This kind of service does have at least one very valuable niche application - armed forces personnel on active deployment. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, British troops received hundreds of thousands of letters every month through the e-bluey service. Letters could be sent via email (including attachments) and were printed as close as possible to the recipient. It greatly reduced logistics costs and improved speed of delivery, often facilitating next-day delivery to extremely remote Forward Operating Bases.
Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
I was in Afghanistan for a different country. It was my job to keep the satellite communications working, including so people could send emails to their friends and family.
>Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
Because they weren't in one of the larger bases that had satellite internet. Combat troops in the wilds of Helmand might go weeks without seeing a fresh egg or a slice of bread. Satellite terminals circa 2002 were bulky, expensive bits of kit that just weren't that widely distributed, at least in the British armed forces.
It would presumably be more secure to have the recipient receive them directly with a cell phone or satellite device. Printing them creates a literal paper trail and footsteps.
Besides mandatory censorship, I've heard in WW2 they just delayed all mail by 2 weeks intentionally. By that time all secret information is not relevant anyway.
Another interesting thing about WW2 mail - they would photograph letters onto microfilm, then reprint them on the other end to save valuable shipping capacity.
In the context of peer or near-peer conflicts, Ukraine has shown us many reasons why a cellphone or satphone can get you killed. Anything with a radio transmitter is a giant beacon announcing your location if your enemy has a half-competent ELINT operation. Allowing personal devices with internet access to be used in the field is a gargantuan COMINT risk, because it's basically inevitable that some idiot is going to post a geotagged photo of something sensitive on social media. Mail delivered through specific authorised channels can be monitored and censored much more easily than real-time communications.
Why do you even need two way communication? Just have an encrypted signal with per device decryption keys. Kind of like how satellite tv works but for messages. You won’t have proof of delivery or a way to reply, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
We use this for summer camp. The kids aren't allowed anywhere near computers or phones, let alone internet access. So we write them emails and attach photos that are printed out and delivered to their bunks.
There is something like this being used in jails and prisons now. The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl or other potent enough substances.
Inmates do not receive originals - incoming mail is scanned at some service provider’s office that a PO Box forwards to, and things are reprinted at the detention center and walked to the inmate. Or people sign up for a faster service where photos / letters are uploaded through an app to skip the snail mail + scanning step.
One of these is called pigeon.ly
At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.
French postal service offers this, which is very convenient for legal letters because it stores a copy of it so people can't pretend they received something else.
I use this constantly when I have an online document I need to send through the mail. I just use the online postal service to send it directly. It's probably a lot environmentally friendly since they can just print as close as possible to the destination. Instead of sending it across the country etc...
> The Postal Rate Commission took 15 months to review E-COM—long enough that standard postage went up 5¢ in the interim. It barred the USPS from operating its own electronic networks, just in case the Post Office decided to deliver messages electronically and in print. And it raised the price on the service to 26¢ for the first page, plus 5¢ for a second page.
> Sending the messages wouldn’t be simple, either. Customers had to register their company with the USPS using Form 5320, pay a $50 annual fee, send a minimum of 200 messages per post office, and “prepay postage for transmitted messages received, processed, and printed for each transmission,” dictated the 1981 Federal Register.
Either it is able to fully fund itself through sender fees and other operations, or the net losses are ultimately paid for by other government revenues, primarily taxes.
I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
As a business that ships physical products through USPS because they have been WAY more reliable than UPS or FedEx, I wouldn't mind paying more for the service (well passing it on to customers), so long as it improved the service. But the non-government run parcel services can't compete (in my experience) with the USPS, even with the recent rate hikes that have been going on every few months.
Right now I have about a 1% lost/damaged package rate (averaged over 12 months - it's a tiny amount and it is insured), but come Christmas, that shoots up to around a 10% lost/damaged package rate through USPS - some of those packages do eventually resurface, and I let the customers keep them (I've already filed the insurance claim and shipped a replacement).
UPS was at 5% on average - never used them around Christmas - so no data for that - they might be better than USPS and the were close enough in cost just further away from my workshop.
FedEx (only used for 2 weeks) cost double and 30% of my packages were lost or damaged - can't average it out since there isn't enough data, but having to file claims for 1 in 3 packages after already paying 2x USPS rates wasn't going to fly.
It always surprises me how different people's experiences very so widely between UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
We ship packages via UPS, and have <1% lost/damaged. Not sure how long it's been now since a damaged/lost package - maybe 300?
It probably helps that our smallest packages are ~1000 cu inch and 6 pounds. Hard to lose.
I don't like dealing with UPS customer service, but I really like the actual shipping service. And it's very fast and predictable. Very rare that it takes any longer than UPS WorldShip predicts. 1 day shipping to most of our customers in our state, and some in neighboring states.
More charitably, it's a cost-sharing scheme for last-mile delivery to rural communities and deep suburban sprawl – as, to be fair, is often true for other rural services with significant federal funding like healthcare and higher education.
A lot of the people who don't want to live in urban/suburban areas also view "government services" as a bad thing to begin with. Probably because they've never had good access to services.
I think they view government services as a bad thing for a few reasons, despite having access to good government services. These two stick out to me:
The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits.
They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
Alternatively, they view government services as a bad thing when they are terrible, which they very often are because of the retreat from public investment that's been going on since the 80s; and when they view them as good, they also view them as temporary. Because they will be.
No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.
The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.
Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.
Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.
edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
Don't we all believe that! I think the challenge to do it politically without ending up getting entangled into culture warring over urbanisation (e.g. "15 minute city" conspiracy theories [1]). The best we can do is endless suburbia...
It actually was profitable for most of its existence. It zealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail because that's where the money came from. And it did so before it was spun out as a quasi-private entity.
This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund.
However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
For the USPS, it would be profitable if it wasn't required to self-fund and pre-fund all retirement benefits for current and future employees 75 years in advance, paying for retirement health care for "workers" who aren't in the workforce, or even born yet.
It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
That requirement was repealed in 2022. The USPS still isn't profitable. While it reaped the benefit of that repeal and reported only a small loss in 2022, it reported much larger losses in 2023 and 2024, comparable to its loss in 2021 (when the requirement was still in effect).
Could USPS offer limited check accounts and debit cards?
I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree).
Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does.
Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US?
Yes, I’ve also thought postal banking could help drive down the visa/mastercard tax on nearly all small businesses must pay now. The government has run an expensive payment network (the mint) since before 1776, no real reason they should stop now that it’s cheaper to do.
> The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967.
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have suggested bringing it back.
Walmart has partnered with a few "financial services" companies to offer bank accounts in the past, but the partnerships never seem to last, except Green Dot.
I usually actually have a handful of checking accounts for splitting up bills, not relying on a single bank, etc. And a couple years ago I started a Chime account for my "allowance" because they were partnered with Walmart, and you could deposit cash at Walmart, well not anymore (at least not at my Walmart). I can go to walgreens, but I never need to go to walgreens, so that card has been removed from my wallet.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS.
This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything.
If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research.
If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military.
If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".
Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients?
But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.
The downstream benefits of a well functioning USPS could be worth running it at a loss. If efforts to make it profitable make the service worse, then it could be a net negative.
On a side note related to your comment, just one side benefit of urbanization would be more efficient delivery of services (including delivery services).
Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.
And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).
>Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted
I could not disagree more.
While I agree they don't "need" to be profitable and we "could" just give them tax money the fact that they try to be in the face of competition and come pretty close to doing so despite some dumb requirements really results in an incentive structure that puts them head and shoulders above pretty much any other subsection of government one interacts with. So perhaps let's not remove the incentive for profitability.
Edit: And before anyone tries to construe this as me advocating for privatization or anything else like that, I'm saying they're fine the way they are (on a macro level, I'm sure there's tons of individual items that could use refinement, like any organization) and ought to be a model for other government functions.
>and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
What? Are you joking? Have you ever tried to do anything other than a bog standard transaction at the DMV or get anything beyond typical "homeowner pays professional to do typical thing" type work permitted? The USPS is one of the most user friendly services in existence even once you get off the beaten path of sending standardized envelopes and parcels. If you restrict the comparison to just federal services it's not even close except perhaps some very specific common workflows but even then when it goes off the rails it goes off the rails way harder and is way more painful to resolve. Ask anyone of social security age if you don't believe me.
This creates a market discontinuity by the government that leads to abuse. Part of the reason for Amazon's dominance is that USPS undercharges for package delivery. When Amazon rolled out their own delivery service, they optimize delivering the "cheap" packages, and making USPS deliver the "expensive" out of the way packages, and due to flat-rates, USPS was in the red. USPS's solution? Keep squeezing grandma who wants to mail a few first-class letters a year.
So that people can discuss the US Postal service intelligently. About 15 years ago, there was a service (Outbox) designed to scan your mail, email anything important to you, and discard junk mail. They were growing, people enjoyed the service, and then they went to Washington DC to talk to the Postmaster General about expanding nationwide.
>When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'”
That's the US mail. Can we all please stop pretending that any actual human needs the US mail to continue? No one's paying their bills through the mail... you can't even really write checks. Hell, given how international mail works, it's the US government subsidizing Aliexpress and Temu. No one should be defending the US Postal Service.
The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but it's super ignorant. It speaks to idiots, everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright.
It's a public service. It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity.
This kind of service does have at least one very valuable niche application - armed forces personnel on active deployment. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, British troops received hundreds of thousands of letters every month through the e-bluey service. Letters could be sent via email (including attachments) and were printed as close as possible to the recipient. It greatly reduced logistics costs and improved speed of delivery, often facilitating next-day delivery to extremely remote Forward Operating Bases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Forces_Post_Office#The...
It isn't an entirely novel idea - during the Second World War, mail was often sent to very remote destinations on microfilm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail
Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
I was in Afghanistan for a different country. It was my job to keep the satellite communications working, including so people could send emails to their friends and family.
>Why didn’t the service personnel have access to their e-mail?
Because they weren't in one of the larger bases that had satellite internet. Combat troops in the wilds of Helmand might go weeks without seeing a fresh egg or a slice of bread. Satellite terminals circa 2002 were bulky, expensive bits of kit that just weren't that widely distributed, at least in the British armed forces.
Fair enough.
I was there in 2010 and even our FOBs had access to BGANs.
It would presumably be more secure to have the recipient receive them directly with a cell phone or satellite device. Printing them creates a literal paper trail and footsteps.
Besides mandatory censorship, I've heard in WW2 they just delayed all mail by 2 weeks intentionally. By that time all secret information is not relevant anyway.
Another interesting thing about WW2 mail - they would photograph letters onto microfilm, then reprint them on the other end to save valuable shipping capacity.
In the context of peer or near-peer conflicts, Ukraine has shown us many reasons why a cellphone or satphone can get you killed. Anything with a radio transmitter is a giant beacon announcing your location if your enemy has a half-competent ELINT operation. Allowing personal devices with internet access to be used in the field is a gargantuan COMINT risk, because it's basically inevitable that some idiot is going to post a geotagged photo of something sensitive on social media. Mail delivered through specific authorised channels can be monitored and censored much more easily than real-time communications.
Why do you even need two way communication? Just have an encrypted signal with per device decryption keys. Kind of like how satellite tv works but for messages. You won’t have proof of delivery or a way to reply, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
We use this for summer camp. The kids aren't allowed anywhere near computers or phones, let alone internet access. So we write them emails and attach photos that are printed out and delivered to their bunks.
The service is https://www.bunk1.com/
Why not simply sit down and write an actual letter with a pen on paper, encouraging your child to also write?
There is something like this being used in jails and prisons now. The purpose is to limit the ability of people to sneak in paper bathed in fentanyl or other potent enough substances.
Inmates do not receive originals - incoming mail is scanned at some service provider’s office that a PO Box forwards to, and things are reprinted at the detention center and walked to the inmate. Or people sign up for a faster service where photos / letters are uploaded through an app to skip the snail mail + scanning step.
One of these is called pigeon.ly
At most participating facilities the only exception to get an inmate physical paper from the outside world is legal mail.
I developed so many similar services for the UK Royal Mail in the 1990's
We used Yellow Royal Mail branded envelopes to gain attention.
Would love to hear more about your experience! Any chance you'd be up for an interview on the Buttondown blog?
Happy to, find me on LinkedIN - Dave Barter CEO Nautoguide
French postal service offers this, which is very convenient for legal letters because it stores a copy of it so people can't pretend they received something else.
I use this constantly when I have an online document I need to send through the mail. I just use the online postal service to send it directly. It's probably a lot environmentally friendly since they can just print as close as possible to the destination. Instead of sending it across the country etc...
> The Postal Rate Commission took 15 months to review E-COM—long enough that standard postage went up 5¢ in the interim. It barred the USPS from operating its own electronic networks, just in case the Post Office decided to deliver messages electronically and in print. And it raised the price on the service to 26¢ for the first page, plus 5¢ for a second page.
> Sending the messages wouldn’t be simple, either. Customers had to register their company with the USPS using Form 5320, pay a $50 annual fee, send a minimum of 200 messages per post office, and “prepay postage for transmitted messages received, processed, and printed for each transmission,” dictated the 1981 Federal Register.
Almost sounds like a parody
now the junk mail subsidizes USPS. I wonder if they could be profitable without all the credit card preapprovals in the mail.
USPS doesn't technically need to be profitable. It's a service guaranteed by the Government. Government services do not need to turn a profit.
Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
Either it is able to fully fund itself through sender fees and other operations, or the net losses are ultimately paid for by other government revenues, primarily taxes.
I enjoy Christmas cards and personal letters as much as anyone, but with electronic payments and telecommunications taking more of the volume, it is increasingly becoming an advertising service. If it is operating unprofitably, we are paying a form of subscription fee to receive those ads.
As a business that ships physical products through USPS because they have been WAY more reliable than UPS or FedEx, I wouldn't mind paying more for the service (well passing it on to customers), so long as it improved the service. But the non-government run parcel services can't compete (in my experience) with the USPS, even with the recent rate hikes that have been going on every few months.
Right now I have about a 1% lost/damaged package rate (averaged over 12 months - it's a tiny amount and it is insured), but come Christmas, that shoots up to around a 10% lost/damaged package rate through USPS - some of those packages do eventually resurface, and I let the customers keep them (I've already filed the insurance claim and shipped a replacement).
UPS was at 5% on average - never used them around Christmas - so no data for that - they might be better than USPS and the were close enough in cost just further away from my workshop.
FedEx (only used for 2 weeks) cost double and 30% of my packages were lost or damaged - can't average it out since there isn't enough data, but having to file claims for 1 in 3 packages after already paying 2x USPS rates wasn't going to fly.
It always surprises me how different people's experiences very so widely between UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
We ship packages via UPS, and have <1% lost/damaged. Not sure how long it's been now since a damaged/lost package - maybe 300?
It probably helps that our smallest packages are ~1000 cu inch and 6 pounds. Hard to lose.
I don't like dealing with UPS customer service, but I really like the actual shipping service. And it's very fast and predictable. Very rare that it takes any longer than UPS WorldShip predicts. 1 day shipping to most of our customers in our state, and some in neighboring states.
More charitably, it's a cost-sharing scheme for last-mile delivery to rural communities and deep suburban sprawl – as, to be fair, is often true for other rural services with significant federal funding like healthcare and higher education.
At some point, we should do what we can to promote urbanization. Being able to deliver government services more efficiently is one benefit.
A lot of the people who don't want to live in urban/suburban areas also view "government services" as a bad thing to begin with. Probably because they've never had good access to services.
I think they view government services as a bad thing for a few reasons, despite having access to good government services. These two stick out to me:
The ubiquitous conservative media bombards them with lies about the quality, quantity and cost of these services, along with who receives the benefits.
They also haven't taken a step back to consider all the things they enjoy that are provided as government services, like roads, police, education, subsidized mail delivery, unemployment, support for dairy products, etc.
Alternatively, they view government services as a bad thing when they are terrible, which they very often are because of the retreat from public investment that's been going on since the 80s; and when they view them as good, they also view them as temporary. Because they will be.
No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.
The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.
Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.
Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.
edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
Don't we all believe that! I think the challenge to do it politically without ending up getting entangled into culture warring over urbanisation (e.g. "15 minute city" conspiracy theories [1]). The best we can do is endless suburbia...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-c...
It actually was profitable for most of its existence. It zealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail because that's where the money came from. And it did so before it was spun out as a quasi-private entity.
This is actually one of the challenges of public services in the US today; many things, from mail delivery to bus and train service to road construction and vehicle registration, were once self-sufficient but haven't been for a long time. There's a lot of reasons for this, but one of the outcomes is that entities which used to take care of themselves now have to beg for a growing portion out of the general fund.
However, it's clear that the 1970s experiment to have it turn a profit again didn't work and likely never would have worked (it was, in many ways, set up for failure).
For the USPS, it would be profitable if it wasn't required to self-fund and pre-fund all retirement benefits for current and future employees 75 years in advance, paying for retirement health care for "workers" who aren't in the workforce, or even born yet.
It was a political ploy to force the USPS into debt in 2006 with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. No other federal agency or private sector business pre-funds its retirement benefits.
That requirement was repealed in 2022. The USPS still isn't profitable. While it reaped the benefit of that repeal and reported only a small loss in 2022, it reported much larger losses in 2023 and 2024, comparable to its loss in 2021 (when the requirement was still in effect).
Last quarter was slightly profitable [0], but yeah the losses in 2023 were pretty big.
https://about.usps.com/what/financials/financial-conditions-...
Could USPS offer limited check accounts and debit cards?
I've been twice now in WV, in counties so far away from everything, the only government presence is USPS. The only proof you're in the modern US is USPS (and a bit further a weird, small public library near a weirder Dollar tree).
Some people have trouble getting their retirement money, other are destitute who found a new, non-homeless life (but have trouble with debt collection or just lost their papers), And from what I've understood, USPS has buildings and employees present everywhere and is really trusted in those deep parts, more than anything the government does.
Wouldn't offering basic banking (and maybe limited but free internet access) be a nice addition to help the poorest in the US?
Just an idle thought I had for a while
Yes, I’ve also thought postal banking could help drive down the visa/mastercard tax on nearly all small businesses must pay now. The government has run an expensive payment network (the mint) since before 1776, no real reason they should stop now that it’s cheaper to do.
Postal banking existed in the US in some form until 1967. We could (and should) bring it back just for the reasons you stated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
There are places in the US where the bank drives to the town once or twice a week, since there's otherwise no way to get cash or transact.
This sounds like a “postal banking system,” some countries have done it. The US had it at one point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings...
> The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967.
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have suggested bringing it back.
I'd argue that its passport services are a success – at this point, delivering random services at POs would have few downsides.
I'm from WV. I always figured Wal-Mart would pick it up eventually, but I think there may be laws that make that difficult.
Walmart has partnered with a few "financial services" companies to offer bank accounts in the past, but the partnerships never seem to last, except Green Dot.
I usually actually have a handful of checking accounts for splitting up bills, not relying on a single bank, etc. And a couple years ago I started a Chime account for my "allowance" because they were partnered with Walmart, and you could deposit cash at Walmart, well not anymore (at least not at my Walmart). I can go to walgreens, but I never need to go to walgreens, so that card has been removed from my wallet.
I imagine the question is how much money there would be in it for Wal-Mart.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.
Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS.
This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything.
If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research.
If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military.
If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.
You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".
Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients?
But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.
It costs 15x as much to use a private sector mail service as the USPS.
I can imagine it would cost a bit more, because corporation tax, and you probably can't afford to run a year where you lose $8.8bn[0].
Although I thought USPS had an enforced monopoly on US mail, so how did you do the comparison with private sector mail?
[0] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-...
On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.
I wouldn't consider the USPS to be deeply in the red when compared with other government operations.
deeply in the red is your phrase, not mine
The downstream benefits of a well functioning USPS could be worth running it at a loss. If efforts to make it profitable make the service worse, then it could be a net negative.
You obviously haven't lived in rural america.
On a side note related to your comment, just one side benefit of urbanization would be more efficient delivery of services (including delivery services).
Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.
And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).
>Yes, currently the service is expected to fund itself. This is short sighted
I could not disagree more.
While I agree they don't "need" to be profitable and we "could" just give them tax money the fact that they try to be in the face of competition and come pretty close to doing so despite some dumb requirements really results in an incentive structure that puts them head and shoulders above pretty much any other subsection of government one interacts with. So perhaps let's not remove the incentive for profitability.
Edit: And before anyone tries to construe this as me advocating for privatization or anything else like that, I'm saying they're fine the way they are (on a macro level, I'm sure there's tons of individual items that could use refinement, like any organization) and ought to be a model for other government functions.
>and has progressively made one of the greatest public services worse.
What? Are you joking? Have you ever tried to do anything other than a bog standard transaction at the DMV or get anything beyond typical "homeowner pays professional to do typical thing" type work permitted? The USPS is one of the most user friendly services in existence even once you get off the beaten path of sending standardized envelopes and parcels. If you restrict the comparison to just federal services it's not even close except perhaps some very specific common workflows but even then when it goes off the rails it goes off the rails way harder and is way more painful to resolve. Ask anyone of social security age if you don't believe me.
This creates a market discontinuity by the government that leads to abuse. Part of the reason for Amazon's dominance is that USPS undercharges for package delivery. When Amazon rolled out their own delivery service, they optimize delivering the "cheap" packages, and making USPS deliver the "expensive" out of the way packages, and due to flat-rates, USPS was in the red. USPS's solution? Keep squeezing grandma who wants to mail a few first-class letters a year.
Maybe in some places, but in our rural area (Durham, Kansas) 95%+ of Amazon packages are delivered by UPS.
To be fair, all the credit card preapprovals in the mail help ensure every last American is reached by mail, even if it means by mule train.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/mule-ma...
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatla...
So that people can discuss the US Postal service intelligently. About 15 years ago, there was a service (Outbox) designed to scan your mail, email anything important to you, and discard junk mail. They were growing, people enjoyed the service, and then they went to Washington DC to talk to the Postmaster General about expanding nationwide.
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-po...
>When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the postmaster general, they were joined by the USPS’ general counsel and chief of digital strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.'” Further, “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'”
That's the US mail. Can we all please stop pretending that any actual human needs the US mail to continue? No one's paying their bills through the mail... you can't even really write checks. Hell, given how international mail works, it's the US government subsidizing Aliexpress and Temu. No one should be defending the US Postal Service.
The USPS does a lot more than ship junk mail. It's a fun joke but it's super ignorant. It speaks to idiots, everyone else rolls their eyes and thinks you're not very bright.
It's a public service. It doesn't need to turn a profit because every dollar put into it generates economic activity.