Congress is being bribed to kill the Postal Service. Even though they do better than FedEx or UPS.

[haele]

52. USPS Flat Rate Priority shipping. Free franking. Best things ever for personal and small business.

Franking services - or the free selling of stamps and/or estimates and recording of postage costs and postage paid - is another thing that the USPS does that people don't really understand. Pitney Bowles and "Stamps R Us" provide franking services for a cost - you rent their machines and software and their access to the delivery services, and you still have to pay for the supplies to print your stamps and postage. My rent-mate used to run a small business; she looked into purchasing one of those machines so that she wouldn't have to haul her envelopes and small boxes three blocks down the street to the Mailboxes, etc every other day or so. For a $125.00 investment and $25 a month, she would get a machine that would not only print out her postage, but pull the money (and the monthly fee) off her credit card. She would also have to buy the printer ink, maintain the machine, and buy the postage paper sheets - which the company would nicely supply as an additional "service" that would only cost her $5 - $15 a month, depending on her usage. She estimated the total cost, whatever tax write-off the machine would give her, and threw in the weight-maintenance due to exercise factor, and figured it was still cheaper to walk down the street than buy a franking machine.

As for the flat-rate priority boxes, this holiday season, I spent $5.84 each box to send (last minute) several small box of cookies and little handmade gifts across country to the in laws in 2/3 days, when UPS and Fed-EX charge a minimum of $10.00 + $1.00 per ounce because they live in small towns or rural "county road" addresses and would just ship it ground - maybe it would get there on time, and maybe it wouldn't. Everyone got their gifts the day before Christmas, at the latest. A little over $34 for guaranteed three day delivery vice over $84 for "maybe it will get there before Christmas, maybe not".

Since USPS still does the "final mile" to get the package to their doorstep, so it's not like the for-profits are paying their delivery people to find and drive fifteen miles down Covington County C.R. 36, (a total of sixty five miles away from the nearest UPS/Fed-Ex hub) just to deliver one package, three letters, and the weekly county newspaper to my husband's favorite cousins.
Have a small craftsman's business making gourmet candy, jewelry, bamboo penny-whistles or other handmade tchotckis out of the garage? USPS is required to maintain a full service office in your area no matter where you live.
So if you do live in BFE county, you can keep your small business at home rather than have to find a business/manufacturing or franking/shipping location in a larger population center if you want to expand your customer base beyond your local region.
You can sell on the internet and send your wares via USPS with their flat rate priority shipping (and also not have to pay for their flat rate boxes and envelopes!) - allowing you to cut costs and keep more of your revenue enough to keep the business going.

If the Free-marketeers get their way, and the Federal Government is forced to get rid of the USPS for Fed-Ex, UPS, Pitney Bowles, et all - do you think those companies will maintain an affordable full-service postal/package center for an economically depressed town - or - huge county with a population of at most ten thousand?
I'll guarantee this is the very first thing that will happen if the USPS privatizes:

Sorry Granny - counties and rural areas like yours just aren't worth the cost, cuts into our responsibilities to our shareholders too much, and the Fed contract is still too "restrictive" for us to be able to do everything the old USPS used to do for you. We had to close your county post office and all stop weekday delivery.

It's not too bad, though. You and the other folks around here are used to living out in the sticks, so you should have no problems driving seventy five miles to the nearest big town to get your mail or getting a ride if you don't drive very well - all you country folks stick together, right? We'll set you up a P.O. box in town for a nominal annual cost - or you can pay a monthly fee of, oh, $80.00 to have one of our processing trucks come by to handle your mail and deliveries once a week or so.

Unless, of course your neighbors want to get some sort of an HOA set up for mail service - but of course, we require a minimum number of one hundred subscriber households. For an annual fee of $2K each, you can have a new station set up three days a week at that crossroads where your rural post office used to be; or maybe we'll contract out to a nearby gas station or convenience store, if keeping that post office maintained isn't cost effective.

Ultimately, with privatization, the taxpayers will have to foot the bill to keep local Post Offices in service in accordance to the Constitution. Means the Supreme Court will eventually have to become involved; privatization will mean a few large companies are going to be profiteering off a universal government service that is mandated to be provided to the citizens "at an affordable cost".
When it becomes un-affordable to most citizens (except for corporations) and ruins small household and family businesses that require post delivery to sell their goods and survive, who is going to foot the bill?
And now that a lot of the local analog transmissions and POTs infrastructure is going away, rural areas are becoming increasingly dependent on cell phones, internet and cable services, which also costs a lot of money retirees usually don't have. Granny - and everyone else who lives in a rural area - is becoming effectively isolated.

It will hit the red states particularly hard. I'd hate to think of how much sending an card or letter would become.

Haele