Ordinarily I would schedule a thought piece like this for whenever the next available Sunday post was. I’m fairly certain even a tabloid like Yahoo Finance won’t let Rick Newman’s post hang around that long so I have to comment as soon as possible __AND__ use a screen shot because the post will most likely disappear quickly.
The first thing you will notice about Yahoo Finance is the tabloid click-bait on the right. An obvious sign of incredible journalism . . . NOT.
This article does more to prove why California and New York are foreign countries than anything else. Allowing people who’ve never been anywhere without a Starbucks to write things like these is simply un-American.
Before anyone can tick off a list of how to “save” the Post Office, one has to take into account the underlying mission of the Post Office. That mission is to allow the citizens and most importantly the government, to communicate with the most rural areas of the country. There still are areas in this country called America without high speed Internet or cell phone service. Those nationwide coverage maps have huge gaping holes in them.
Most of you reading this are too young to remember a time when there were only 5 television stations. Some of you, unable to afford the fees of a satellite dish and living in an area without affordable cable still live in such a communications desert.
Have any of you ever wondered how the down and out Chicago Cubs managed to have such a devoted nationwide fan base? Cubs baseball was carried on WGN. One of the original nationwide television networks. Baseball fans could watch Cubs games multiple days per week during the season. Despite the curse of the Billy Goat and a century long drought of World Series championships the Cubs kept a nationwide die hard fan base because they were the one team which could be watched all season on regular television. WGN even had a radio network so people could listen to a Cubs game while at work. No matter where you grew up, the Cubs were the team you grew up with, even if you weren’t a baseball fan.
The U.S. Post Office is one of the few government institutions established in the Constitution of the United States. Many do not know that it is also an independent agency rather than a branch of government. Most people think the Post Office didn’t come about until the Pony Express. While that is both a romantic and nostalgic image, the truth is that everyone had a need to communicate. The Constitution and our government grant the Post Office a monopoly on first class mail.
In rural communities Postal workers know the name, address and face of every customer. They are the wellness check for an aging rural population. This will not be obvious to a person who has never been more than two blocks from a Starbucks, but it is a reality.
Here’s another reality. Until the last decade or so, according to the insurance industry, farming was the most dangerous occupation in America. As of 2016, it is still number 5. The much hated “burdensome government regulations” are what has made it safer. Covers over PTO shafts, grates over unloading auger fill ports, tractor cabs with roll over protection and a host of other “burdensome government regulations” has been saving life and limb for years.
In truth, the government forcing cell phone carriers to plug the holes in their “nationwide” coverage maps so police and fire can communicate (standard radios don’t work over hills or around mountain peaks) has also helped reduce the danger. While combine and tractor fires are still a reality we live with and will continue to live with for decades to come, having a cell phone which works means getting help there faster.
While you are looking at the images, keep in mind someone was sitting in that cab when it went up. That is actually the lesser of two evils. Getting caught in the machinery and having some part of your body mangled then laying there while you bleed out is the more common happening. Being able to dial 911 and have help locate your phone really does save lives despite the “burdensome regulation” imposed by the government making cell phones participate in 911 and provide some form of GPS like location.
So, let’s take a look at the “solutions” proposed by the Starbucks crowd from the foreign countries of California and New York.
Cut mail delivery from six days a week to as few as three.
Someone who obviously never uses the Post Office came up with this brain dead idea. Are they also going to get rid of Priority Mail service and its no more than 3 day delivery promise? I guess those community service observations and wellness monitoring will also go away. Now the Postal workers will just find corpses.
Let postal carriers deliver mail to centralized drop boxes instead of everybody’s mailbox.
Only a New Yorker could come up with this hair brained idea. When neighbors live miles apart, just where are you going to put that central drop box?
Why do you think the U.S. Government started shipping boxes of prepackaged food to Indian reservations? While some my opt to believe the conspiracy theory that it was an attempt to kill off the native American population my turning them into obese diabetics with other severe health problems, that was not the justification. Giving money to someone who has to walk up to 100 miles round trip to get groceries doesn’t feed them. Many of the reservations are still incredibly remote today. While I suspect more people living on “the rez” have vehicles today than did decades ago, I would wager it is still not all. I will also wager they probably can’t book a ride on Uber. Many probably don’t have cell service.
Let the Postal Service close all underperforming post offices.
Once again, only someone living within blocks of a Starbucks could suggest this with a straight face. It undermines the primary mission of the Post Office much like the Clinton’s committing treason by taking a bribe to okay the sale of Uranium mines to Russia undermines national security. In many ways, that act itself might undermine National Security. The people who live in these remote locations where the under performing Post Offices will be not only grow your food, a much higher percentage of them send their own sons and daughters to defend the country you live in. Cadet Bone Spurs is pretty typical for New York. R. Lee Emery is rather typical of the Midwest.
Kansas, we thank you for your son.
Do you think the military has recruiting offices in towns of under 300 people. Those same towns, many of which to this day don’t have high speed Internet or decent cell phone coverage? No. They mail a package to your high school guidance counselor with brochures and stuff. Where do most of those kids go to register for the draft? Same place I did, the Post Office.
Allow the Postal Service to charge market price for stamps, setting prices in a way that actually cover costs.
Spoken like a New Yorker who writes for a Tabloid rather than someone who actually bothered to look into anything.
This may actually be the only thing Trump gets right in his entire Presidency. The bulk mail contracts like Amazon pay too little. Long ago, before most of you were born, this bulk mail concept came into being. In order to cover the cost of having to run the trucks between the main Post Offices, the Postal Service started cutting bulk mail contracts. This gave rise to Junk Mail and magazine subscriptions. Many of these prices were set to basically cover the cost of fuel and vehicle depreciation. The “profit” was in the first class mail. People putting a stamp on that envelop to pay their bills.
People mostly auto-bill or pay on-line now. Even if you don’t have Internet where you live, most companies want you to fill out and sign a form for auto-pay. The older generations with access to the Internet send email instead of letters. In short, there is no accurate method of determining “market price for stamps.”
The Post Office can total up what facilities cost to operate last year and add a fudge factor. They can hedge fuel costs like the airlines but not for the rural drivers unless one single gas station chain commits to operating a gas station near each and every Post Office. They can total up wages paid last year, vehicle maintenance costs, etc. and add a fudge factor. In short, they can determine just how much it actually costs to operate the Post Office for a year, but they can in no way, shape, or form, predict the volume of mail.
When the economy is good people order more stuff which potentially gives more business to the Post Office. Other than birthday and holiday cards, first class/priority mail will continue to drop as more people migrate to sending email or text messages. Not so much for the cost, but for the convenience.
What has to happen is an inversion of the pricing model. The bulk shippers and mailers have to pay contracted pricing which exceeds the entire operational cost of the Post Office for the year leaving first class mail as the profit margin. This creates a bit of an issue as big players like Amazon try to play FedEx, UPS and the Post Office against one another while creating their own delivery services.
Congress could give the Post Office an edge here. The could pass a law mandating 50% of all publicly traded retailer shipping be done via the Post Office. The justification for such a bill would fall under National Security. The government still needs the Post Office to work. They need it for the census and countless other government documents.
Congress could also do away with free postage for public officials or at least pay what it actually costs. By and large, when a public official sends you one of those “What I’ve done for you lately” letters in the mail (usually around campaign time) it costs them nothing.
Let the Postal Service sell a wide range of consumer products at its 35,000 post offices, instead of limiting sales to a mere 11 non-postal products.
This is a slippery slope. Anything sold directly by the Post Office implicitly has the backing of the U.S. government. Even though that is not true, it is the subconscious message.
To get around this issue, various major retailers open Postal Stations of limited functionality. You can purchase stamps, drop off mail and a few other things. Brick and mortar retailers would be better served if they set aside a larger chunk of their physical retail space and allowed the Post Office to operate full service locations in their store. It should reduce the operational costs of the Post Office while increasing their business. I’m thinking more along the lines of major grocery retail chains. Everyone has to eat and to eat you have to buy food. It would be easier for people to do business with the Post Office if they were located where you already had to go.
Stop requiring the USPS to pre-fund retirement health benefits for its employees, a ruinous financial burden no private-sector company bears.
Spoken like a CEO or governor looking to weasel out of pension obligations. This burden needs to be placed on every governmental body and every publicly traded corporation. Because it doesn’t exist, the state of Illinois already has $203 billion in unfunded pension liability. Why don’t you talk to all of those Enron employees who lost everything because their retirement wasn’t adequately funded?
Postal worker jobs don’t pay what you make in a corporate office. People give up a significant amount of income now for a stable pension with health benefits when they retire.
We have a similar situation with the VA. Service members aren’t paid what you get paid in the private sector, but, if they stay in long enough they are supposed to get health care and a nursing home room if they need it. The VA is viciously under funded today. Veterans who served this country are being turned away in droves from the token few VA nursing homes in America.
Postal workers don’t get the nursing home part (at least I don’t believe they do) but they do get health care, which is a bit more than veterans have been getting.
Saving the Post Office is easy, but, not for any of the reasons in that article.
