re: USPS/Amazon losing money question...

More evidence s of how thin skinned you guys are. God forbid that a product offer a benign opinion in one of its commercials. This zero tolerance on the part of the right is going to backfire big time

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God forbid that a product offer a benign opinion in one of its commercials

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You are mad that 3-5 people on a message board made comments about an "open borders" commercial.

You think that's real life.

You realize most conservatives never saw the commercial. Some who did see it, left in the middle to go pee or grab a beer. Some saw it and didn't hear it because of their loud buddy/spouse/dog barking/etc. Some saw and heard it and didn't really give a shite. A few made comments on a message board.

Then you extrapolate that to why the right is going to receive some backlash because of a few people. You lefties really are more sensitive than I thought.

#resistards can be so dramatic.

Anyway, here's to your belief that a few people will cause all this backlash.

They need to do away with the USPS and privatize mail delivery.

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You guys are real pieces of work. You really have a problem with pensions and making sure people are taken care of when they retire. Do you even hear yourselves? bunch of douchebags.

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not sure if trolling ...

i know a few who have retired ... they are good friends of me/my family ... doesn't change the fact that their pension is ridiculous, esp given the age at which they retired ...

There are so many strange (legal, but strange) things going on with the USPS finances that it's hard to give honest answers as to how they are doing.

The pre-funding requirement for pensions and health insurance gives them a burden that most companies do not have. Honestly, it's not a bad policy - it gives the true cost of pensions. If more companies and government agencies were required to do this... it would be shocking to most people.

Thus the USPS is given this huge fixed cost. On the other hand, the variable cost to deliver these packages isn't much... you already have the trucks and the drivers running the routes. It doesn't slow down the system to stick a small package in the mailbox along with the day's mail. Now, the Sunday delivery is a different deal... and I do believe USPS should charge more for this (with amazon passing the cost along).

The deal is probably a net positive, financially for the USPS. As it is, the service levels have not been good, especially this past holiday season. If USPS tried to raise rates on Amazon, they would likely tell USPS to F Off, at least in the long run, and it would hasten the development of Amazon's own delivery system.

Personally I'd like to see three day a week delivery for regular mail. Would not change mailing patterns - the mail just sits in the post office a day longer if it arrives for delivery on an "off" day. Postmen still work 6 days a week as half the area gets one set of days and the other half gets the opposite set. Keep post offices open 6 days. And priority mail /overnight mail still can get delivered even on off days.

After college, Donahoe oversaw postal-service fleet maintenance in Pittsburgh. He viewed the network through the prism of gas prices and mileage. Several posts and a master's degree from MIT later, he moved up to the national level, overseeing human resources and then operations for the entire postal-service network. It was in D.C. that he got enmeshed in some of the postal service's biggest liabilities: the union contracts' no-layoff clauses, which limited its ability to downsize. The astounding cost of administering benefits to more than a half million workers plus retirees. While the cost of paying workers has declined 3 percent below inflation since 1972, the total cost of administering benefits to them has rocketed 448 percent. During the same time, total mail volume has nearly doubled, and the number of delivery points has exploded — more than six hundred thousand new addresses added in 2011 alone.

When Donahoe testifies on Capitol Hill, as he has done several times over the past two years, to describe just how dire the postal service's situation is — losing $25 million per day! — he talks in even, polite tones. Because there he's not telling, he's asking. Five hundred thirty-five members of Congress ultimately decide how to run the postal service: what it can charge for postage, which services it can offer, how it operates. Donahoe is the person who implements their policies, despite the postal service not being a federal agency or taking any taxpayer money; it runs solely on the postage it sells — or lately, doesn't.
Take the most contentious issue: the seventy-five years' worth of future-retiree health benefits that in 2006 a lame-duck session of Congress legislated the postal service prepay over the following ten years as part of a broad overhaul of the way the postal service operates. No other government agency must do this, and most private companies would have spread those payments over forty years. But the postal service was flush at the time, and Congress figured out that since health-care payments are counted as general government revenue, it could use them to prop up its own books. (Five-and-a-half billion dollars a year coming in from the postal service was $5.5 billion less Congress would have to cut elsewhere to remain budget-neutral, as the Bush administration was demanding.) But then the economy crashed and with it the amount of first-class mail being sent around the country. Suddenly a law designed to keep the postal service solvent in the long term began bankrupting it. Of the $15.9 billion the postal service lost last year, 70 percent — $11.1 billion — was in future health-care payments.

Today, at the National Postal Forum, Donahoe is not beseeching, he's selling. Forget finding new customers. He just wants to make sure he keeps those he already has. The big mailers before him employ 8.5 million Americans. That's almost three of every fifty American jobs. And the billions of insurance bills and catalogs and summonses these companies send every year pump $1 trillion into the economy.
In one session, a strategic business planner from the postal service asks for a show of hands from "all of those who think the postal service and industry is in a death spiral." A few honest palms dart up. The mailers want to know that Donahoe has a plan. They want to believe that Congress is listening. They want to be reassured that the post office won't abruptly fail.

Donahoe's speech is full of optimism about the potential of the post office in the digital age. He talks about QR codes that drive potential customers to Web sites from mail and an iPhone app that lets you design and send a paper postcard. He talks about growing the package business and becoming leaner, faster, and smarter as an organization. "I think that we've got a very, very strong Forum this year," Donahoe says. "You're supposed to clap!" he adds. And they do.

There's a story Donahoe tells Congress and reporters and pretty much anyone else who will listen. It's about what it was like growing up as a boy in Pittsburgh, how steel was king, the U.S. Steel Tower reaching higher than any other building in the state. There was pride in that, and in the mills, and in the middle-class jobs they produced. The steel industry built not just Pittsburgh but the entire country. The railcars and railways, the skyscrapers that made New York the capital of the world, the millions of Buicks and Pontiacs that rolled out of Detroit. Hell, with three hundred thousand men and women working twenty-four-hour shifts making ships and weapons in the 1940s, Bethlehem Steel even beat Hitler.

But there's a second half to the story — about what it was like watching the industry crumble in the seventies and eighties. First from new, cheaper steel developed in Germany and Japan, where it took just five hours to smelt a ton of steel, half the time it took in Pennsylvania. And then from waves of retiree benefits that drowned many of the companies entirely. Even after the big steelmakers began using some of the most efficient smelting methods, it was too late. In the mid-1990s, they still had four retirees drawing benefits from every worker. Unable to shoulder the burden, Bethlehem Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001. After culling its workforce down to 11,500, it still had 95,000 dependents on the books.

Donahoe talks about steel because it's a cautionary tale. It is about what happens when management waits too long to make hard but necessary changes. It's about how industries that fail to adapt die.

"I've been the postmaster general now for almost eighteen months," he says at the end of his keynote address. "They say that you never really understand and appreciate how things work until you try to change them. I think this is true. Change is not easy. It's comfortable to keep things the way they are. It's comfortable not to make tough decisions. But our future is not in today's comfort zone... Your business depends upon a postal service that can reinvent itself. So that's what we're doing: We are reinventing the postal service."

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