US Post Office Hammers Americans

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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US Post Office Hammers Americans

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It isn’t enough that the U.S. Post Office offers mediocre service as it handles fewer letters and packages than a decade ago. The high price of a First Class stamp is higher again, with only the thinnest of excuses for Postal Service management.

A First Class mail stamp price rises to $.66 from $.63 in January. In January, the price rose from $.60 to $.63. In 2009, the price was $.50.
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As Reuters points out, “First-class mail volume fell 3% last year to the lowest number in 50 years and is down 51% since 2006.” Yet the Postal Service is bloated. It had 516,750 career employees in 2022 and a non-career total of 118,600. It is run out of 31,132 Postal Service-managed retail offices. Both are unnecessarily big. (Look at the oldest post offices across the U.S.)

The Post Office’s utility has fallen sharply. In the last several decades, many of its services were replaced by fax and then, to a much larger extent, email. Email is not only free in most cases. It allows communication immediately instead of in several days. It can carry attachments that can replace large printed documents or, in many cases, packages. Most bills can be delivered online and paid online as well.
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Some of the Postal System’s 31,000 offices are in small towns, some of which have populations only in the thousands. The Post Office insists it has to deliver mail six days. Electronic communications could easily push that to two or three days.

UPS or FedEx can do many of the services done by the Postal Service. The USPS operation is entirely unnecessary.

Why should the Postal Service charge $.66 for a First Class stamp when First Class service is becoming outdated?

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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