Close the Post Office Forever

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 26, 10:15AM EDT

Quick Read

The U.S. Postal Service is on track to lose $10 billion this year.
The agency is unprofitable due to the large number of its employees and retail locations.

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Close the Post Office Forever — © kirill4mula / Getty Images

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) lost $3.1 billion last quarter and is on track to lose $10 billion this year. America no longer needs it. At the very least, it should be made so small that it cannot be recognized and have an extremely narrow mission.

In the quarter ended June 30, the USPS reported a loss of $3.1 billion on revenue of $18.8 billion. That is much worse than in the same quarter the year before, when the loss was $2.5 billion on about the same revenue. Since there was no good excuse for the loss, management turned to the agency’s history. “The Postal Service continues to play an important role in the American economy and society, and in the daily lives of the American public, as it has for 250 years,” said Postmaster General David Steiner.

The USPS is huge and unwieldy. There were 533,000 career employees in 2024 and 106,000 non-career employees. It has 34,000 retail locations, some of which are in small towns with only a few thousand residents. The USPS delivers six days a week, Monday through Saturday.

Over the past few decades, postal services have become increasingly less useful. Tens of millions of Americans use email instead of sending mail via First Class. Documents that were once delivered by hand are now typically emailed as attachments. Even promotions and catalogs are sent electronically. Many people get their bank statements and pay bills online. This means that among the primary reasons that the USPS existed for two centuries, many are gone.

The fact that the USPS has thousands of post offices in small towns means tens of thousands of unnecessary workers. It also, in many cases, means that the USPS has to pay for leases.

The fact that the USPS needs to deliver mail six days a week is entirely unnecessary. There are almost no pieces of mail that are important enough for this delivery calendar to require more than two or three service days a week.

The USPS bills itself as a way to deliver packages, including overnight delivery. FedEx and UPS each provide these services. The prices of the service are tiered based on the delivery date.

There is no single substantial reason the USPS shouldn’t be closed and never open again.

U.S. Postal Service Processes Over 100 Billion Pieces of Mail Annually Despite Digital Shift

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.