Kill Saturday delivery. Fine. But isn’t it time to open up the first-class monopoly to private sector competition?Yes.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
My Morning Wooten
Keeping it simple today. The Post Office.
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17 comments:
YES!
Damn. I agree with Wooten.
Though, I think maybe they should kill a different day.
Does anyone really believe that any other provider could deliver an envelope across the country in 3-4 days for less than 50 cents?
I am regularly amazed at the ability of the USPS to handle all the mail they handle with relatively few glitches. We mail hundreds of items each month and I can count on one hand the number of times a letter has gone missing in 13 years.
Eliminating Saturdays is a good idea.
I'm not to do as some do (like Jim) and downgrade the USPS. If you look at it objectively theyy do a fantastic job. But that shouldn't make them immune to competition from someone who might do a better job. Maybe no one can. Let's open it up and find out.
There already is competition. Fedex and UPS if you want to pay $5 or so for ground instead of 42 cents for first class mail.
But technically Decaturguy they are forbidden to do anything but "priority". Of course the get around that by labelling everything priority. Stil it's not really true competition.
Eliminate Saturdays? Yes.
Privatization? Not necessarily.
Major attitude adjustments for postal employees? Definitely.
I believe that another provider could easily do what the USPS does, but, given the enormous barriers to entry into the market place, I doubt anypone would. I think the USPS is pretty phenomenal, but I see no reason we can't open up the market to competition. Their infrastructure gives them such a huge head start that they should not be caught in our lifetimes.
Does anyone really believe that any other provider could deliver an envelope across the country in 3-4 days for less than 50 cents?
No.
What would be "true competition" in this case?
As far as I can tell, the only thing that they really gives them a competitive advantage is their exclusive access to the nation's system of mailboxes. FedEx and UPS (and others) have more or less gotten around this advantage by utilizing the nation's system of front porches, screen doors and apartment building vestibules.
Well they are legally prohibited from delivering daily mail. I'm going to make a big assumption here and guess that includes the probably lucrative bulk mail business. But even if I'm wrong what's the harm in repealing the ban and see what happens?
Well, I would expect that instead of seeing the cost of sending a letter via FedEx or UPS come down to $1.00, we'd be more likely to see the cost of a stamp go up to $5 or $6, if not more.
The purpose of the USPS is supposed to be to deliver the mail. You shift that to making a profit instead, and I suspect you'd also see the unintended consequence of "unprofitable" customers getting dropped entirely.
Sure, we here in Atlanta would have plenty of options to choose from, but who would want those long, sparsely populated rural districts?
Won't anyone think of the poor rural people!
I can't stop thinking of this SNL sketch
I was kinda hoping that the link would be to the old Willie Nelson sketches of folks that "never amounted to much, but they sure was good people."
I think about them almost every day as they are one of the main reasons we're still in business. As much as everyone likes to say dial-up is dead, there are large swaths of the country where it is the only reasonable internet access option because the phone and cable companies will never set up facilities out there.
Kind of funny that ol' Jim seems himself as a traditionalist, strict constitutionalist conservative, but wants to open up one of the few functions of the federal government which is specifically mandated by the U.S. Constitution to private competition.
Sounds like a liberal radical to me.
decaturguy - wouldn't be the first time... in the Depression cities and companies printed money that many preferred to US currency
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