I talked to the franchise owner of a UPS store outside of Boston, and he reported a 50% dropoff in business, as well as a shift in the types of orders for people working from home as well as people shipping things like toilet paper.

The big issue for the post office is the amount commercial mail has fallen off a cliff and will likely continue to drop. Anecdotally, we have seen very little junk mail in the past month other than grocery fliers. I predict serial publications like regional magazines will fail, too -- running a magazine was already tough, but now it's even worse now that many advertisers have gone out of business or are cutting back on marketing costs. If they don't have enough subscribers to keep the presses running, it's game over.

Interesting yet in retrospect not too surprising given that even Amazon is bottlenecking - even with increased demand in general that they could have issues keeping demand up.

Anecdotally, I've seen much less junk mail, which happens to be a significant portion of the mail delivered to our house.

Does that get sent by the mail system? At least here it's mostly minimum wage folks employed by marketing companies (not the postal service) going door to door to put leaflets in.

The postal service might add a flyer to your actual mail delivery, but only if they're delivering to your address anyway.

It is not legal, in the US, for anyone except the USPS to put anything into your mailbox.

That's crazy. You can't hand-post your neighbours invitations to a party, for example?

Not legally, though it sounds like if you put postage on it, it would be: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1725

What about FedEx, UPS, and DHL?

USPS only.

A lot goes through the mail system.

The Data and Marketing Association says American businesses sent 149 billion pieces of direct mail and nearly 10 billion catalogues in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/how-to-stop-ju...

This is just a counter-anecdote, but for every flyer on the door I get (once or twice a week), I get scores of pieces of junk mail. I assume you don't own a home, because that alone is good for 10 a week.

99% of my junk mail is sent via USPS. Junk mail actually gets a better rate than regular 1st class mail. It's something like 20 cents for marketing mail vs 50 cents for a piece of regular mail. In exchange I think the marketer has to do some presorting of their own, and they lose the ability to do things like forwarding or return to sender.

USPS actually has a monopoly on mailboxes. It's illegal for FedEx or anyone else to put a letter/package in your mailbox, although I don't know how much that's enforced.

I live in an apartment complex, and my mailbox doesn't have a slot in it.

All of the junk mail I've received has come via the USPS, however since this all started happening I have received almost none.

The drop-off of junk mail delivery has been both welcome, and a sign of troubles for the USPS.

Yes, most of it is delivered by USPS https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm

To clarify, "here" is Ireland, not the US. The comments indicate in the US, USPS has a much greater share of spam delivery. (too late to edit the original post)

I have started to order for at-home delivery, including groceries. That is anec-data but I wouldn't be surprised if it is also the case for a lot of other people.

Also I know that ads of all kinds have dropped of a cliff.

I am in Denmark, but I imagine that people are people everywhere.

Most of my Amazon packages now come via Amazon's own logistics system at this point.