I'm not aware of any organization that has the same requirements to fund its future pension obligations that the USPS has. That requirement was created by Congress as part of a sustained campaign to damage the USPS.

It seems like your argument is actually that Congress should rescind that requirement, so that USPS can afford to better service urban customers while continuing to be a critical lifeline to rural areas.

> Just this week I had a package that was supposed to be delivered by Monday that lost tracking and didn't show up until Wednesday.

This is the sort of problem you solve with more funding not privatization.

Here’s how these privatizations work:

1. Cut funding for public service

2. Service becomes bad

3. Cut more funding because service is bad and unused

4. Service becomes worse

5. Privatize

6. Strip the service for parts, a bunch of people get rich, classic PE stuff but worse

7. Start extracting rents, you have a nice monopoly

8. Public has no or worse service for higher cost

Sure, it's not perfect, but I'm doubtful privatizing it would make it any better. And on the list of things I want fixed in the US, it is far from the top.

All shopping companies lose packages, damage packages, and fail to deliver on time as promised.

The question is just about the rate it happens and the ease with which you can get restitution.

Remember when Amazon’s delivery dates were commitments instead of estimates? That was interesting for me to think about in this context.

I spent many years shipping out online orders every day via UPS, Fedex, and USPS. USPS was not meaningfully worse in aggregate, UPS and FedEx still fucked up plenty

> My problem rate with Fedex or UPS is maybe 0.1% of packages. I can't remember the last time I had a delivery issue.

Well… I had a package being delivered, and it had missed its estimated arrival; it ended with me have a long discussion w/ their support that I'm sure was fed to /dev/null. FedEx was the carrier, it turned out, and they claimed they had attempted delivery. Problem was, they required a signature. I live in an apartment, & we have a dedicated package room. But FedEx's stance is that they can't deliver to the secure package room: they require a signature. But at my apartment, they come to the door with the street address on it. Weirdly, that is not the door with the buzzer — that's at a separate, more remote door. The delivery person is not going to take the time to find that door, assuming their corporate overlord's maximum dwell time even permits them to. So they can't buzz me. So they sticker an utterly arbitrary window on the building, and leave. The landlord clears the window. I am never notified.

Somewhere this kicks around in their system until I get a call from an unknown number of "hey your package is undeliverable." But the "guaranteed" delivery date was overshot, of course.

I was, of course, home the entire time. These are what spawn the "missed delivery" memes … https://xkcd.com/921/

This is a systemic problem, not just a "one time" issue: every package shipped via FedEx that requires a signature to me is undeliverable.

The shipper (my bank, in this case) was also less-than-helpful: they apparently have no idea who they ship with, let alone what tracking number they used. Worse, they refused to refund me the extra I had paid to expedite the shipment (which, as you can imagine from the above, did not arrive on time; worse, the expiditing fee was extortionary…)

… and this is modern capitalism these days. A fractal of bad service where the customer ends up having to do 90% of the support work.

> Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.

Yes, it is discrimination. Treating people differently on any basis is discrimination on that basis.

It may or may not be illegal discrimination depending on the specifics and the governing law, and it may or may not be unjust discrimination depending on the specifics and the applicable moral framework, but all discrimination means is differential treatment on some criteria.

Refusing service entirely kinda feels like more like something that fits the word “discrimination.” UPS/FedEx can refuse service to you for almost any reason.

But, perhaps you’re right, maybe the word “discrimination” is the wrong word. Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.

USPS from an operations standpoint is pretty much profitable. Congress basically doesn’t even allow USPS to fix itself when it absolutely can fix itself without major service cuts or privatization. For example, their pension fund can only invest in low-yield securities, while normal companies have more flexibility, so that inflates the cost of their retirement program.

> Why does a hill billy who insists on living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon deserve a subsidy?

I'm going to say this nicely once instead of the reply I really wanted to say because I'll give you the benefit of the doubt of not knowing or looking it up.

Because it provides postal service to the Havasupai people living on their native land at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Would you like to take a guess as to why Supai, Arizona, the capital of the Havasupai Nation, is located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.