Junk mail is bad.
Full stop.
If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.
However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.
I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.
[0]https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-jun...
This is not intuitive. We're maintaining a service because we have made a democratic decision to provide that service. The junk mail is subsidizing that service. I hate junk mail too, but we don't get to claim that the sky is "down" just because we're standing on our heads.
We could make a decision to cut back service if we want, but we haven't. I strongly suspect that part of the reason we haven't decided to cut back the postal service is that many voters are elderly and find the postal service vastly more essential than young technical people on HN do. I'm not in a position to tell society that it's wrong.
(And frankly, given that we barely have a working electronic payment infrastructure in this country that can serve that audience, I'm not sure we're ready to do that.)
I suspect it's because you do receive "one or two important" pieces per year and because you cannot anticipate when someone will send them to you. That's the value provided to all Americans by this beautiful system.
Your experience is not the only experience.
There are another 300 million Americans with different needs than yours. And it's hubris to pretend that your way and your life is superior to everyone else.
The only reason I can this being downvoted is people see this as a political discussion. It really isn't. As people have turned to email and bills get delivered online, we're subsidizing junk mail in a sense because the USPS operates at a loss.
The same is true for my company. In fact I'm not sure we received one piece of physical mail in the past year of any consequence.
Obviously this isn't true for everyone, but some reduction in frequency of delivery could save a lot of money. Either that or raise the cost and kill junk mail.