Possibly, if you shipped a product thru that one individual post office, it might have arrived a day late. Not surprising you haven't noticed the problem, because there isn't one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...
I expect delivery times will go sideways again in Q4.
This is exactly the way a utility works.
Maybe we should make more utilities be prepared like the USPS.
[x] In the west big tech can more or less serve 98% of the population. but there is (approx) 2% of the population who for various reasons are massively uneconomic to serve - mentally, ill, disabled, poor, lacking literacy skills or the wrong language. Hell its probably more than 2%. But the point is Government must serve these people and provide a level playing field. Commercial companies dont have to.
There certainly would be an additional marginal cost, but it would be much, much less than an entity trying to start that from zero.
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/banking_money/basic_bank_ac...
Do you mean even cheaper and less frills than that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
How can it act as both a public service and source of free money? Even if it made a small profit doing so, it would be less than ramping up their most profitable areas and would have an opportunity cost.
(If you mean they should do it purely as a public service, that's a fair point, but you're writing like it's an easy way to improve their financial position, which doesn't make sense.)
Most of the reasons that it isn't profitable relate to problems that the USPS already has to solve as part of their core function. It doesn't make sense for a bank to invest in physical infrastructure in the middle of nowhere, the cost of the building would erase any potential profit. The post office already has a building there though (and staff, etc). A significant amount of the up front expense, as well as a decent chunk of the ongoing expenses, is already going to be spent anyway.
So for these five or six people in rural areas that can't get a bank account, and aren't complete deadbeats, and can't get to a bank as easily as they can get to a post office, the USPS has a cost advantage in serving them. Okay. I just don't see numbers that make this a big source of free money.
Edited to add: Wealthy privileged HN readers would not know this, but poor people who are "unbanked" have to use USPS money orders to pay bills, and the USPS charges a fraction of one percent on money orders. So yes, the USPS is already performing banking functions.
Using a bank as a poor person is stupid expensive. Have less than 200$ in an account? That's a monthly fee. Use your debit card less than 15 times last month? That's a fee. Need checks for that account with only $100 in it? Most people get them for free but you pay. For a time, TD Bank was even applying transactions to your account out of order so you would incur more than expected overdrafts and accrue more overdraft fees than you actually should have had. They lost a court case about that and had to pay people a few dollars, because class action suits are a travesty of justice often.
With a $15/month charge for having less than $1000 in the account per month.
With a destroyed credit history when Wells Fargo and BoA continue their stock value pumping shenanigans and opening accounts in your name.
In the past USPS has been evaluated as "thing that should make money" which is silly - if it was profitable to run a reliable service in that space the commercial sector would have forced out the government.
I've heard the deal with Amazon is bad, and the new Postmaster General is trying to renegotiate it.
In my experience, no Priority or First Class packages were delayed in favor of Amazon packages, but the flood of Amazon packages did overburden the system causing some delays. From what I understand, USPS is receiving more Amazon, because more people are shopping online (Covid) and because Amazon is (was?) dealing with a labor dispute. A couple weeks back my station got absolutely hammered - received about triple the typical Amazon volume on back-to-back days. The clerks have to sort each package to the appropriate routes, and then the carriers have to deliver all those packages. As they're out delivering, they're picking up packages to bring back to the station, and those are the packages that were subject to delays.
In general, everything goes out every day, and even if one package is left behind, someone has to drive that package to the plant. From a business standpoint, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's part of the service culture at USPS, and clerks and carriers are horrified and mortified to hold up mail, which is why you see complaints like the one from the carrier in the article.
At the same time, USPS was rolling out some new policies, and they're missing a lot of people due to Covid, so a lot of factors converged to make the situation difficult. But, at my station, no mail has been delayed for weeks. I can't speak for the plants, but the vast majority of Amazon packages are delivered to the stations as drop shipments, so if the plants are having issues with volume, it's not because of Amazon.
During Covid, letters and flats had been down in volume (businesses being closed = less advertising) by somewhere between 25% and 40%, but they appear to be back to normal, and parcels had been up something like 60% overall.
I think that's most of the pertinent information. But, I'll say that this is typically the time of year where many USPS employees exhale a bit. The overtime dwindles, and the pace slows. Instead, much of this has felt like Christmas - anyone on the OT list and any non-career employees are working lots of hours to keep up with demand, and sometimes they're even compelling people not on the OT list to work OT. So, it feels like the holiday season never stopped, and we're all pretty exhausted. Of course, we feel lucky to have been able to work through the pandemic, but it's taken its toll, as well.