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Very well aware of both SurePost and SmartPost. You're not telling me anything new. Both of those services rely on the fact that the USPS subsidizes their delivery services through trash distribution. They charge businesses to transport trash to mailboxes, where it ends up in a wheely bin > trash truck > landfill.
As I've mentioned in other comments, I don't want USPS privatized. I am only pointing out that their core competency is not delivery. They are trash distributors. Garbage providers.
The old "every door, every day" model is propped up by hundreds of pieces of trash for every actual delivery. It is not sustainable.
USPS needs a presence throughout the country. Every residence should, indeed, be served by the postal service. But, that doesn't mean they need to go everywhere, every day. They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They don't need to switch to anything so long as they're properly tax funded like they're supposed to be (they aren't, Republicans have been bleeding their finances for decades). For instance, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
Remove R oversight of the post office and roll back their ridiculous demands and your problem is already solved. Postal struggles are a problem manufactured by conservatives in an effort to sell you a solution to the problem they caused.
Not having to finance that overmassive backlog of cash, combined with a little bit of updating advertising law to the modern age, solves your problem three ways over.
But naturally this will never happen because that $72B is specifically earmarked to be looted by the government once they finally manage to kill and privatize the USPS. That's the real reason that pension fund exists.
The problem I am talking about is with their basic business model, and has nothing to do with how badly the Republicans are managing (bungling) their operation. The problem I am talking about is not at all related to their pension fund.
If the USPS operated on the internet the way it operates in the physical world, they would be immediately added to the blacklists on uBlock Origin and PiHole. That is the problem. They exist primarily to serve the needs of marketers rather than the general public.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation's inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago.
To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
The postal service is being forced to use same business model today as at the time of the nation's inception. The only thing it is being allowed to do is convey physical media to the public's door. It has not been allowed to explore natural extensions of that, such as banking and telecoms.
We should just have them take on the additional role of rolling out a nationwide, subsidized, high speed fiber network.