Yes they have the same problem with pension obligations that a lot of other companies (and governments State and Local) do. It wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if their 1st class mail delivery volume had kept up with their projections during the years of the housing boom. They saw a tremendous fall off in both first class and standard mail volume as the economy tanked. Some of that volume came from people who could no longer afford 1st class postage rates and ALSO a lot of it resulted because credit card companies basically called an almost complete halt to their direct mail marketing efforts when it became clear how close the entire world was to World War IV.

For example in 2008 I used to do a mailing for a company that insisted on 1st Class postage processing. It was relatively large mailing for a relatively small company, and the postage was worth about $5,000 a month just from that single customer to the USPS. Well, when the economy went into a tailspin, guess what they had to do? They couldn’t afford 1st Class rates any more, so we started sorting the mail Standard instead, for about 1/2 the postage. Take that example and apply it to the entire country and you can see why their revenues didn’t meet their projections.

Billions of pieces of mail that would have been paid for, or paid for at higher rates, suddenly disappeared.

On the “personnel promises” side, they really need to work on that and they’re doing some of it through attrition. They need to do a lot more. Congress should be acting to *help* them do a lot more. A job at the USPS is still a good job, and my sense right now is that there are a lot of people who would find it “Work Americans Will Definitely Do.”

The USPS is a national asset and there are certain things it does better than anyone else in the world. When times were flush, everything was super – they were going to meet even their astronomical pension obligations, etc., etc. Well, it takes an Act of Congress (or several Acts of Congress) to provide a new framework for how they can become leaner, better competitors, and cut the dead weight.

Having said all that, I use them literally every day and my customers make real profits from the work I do. I regularly achieve 300-400% ROI for my customers (yes, you read that right). So we have a real Situation: reform the asset to make it work better, or throw up our hands and say that’s too big a problem for us to solve.

The government CAN compete with private businesses on this (particularly because private businesses already do much of the work!) but it has to start getting rid of the kinds of nutty things like the one you just mentioned. Nationwide, every-work-day mail service is a *good* thing and we need to preserve it.

Everyone picks on the USPS but very few people know how mailings are actually done. Most of the mailings in this country are done by private companies, like this one: http://www.umsmail.com