Companies and Brands

Close the USPS, Cut 600,000 People and 31,000 Offices

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: February 22, 2022 12:30 pm

The U.S. Postal Service, a thing of the past for several years, is slow, inefficient, poorly run and can be replaced by private enterprise. It has 31,000 offices, some of them in areas that have so few people that they do not get enough foot traffic to support them. It employs over 644,000 workers, over half a million of which have extremely high benefits, primarily negotiated by the American Postal Workers Union. The cost of these benefits alone, for both current and future retirees, is enough to swamp the USPS financially. The labor situation is similar to that of the car companies before they went under.

Shuttering of the USPS would allow the federal government to move mail delivery to FedEx and UPS, each of which is highly profitable and would not rely on government funding. Together, they are certainly large enough to handle the business. FedEx has 600,000 workers and revenue of about $100 billion annually. UPS has 540,000 workers and $90 billion a year in revenue.

The 31,000 locations the USPS has could be sold and the money sent to the Treasury. Alternatively, UPS or FedEx could lease them as service centers. The operating cost of each of these offices would be eliminated.

The USPS has a number of aging fossil fuel-based vehicles. Most of these would be taken out of service quickly.

Closing the USPS would allow an end to the fiction that mail has to be delivered six days a week. Daily mail delivery has almost no benefits. FedEx and UPS have extensive experience delivering mail periodically. Certainly, three deliveries a week would be adequate. It would be the financial responsibility of UPS and FedEx to do this without recourse to government money. There would be some cap on what they could charge businesses and individuals for mail, although that might be above current levels.

People nationwide have not been sufficiently encouraged to use email for correspondence and business documents. Although a huge amount of communication among Americans is done via email, the USPS had no reason to aggressively promote it as a low-cost option. The same is true with transactions that include payments, almost all of which can be done electronically, saving companies untold expenses and the public the cost of first-class stamps to send in checks.

Close the U.S. Postal Service. Its value has all but disappeared.