Some of the fixes are pretty simple, but when a union is involved, it's impossible to use common sense approaches to fiscal stability. 1. Close 1/3 of existing post offices. Make self-serv kiosks more readily available. Grocery and convenience stores would likely pay a small monthly fee to have them located in their retail locations in order to drive more traffic. 2. Raise prices on junk mail. It is fairly easy to do studies on where you can push prices without hurting overall revenue. I would hope that they have already done that, but since it's a governmental agency, they probably haven't. 3. Gradually move to 3 delivery days/week instead of the current 6. There is absolutely no reason that I need to have junk mail delivered everyday but Sunday. If someone wants mail delivered more than that, charges will apply.
Think they're posturing to allow the post office to offer other products and services like foreign post offices. Post office will soon provide money services and sell insurance products. The USPS as an organization is evaluating becoming an end to end logistics operation.
1) too drastic...simply slowing down the speed is more effective, I think, but I have not seen the details to be the bean counter. 2) Not completely a gov't agency..it is more of a hybrid 3) too much redundancy...
It's really that easy to fix many (certainly not all) of this country's problems. However partisan politics and special interest groups make it damn near impossible to implement easy fixes such as these. In this case, the Dems and Postal Union would scream bloody murder. They will do it under the guise of "elderly people not getting their medications delivered" but really it boils down to they don't want to give up the nice salaries to their constituents.
The best and safest investment might be in "Forever stamps" .44 cents each, Can not go down, very liquid, has a monopoly on first class mail. Price has to go higher, but when introduced they limited price increases. First class stamps should be at least double the current price. Hard to believe a private business would have ended up where the USPS is today. The USPS has a 38,000 retail stores in almost every town in the USA. Yet they never thought about selling other products. Why not lotto tickets or cell phones...so many things..