The most sensible suggestion I've heard recently was from a co-worker who said it would make sense to not sound out postal workers to every house, but instead to keep all the mail at the Post Office. If you want your mail delivered to your door, then you can pay extra. Otherwise pick it up yourself. This would greatly cut down on the USPS expenses.

I also would love a premium service where I get one address (just like Google Voice) that I give out and then the mail is actually forwarded to my new location if/when I move. UPS provides something like this, I believe, but why not USPS?

I don’t understand why you can’t address physical mail to an identity and let the USPS automatically route it to a physical address. Especially during and after college, I moved so much, I’m sure mail got lost en route. It would also help with privacy. You could have “throwaway addresses” given to certain businesses, possibly, or instruct the USPS to block mail from <sender>.

Anyone complaining about USPS quality of service should really travel to other countries. From my experience in Europe and elsewhere, USPS knocks it out of the park.

One of the reasons that USPS is a national monopoly is that it provides an important piece of national infrastructure. I don't see how that is going to be replaced, as many features of federal and local government depend on systems for reliably sending citizens messages, such as censuses, legal notifications such as court summons, drafts, various aspects of voting and elections, information and notices from local governments, etc.

Most of these depend on every citizen being reachable by mail, which is in the USPS's charter, and which causes a lot of overhead. If the USPS goes away, private companies will not provide service to everyone. I have no idea how these systems will continue function (e-mail is, for various reasons, not an acceptable solution at the moment).

I would love for USPS to develop alternate forms of income in order to essentially "pay for" traditional mail delivery. I'm not sure it's in their DNA though.

From talking to my grandmother, apparently people used to love the postoffice. Now, I don't know a single person in my age group (20-30 somethings) that doesn't despise the postoffice. The fact that I can't opt out of garbage being delivered to my door, by an actual person, is pretty infuriating to most.

If the post office acted like a "letter carrier" and not a package/spam carrier, I think they could do alright. Let UPS etc handle shipping actual packages, drop the spam and drop delivery to 4-5 days a week tops, they would save alot of money.

Why are we trying to save USPS? It offers worse service than any of the private companies, and according to this article, it currently has a net loss of 7 billion dollars. How about we delete it, then git commit -a -m "deleted unused stuff, should improve efficiency"

undefined

What is going to happen to the Postal Service? In 10-15 years, dead tree mail will be an anachronism. Mass mail campaigns will be much less effective because the current buying generation will have grown up ignoring letters. Will the post office be able to continue to function after losing 80% of it's current volume? Does this mean that we'll be trusting one or many startups to deliver important information from the government?

I also wonder how a world with a much smaller post office would look. I know there are already several startups operating in this space, but it seems like there will be a large opportunity in "replacing printed mail" in the near future.

earthclassmail.com is what they should look at. Many things don't need to be delivered. The post office could actually let people see images of mass mailings before they are even printed or let people print them themselves with no delivery.

In other words, where electronic mail won't work, USPS could handle parts of the delivery that make sense and how its done shouldn't matter.

As far as delivery 6 days a week, I think most people could get by with delivery 2 or 3 times a week.

Delivery of commercial could be scheduled to arrive just before delivery days so they could avoid storing too much mail.

USPS or private equivalents could also accept and store electronic bills for you as a trusted third party so you can access them as long as needed. It could certify that bills have actually been paid.

There are a lot of things that could be done to leverage its "official" position. But to do so, it actually must become technically competent. At the moment, it cannot even put the mail into the right box consistently at my house.

I wouldn't mind getting mail once a week. The question is, would this work for everyone?

Are there items that are time critical (need less than two weeks round trip) AND must be sent physically AND would be prohibitively expensive to send through private mail services?

Considering the items I have in my mail pile right now I can't think of any.

One fairly simple solution would be to reduce the frequency of mail delivery. Instead of Mon-Sat, we could deliver mail Mon-Wed-Fri or Tues-Thurs-Sat (different days for different zones).