I don't know if the USPS actually contributes to competition or not. My guess is that it does. Losing them would reduce the number of shipping companies from 4 to 3: Amazon, USPS, UPS, FedEx.
I do wish the USPS would stop sending junk mail. Complete waste of resources. And I think they could modify their 1st-class delivery schedule from 6 days/week down to 3 then even down to 2. Very little mail is important to delivery these days. People are more concerned about their packages than their 1st-class mail.
While I’m not a “cut all the public services” kind of person, I do question the value of the USPS in 2022 and I’d love to hear counter arguments. But by and large the USPS just delivers spam to my door. That’s it. Any letter or package can be handled by a different provider and the USPS is the only one that just delivers spam every day non stop. I can’t opt out. I can’t get away from it. It sucks.
And while people will say this is a dire public good and we shouldn’t get rid of it, keep in mind that countries such as the UK and Germany have privatized their post office operations.
Like many companies/organizations in America, this is a jobs program supported by ads.
Well yea I’m not not criticizing those models either, but since the OP was about the USPS I was mainly commenting on that. I wish I could just turn off the spam deliveries. I don’t care if the USPS makes money or not or paying taxes for it or whatever - just let me out of receiving any spam whatsoever.
Thanks. I wish it was actually enforced. Previously signed up and have reported offenders and no change. It relies on processing a paper form (who knows if that actually occurs) and only reduces spam mail if the offender is registered on DMAChoice (and why am I paying $2 for this anyway?) and wants to comply. There's no real mechanism to opt-out of spam mail because that's one of the ways that the USPS makes money, so there's no real incentive to stop. Can't teach a person something that their job depends on them not knowing about, etc. etc.
Right now actually the thing you should know is that no matter how official a piece of mail looks if it says something like PRSRT or Presort Standard you can immediately dump it in the trash. Though sometimes I like to open these to see if there is a prepaid business reply envelope which I'll just send back empty with no return address to inflict a postage stamp cost on whoever sent it to me. Though of course most companies have stopped including those because people were doing what I do.
Similar to what I think we should do with phone calls and email, we should require nationwide opt-in and whitelisting. Nobody can send you mail without your consent. Nobody can send you an email or call you or text you without you adding their number to your whitelist. Etc.
https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-logistics-volume...
I do wish the USPS would stop sending junk mail. Complete waste of resources. And I think they could modify their 1st-class delivery schedule from 6 days/week down to 3 then even down to 2. Very little mail is important to delivery these days. People are more concerned about their packages than their 1st-class mail.