendered":"The ultimate bargain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bargains<\/span> are easy to find in the United States. But among the bargains, there is one super-bargain.<\/p>\n

For only 44 cents (\u20ac0.34), you can send a letter anywhere within the US or its territories \u2014 as far as from Maine to Guam. If you send the letter to a military address, you can even send it around the world for that price. What other service could you even get for 44 cents?<\/p>\n

Not only that \u2014 the service is fast. Most letters can travel more than 1,000 kilometers and still arrive the next day \u2014 six days a week. Typical delivery times for letters are about one day per time zone: so two days from Arizona to the East Coast, three days from California and five days from Hawaii. Packages and postcards take longer, as does, understandably, all service in the weeks leading up to Christmas.<\/p>\n

This week is \u2014 as one might expect \u2014 the time when the most stamps<\/span> are bought and the most mail is delivered. During this year’s holiday season, the US Postal Service<\/a> (USPS) expects to deliver 16.5 billion pieces of mail.<\/p>\n

$20 billion short<\/h2>\n

Older than the country itself, USPS is the second-largest civilian employer in the United States (after Walmart), and it operates the largest vehicle fleet in the world.<\/p>\n

Yet at the same time, it is fighting bankruptcy<\/span>. USPS had a net income of minus $5 billion for 2011. The postal service says that to become profitable, it will have to cut its operating costs by $20 billion by 2015. So it will start in May by closing 3,700 post offices (one eighth of the total) and 252 mail-processing centers (more than half), and no longer guaranteeing next-day delivery. About 28,000 of its 574,000 employees will lose their jobs.<\/p>\n

The rise of e-mail and competition from package-delivery services UPS and FedEx are being blamed for the shortfall<\/span>.<\/p>\n

German-style solutions, such as having private customers pick up their packages at other businesses in shopping malls, are under consideration. Privatizing the postal service was under discussion in the middle of the last decade, but it’s off the table for now.<\/p>\n

The constitution gives Congress the power to establish a postal service, which is obligated<\/span> to serve all Americans equally and for the same price, no matter where they live. The government does not own the postal service, but it determines everything the postal service does, including how much USPS is allowed to charge for its services.<\/p>\n

An artificial problem<\/h2>\n

So ultimately, this is an artificial problem. Raise the price of stamps and the problem goes away.<\/p>\n

I don’t just mean the first-class stamps bought by people like you and me. I mean the much lower price of postage that businesses pay to send much larger quantities of mail \u2014 much of it unwanted \u2014 to people addressed as “Resident” and “Occupant”.<\/p>\n

The postal service justifies the discount with the argument that bulk mail<\/span> is pre-sorted. Behind the junk mail everyone gets is, of course, a whole industry of people who produce and print it. They have to earn a living<\/span>, too, I suppose. But why something few people want should be so cheap is still a mystery to me.<\/p>\n

USPS has done a lot in recent years to modernize its facilities<\/span> and optimize its sorting and delivery processes. Every price increase was the result of a long battle. Perhaps people think of mail as something like a basic right, meaning it should be cheap.<\/p>\n

After a certain point, however, it’s hard to do more with less. If letters cost $1 to send all the way across the US, they’d still be a bargain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bargains are easy to find in the United States. But among the bargains, there is one super-bargain. For only 44 cents (\u20ac0.34), you can send a letter anywhere within the US or its territories \u2014 as far as from Maine to Guam. If you send the letter to a military address, you can even send it around the world for … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[72,77],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}