Postal service shouldn't have to worry about operating at a profit.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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It shouldn't, though to some extent, it operating more efficiently can be a good thing if the efficiency gains can be gotten without significant detriment to service, because then more money is available for either improvements to the mail service or for other services. Profit does not impy efficiency of course, but making something more efficient can make it more profitable.
No. They’re strangled to pieces as it is.
RepubliQans hate the USPS for reasons and have gone to extraordinary lengths to injure it. It’s bullshit. Fuck that.
They are a service, like the army is a service. It costs taxpayer money and they're out here selling pencils in a cup to make barely enough to pay everyone. Fund them properly, for fuck’s sake.
It costs taxpayer money ...
No it doesn't. USPS does not receive taxpayer funds to operate. It's all funded by postage and shipping services.
Edit: Since at least two of you don't believe me: https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/do-my-tax-dollars-pay-postal-service
USPS does not receive taxpayer funds to operate.
It should. Maybe take a few hundred million from the army that doesn't even want it.
This 'efficiency' hit us a few years ago as one of the cities mentioned in the article. Since DeJoy's changes, our local sorting facility was shut down and if I want to mail a letter to my neighbor, they drive it an hour north, sort it, and then drive it an hour south where it's then put on a truck for delivery.
Ask his other efficiency and profit ideas are floundering.
I'm not arguing that this idea in particular is necessarily a good one, just that the concept of making the service more efficient has merit. Obviously, to actually see the benefits, the idea in question has to actually succeed at making the service more efficient.
the concept of making the service more efficient has merit
I’m really not sure it does. USPS needs to serve all citizens, regardless of efficiency. Just the fact of having to be everywhere for everyone necessarily means accepting all sorts of situations that can never be efficient, but nevertheless should have service
Absolutely agree.
Somebody ask how much revenue their corporation's IT dept generates. Then, ask the executives if they'd be fine if servers crashed, critical payment systems failed, and (God forbid!) their laptop stopped working...
The government as a whole shouldn't have to worry about it. Republicans think the government should be run like a business when it is nothing like a business.
They think that it is like a business because it provides services and a business does too and they equate paying taxes with paying for restaurant food. It's utter nonsense.
Government is a service. An expense. Nobody says the military is unprofitable.
We don't have enough money for public Healthcare or even just mail, but we always have room for more fucking bombs!
How else are the oligarks who owns the majority of stocks in the weapons manufacturing industry going to take even more wealth from the general population? Line. Must. Go. UP!
In layman's terms, they wanna move carriers to sorting facilities to cut down on cost for shipping mail to local offices. This could cause carriers who live in the towns the deliver in, like myself, to drive upwards of 45 minutes to an hour away to a sorting facility (this number is based on what my office's situation would be, could vary office to office). After clocking in and sorting our routes, we would then have to drive back that same amount of time to town to deliver, then drive that far back to return to office.
You can see the issue here, sure you're cutting on transportation costs to local offices, but you're now spending a lot more on carriers fuel in the already inefficient mail trucks to drive back and forth to their routes. We wouldn't get compensated for the milage and time going to and from the new office and it would lengthen our days because of the new drive time. That being said, if that drive time is accounted to our routes, our routes are supposed to be adjusted to 8 hours total time for normal mail volume. Now you're adding that much time, you gotta cut deliveries per route. Now you have to add more routes to compensate, which means paying more salaries to cover said routes. Sure it's good for us as carriers because routes need readjusting anyway, but is not the cost saving measure they think it is.
Edit: Another idea they've had is create regional delivery offices where 3 or more towns are in a single building, but this can cause the same issue, and in some regions it may not be possible due to the distance between offices in highly rural areas such as the Great Plains.
TLDR: will cause more problems than it solves.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk
I knew in my heart this would end up wasting money rather than saving, and would make life hell for employees. Thank you for explaining how it would happen. I hope it gets the same analysis in the news, and gets dropped as the bad idea it is.
Losses of $87 billion from 2007 to 2020. Why might they have chosen such odd dates to calculate? Perhaps it's because in 2006, Republicans passed a bill requiring the USPS to prefund their retirement benefits for employees 75 years in advance. They're forced to fund retirement benefits for employees that haven't even been born yet and this is the #1 reason why they're seeing losses. Fuck DeJoy and fuck Republicans who want nothing more than to destroy the institutions of this country.
Plus sending empty trucks out, getting rid of automatic sorting machines, generally burning as many man hours on things that could be more efficient - the idea is, as ever, to ‘prove’ it doesn’t work by making it as shitty as possible so whoopsie gotta shut it down.
Some of those automatic sorting machines are so bad. The manpower required to maintain the duds costs way more than just hiring people to sort the mail manually.
Stop funding the retirement fund 70 years in advance, and they would be operating in the black.
Until just a couple of years ago that was still true. Fortunately it no longer is, but it hasn't really been long enough to turn such a massive ship around yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Reform_Act_of_2022
I didn't realize this, didn't get enough press. Another notch in Biden's belt, that's fantastic!
We could have done much worse than Joe Biden as president again, but I'm still glad to see the excitement behind Kamala's campaign. Hopefully she'll do a better job of advertising accomplishments.
Right there with ya.
Wow, this is huge, and bipartisan! Somehow I missed this
Bullshit. Let them raise money. They’re intentionally hamstrung by idiot rightwing Congresses going back fifty years or more.
Funding the retirement fund 70 years in advance is the sole reason it's floundering! The Republicans did it so it could be eventually privatized and if that happens millions will be absolutely fucked.
Fuck DeJoy with something hard and sandpapery. This dude is scum, any plan he has for the USPS is aimed squarely at damaging it and privatizing essential public services.
I really hope an incoming Harris administration will find a way to get rid of DeJoy.
I mean they got rid of the drop boxes that we could drive up to, because DeJoy is a piece of shit.
OK, now show me the monetary losses from the military and tell me how we are trying to fix that. I'll wait.
Exactly.
Stop treating the USPS like a business and start treating it like a government service.
Fund the Postal Service.
Finally, slower mail. The one thing that was keeping the Post Office from being profitable was how fast the mail got sent.
The whole idea of a public service needing to be "profitable" is stupid
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https://apnews.com/article/us-postal-service-delivery-changes-f7ca9fbf047c512aeeddaa2c6bbc500d