How to save the Post Office?

 

“On a U.S. generally accepted accounting principles basis, the Postal Service had a net loss of $4.9 billion for 2021, compared to a net loss of $9.2 billion for 2020.” [1] Yay! Let’s celebrate that it only lost 4 billion. But I think we can do better.

In their planning, the post office mentions that “compensation and benefits expenses increased $1.4 billion, or 2.8 percent, from the prior year” [1]. So we can see that one large expense is the workers. Add to that retirement expenses, worker’s compensation, etc. I will summarize: revenue is down and expenses are up.

So given that one major expense for the Post Office is people, gasoline, and machines, why not have a portal where people can schedule pickups, instead of assuming daily pickups for every house on every day? This is a waste in many cases You don’t have to run every route, on every day.

If we only picked up when people said they had mail to pick up, and we knew which addresses had a delivery in the next few days, then a computer could print out an optimized route that skips many streets. This would save manpower and gasoline and wear on vehicles.

“Ah”, you say. But what about Grandma? She doesn’t know how to use the internet. She needs to mail in her water bill. Well, you could still have a once or twice-a-week schedule that would hit every box, once or twice a week. Given that more and more business is going online, and the post office is becoming less relevant, except for packages, what I have outlined can be scaled down, as more payments go online, but still gives Grandma a safety net plan.

You could also have the local pickup agents be bad at their job, and lose mail every so often. This would encourage people to take their outgoing mail to the post office, drive their water bill to the water company, or go to electronic payments. That idea is working for my local post office.

[1] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/1110-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2021-results.htm