The Postal Service

@alexandrak @barackobama PREACH!

— Chrysanthe Tenentes (@eqx1979) November 12, 2012

Spend an hour in the Koreatown post office (by the way, there is no way to spend LESS than an hour because of the lines), it's at 39 w. 31st St., near Broadway. The amount of commerce & mail coming in and out is breathtaking. When you consider how much of our economy still flows through the Post Office, it's astounding that the Government hasn't been able to make money on it.

Comments

[Khoi]

I have "mad respect" (I think that's what the kids say) for the USPS, but it's not astounding at all that the government hasn't been able to make money on it.

The simple truth is that postage rates are much lower than what you'd reasonably expect to pay to be able to drop a letter on pretty much *any* corner in the United States and have it show up pretty much anywhere else you want in the country within 72 hours.

Like many services, Americans just don't want to pay for this one, even though they have come to expect that it's a veritable right of living in a free society. In my opinion, it's not quite accurate to ask "Why can't the post office make money on this?" Rather we should say, "This is important enough to us to either pay for it on a retail level or to properly subsidize through the government, and we're not doing either right now, so which will it be?"

[David Jacobs]

I agree with you. - I didn't think this through enough before posting. But there are a ton of things that the Postal Service could sell that they don't. For starters, business services - figure out what all those people lined up want and figure out how to package it up! This isn't just return receipt & pick-up, this is basic services like reliable address forwarding, auto-responder postcards when you move, etc. What about more reliable mail delivery TO you, not just from you? I'd pay another .50c for every bill & check to make sure they arrived in a timely manner.