Rep. Issa proposes US Postal Service phase out door-to-door delivery. . .

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
reply to post by roadgravel

 

Saturday Delivery, I've never been opposed to seeing end. Honestly, I don't much WANT Saturday delivery anyway. Not much good comes in snail mail anymore. Friends use Email and packages use FedEx. Who wants a bill or other bad news surprise on a Saturday morning? It can hold till Monday. THAT seemed a logical cut, to me.

Dropping door service though? Okay... Why even have delivery in most places then? Why not just build BIG annexes to every town's post office with a little individual P.O. Box for every household, as some gated and closed communities do for it.

...I better shut up. I'll give someone ideas and that'll be the next proposal we hear about. :shk:

I don't get the issue. Outside of a few old apartment complexes and businesses I've never seen door to door delivery. Apartment complexes use central locations now. Every house in every neighborhood I've lived in has had curb side or community clusters. Besides those with mobility issues it isn't a problem. Around here they don't really make exceptions for that in most cases.

I didn't know door to door was a big deal.

Originally posted by Kali74
No other agency or business on the planet is required to pay a retirement package 75 years into the future. They are required to pay 5.5 Billion dollars a year to the Dept. of Treasury which holds the money in trust for employees that haven't even been born yet. How can you possibly say that legislation isn't the direct cause of their financial problems. Mind you the USPS can currently pay all it's employees just fine, it can pay all it's operational costs just fine, what it's defaulting on is that 5.5 Billion it's supposed to pay per year.

Without this requirement revenues are still falling. That trend is going to continue. There isnt anything on the horizon that will change that.

I'm surprised more people arent pushing for pre-funded pensions. Look at the IOU's CA and MI are handing out. Detroit wants to rip off their pensioners 80% or more.

If they all had to pre-fund they would have seen this coming and would not have been able to weasel out of it or kick the can down to the next generation.

Would you rather the USPS suffer now or later because this pain is coming no matter what.

And the USPS isnt alone. Virtually every municipality and old corporation in the nation is looking down the barrel of the same gun.

Suffer now or later.

Frankly, I'd like to see every government department local, state and federal pre-fund. They're going to pay eventually, right? Why not ensure sound fiscal management now rather than hope and pray something just magically works out later?

For the sake of disclosure I'm in a government job. When I took it I was promised X amount of pay and a pension worth Y. The rumbles of changing the amount and age requirements and even defaulting can be heard coming from the capitol already and I've a good number of years to go.

I'd rather have those funds set aside than sit here uncertain if I'll ever see a dime when the time comes.

reply to post by Kali74


I found a report that may help shed some light on this. It appears you're right on this and to a rather sickening extent for the way the pre-funding is literally tearing the guts out of the USPS. It's a no win situation they cannot escape and cannot avoid. Yup... I'd say it was quite a set up to fail, whatever other motives may have existed.

Although, it turns out, they already had billions in negative loss ..before pre-funding. Pre-funding just makes what COULD have been recoverable with creative new planning and initiatives into an abyss from which there is no possible escape for them. The math is pure impossibility. 100% impossible.

I cap'ed a couple of the charts from the report to show what I mean...and thanks for the initial heads up on this! It's quite a thing to see in raw numbers. Also, they deferred payment on their obligation for 2011, which is why it's a blank and the 2012 projection (At the time this was produced) is doubled. Now of course, up to 14+ in negative.

First, their overall picture in the executive summary:



then a break down of what they actually generate and from what in terms of revenue.


Chart Source: USPS 2012 Integrated Financial Plan (Projection)

Now according to that, their front load payments to retirement takes, by design, about 10% of their mail revenue. That's under normal conditions. Obviously, they've been robbing Peter to pay Paul and deferred those payments, which is what makes it a bottomless pit now, IMO.

What a mess!

reply to post by MikeNice81

I didn't know door to door was a big deal.

This is apparently something that varies enormously by location and even what type of housing within an area. Personally, I've never lived in a house that didn't have door delivery of US mail with one exception. A Semi-closed community in Victorville, Ca I had connections with, had a PO box established for each house in the community at the central post office, within the community.

Now, I'll say for Apartments? It's usually been a community mail box unit with a door for each apartment. That's standard enough..but around here? I don't know of anywhere, within tract housing and normal city homes, where it is not walked up and down the streets, door to door...as it's always been? Even in Orange, Ca, it was delivered to the door. Apparently it still was as of a couple years ago when I was by to see my childhood home. The mail slot is still in the center of the front door and no other boxes in sight?

So Congress doesn't seem to able to come up with ways to solve problems but they can figure out how to destroy something. If the USPS was a corporation with lobbyists this would not have happened. Hint: UPS and FexEx lobby.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
reply to post by Kali74

 

I found a report that may help shed some light on this.

This is the reason I come to ATS. Good job.

Oh.. One other thing to add more context to the thread. I found a list of the top private contractors the USPS does business with and by how much in annual dollars

Based on data compiled from a Freedom of Information Act request, the top five contractors whose services were used by USPS in FY 2010 were:

Source

Apparently, for all of us suggesting Fedex? They already DO run a fair part of the USPS delivery business. Hmm...

Anyway, the source link above has a brief description of what each contractor was primarily brought in to handle. For example:

Northrop Grumman, a $30 billion global defense and technology company, is USPS’s second largest supplier. It provides the agency with the equipment for the automated handling of large envelopes, catalogs and magazines. In 2007 it signed an $874.6 million contract with the USPS for 100 units of the so-called FSS automation hardware.

Fedex does their priority shipping and such. Interesting to see where some of it goes, eh?

Kalitta Air is an FAR 121 Air Carrier and a leading provider of air cargo transportation, offering both scheduled and chartered transportation services worldwide. The company’s 22 Boeing 747 freighters have been used to transport cargo ranging from delicate medical equipment to heavy machinery to livestock to U.S. mail.

www.kalittaair.com...

Originally posted by Kali74
reply to post by beezzer

 

It was fine the way it was, leave the trust to pay out future benefits and repeal that stupid act. It is...was a revenue neutral agency, that provided good jobs, honest work for decent pay, one of the largest employers of veterans by the way. Just leave it the hell alone. It doesn't need to go fully private and doesn't need to go fully dependent on the government.

If they repealed the act, then I'd agree.


This should just illustrate, however, that politicians of ANY stripe need to just cut ribbons, kiss babies, sext nekkid pictures of themselves to college girls, and basically leave things alone.

reply to post by beezzer


Amen to that. Politicians should be seen, not heard. They ought to go do the babies with lollipops B.S. and make fancy speeches while leaving their hands off what isn't broken. How will they know? They won't. That's my point. The public will make it clear beyond question when WE think something is broken ...and there is PLENTY broken right now. It's just all about things they don't want to touch to save their lives or careers. Far easier to go break something like the Postal Service by requiring them to financially break their own backs with money they literally do not possess in physical reality and cannot print like Congress.

I believe This is whats going on.

Slowly phase out the US Mail and force people to use more e-mail - because they can and will ( are doing it now) record your email - cant do that with letters.

In the end this will just put more tools in the hands of government to steal yet more of our private data.

( You may ask - is Everything a conspiracy with this guy? After seeing these types of patterns for 20 years - pretty much yep.. everything is...)

reply to post by beezzer


Are you becoming an Anarchist bunny Beezer?
I approve!

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


Wouldnt doubt that at least the gov sees this as a potential plus.

Especially if one of the proposed solutions is a USPS branded email client sold as a "secure" way to get bills, medical documents, whatever type of stuff people get in the mail they wouldnt normally get via email.

I dont really know what people get in snail mail anymore besides advertisements. I never see anything besides advertisements and items I specifically sent for.

Using asymmetric public key encryption would solve most concerns. Trouble is getting a tech-dumb public to even try using it let alone understand using it. I still deal with people who think they are locked to some 20 year old AOL email address.

Originally posted by Kali74
reply to post by beezzer

 

Are you becoming an Anarchist bunny Beezer?
I approve!

A fluffy little anarchist!

The post office could go away as far as I'm concerned. I empty my box about every six months and throw 99% of it away. Important stuff comes via e-mail and is paid online. I usually pay extra to have things delivered via Fedx or UPS because post office has a bad habit of putting notices in mail box and expecting you to go to them for packages.

Seems like once or twice a week delivery would be fine with 'grouped' deliveries in selected sites also fine. Charge three times as much for junk mail delivery and save the trees. As the internet usage becomes universal, people will default to both emailing and electronic payment of bills to such an extent that the USPS will be almost unused.

When's the last time you got something of real need or value from the USPS that couldn't have been delivered by UPS or FedEx? When's the last time you needed something today rather than a few days from now? Ditto on outgoing mail, I almost never use it. And the only people I know that send Christmas cards (a big money maker for the PS) or birthday cards any more are the elderly who are still in the habit. I'm not even sure of the price of a postage stamp for first class mail anymore, it's been so long since I bought a stamp.

For the poster who said that the postal employees aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, try taking the employment test. It's basically an IQ test and you have to score 90% on it to be considered. There's a lot of better things people that smart could be doing for civilization than driving around in a jeep all day long no matter what the weather, or standing behind a counter and asking the same dopey questions about 'are there any explosives in this package' of people when the terrorists are gonna lie anyways...

Just one of the first government services to go. Soon we be seeing more and more citizen oriented services and institutions fade and disappear while Barry never misses a round of golf or cancels the lavish vacations and expensive trips for himself and his family.

Shut down Gitmo, stop funding terrorists and stupid covert ops (like Fast and Furious) close up all but the most necessary military bases, cut a % of the salary of all politicians, the list goes on and on about what they could do to really budget all that funny money they keep printing. There is just no excuses in my opinion.