The latest big deal in the US is that our postal service is losing money hand over fist, and may have to scale back or shut down.  I don’t suspect shutting down forever will feasibly happen, but we’ll probably see a scaling back.

Email and internet are being blamed for much of the demise of the post office, and there’s a lot to be said about that angle.  Yes, we send fewer items now than years ago, largely due to electronic stuff – invoices, contracts, billpay are all often done by the web or email.

And rural post offices are being singled out as largely unprofitable, losing the most money.  And it makes some sense – small populations set far apart from each other, rising fuel costs, fewer people paying in to send mail, etc.

How to fix this?

Charge for receiving mail.  Perhaps just in rural areas.  People will quibble about what’s ‘rural’, and they’ll argue over price.  I’ll throw this out to start with $29/year for home delivery of mail.  In our area, this might not entirely cover the shortfall, but I’m sure it would go a long way towards helping out.

“But but but… that’s wrong!”.  Well… it’s not really.  We’ve already conditioned ourselves to pay for email, but for some reason we think we shouldn’t have to pay for USPS.

To send email, I have to have an account.  True, some people get away with free webmail accounts at libraries and whatnot, but the overwhelming majority of people taking advantage of electronic billpay, invoices through email, etc – they’re all paying for an internet account.  Often multiple times – many people have data plans on phones, home internet, and their employer pays for it at work.  Internet providers are making a true killing at this, effectively offering almost ‘unlimited’ correspondence transmission, while the USPS struggles with ‘pay per stamp’ pricing.

I’m not suggesting we all pay a flat rate to mail stuff, but consider this.  Someone drives bits of paper to my house every day – for free (yes, the sender paid something, but as we see, the USPS is losing money on this).  I get home delivery for *free*.  Now… if I want some privacy, I can *pay* for that same mail to stay in a PO box which I’d visit at my convenience.  So… *pay money* to have the mail sit at a post office, or *drive* it to my house for free.  Does that make much sense?

Charge me $29/year for home delivery – think of it as USPS “Prime” (ala Amazon), and keep my mail at a local PO box for free, but clear it out every 3 days.

This would change the economics in a hurry – many people wouldn’t opt for the home delivery, and they’d miss out on a lot of junk mail.  Junk mailers may stop sending as much junk.  The junk mail does help subsidize the USPS, but some of that would be offset by income from people paying for the home delivery.

I understand many smaller offices wouldn’t be able to provide boxes for everyone right away – it may have to be manual labor at the front desk for now – show your ID, get your mail.  This would encourage people to get home delivery.

It’s not perfect – maybe a little crazy, even – but I’d like to see people coming up with better solutions to this.  Certainly people don’t have a problem paying for delivery of stuff to their home – Fedex/UPS manage it – but I do think it’s high time we look at charging for rural mail delivery (perhaps all mail delivery at some point).  If it cuts down junk mail, keeps service people on the road, and reduces losses (or helps make a profit) – what’s the downside?  I’m sure there’s some, but I can’t think of any right now.