Canada Post reacts quicker than USPS

You can save stacks of cash by moving from home delivery to community mailboxes.  Instead of the time and energy expended to go to each house, a carrier drives to community boxes holding 20 to 30 individual mailboxes. The residents then come to the little community box.  

Our neighbors to the north have lost a couple of hundred million for a couple of quarters and they are working to fix it rather than doing nothing like our congress likes to do. 

Canada Post, a government corporation, said it will replace foot delivery with community mail boxes.

The company’s core mail operations have been losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter for several quarters in a row. In the third quarter, Canada Post reported…a pre-tax loss of $102 million. The pre-tax loss in the comparable period a year ago was $136 million.  

I highlight ‘hundreds of millions’ for ‘several quarters’ before we read this:

In fiscal 2013, it [USPS] had a $5 billion loss, ending in the red for the seventh year. 

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/canada-phase-out-home-postal-delivery-stem-losses-2D11728643 

Going from door to door to community mailbox: It still takes tons of workers, tons of cars, tons of car maintenance, gas, hours, etc.  So…if we move from 30-count mailboxes to 1,000-count mailboxes….how many less vehicles and employees are needed?  Shouldn’t we move to larger ‘community’ mailboxes if we’re still losing money?

If the community mailbox was a store in the strip mall holding 1,000 mailboxes, how much could we save?  What a boon to the businesses in the strip mall, too!  Everyone that I know just checks mail once or twice a week anyway, because it’s 95% junk mail (pardon me…”direct mail”).  What if  the USPS leased/purchased a larger building, like an an Albertson’s or KMart…how much would we save?  I’m suggesting the post goes back to the “old days” (like way old) where you go to the post office to get your crap.  You go to a ‘Big Lots’ or ‘Staples’ type of place. 

And the Post Office only needs to deliver a few times a week.  If they delivered M-W-F or Tu-Th-Sa we’d all be content.  To be honest, I’m not sure that we can’t deliver mail twice a week and keep everyone content.  If your letter/package is so time-sensitive that it can’t wait a couple days…use a private company like DHL or FedEx.  Put the mailboxes in strip mall shops or even larger locations and lower the cost.  The USPS needs to quit trying to compete with home delivery services. 

The converse side of this is that if it’s less convenient, it will result in less “Direct Mail” being funneled through the USPS which is a primary source of revenue – which then compounds the revenue problem. If we make it less convenient, the advertisers might use USPS less. They might cut down less trees, they might use less chemicals to convert it to waxy paper, they might use less chemicals to create ink and glue.  We might use less gas to deliver tons of chemically-treated paper products to people who don’t want it and instantly throw it in the trash to go to a landfill.  To that we say…who cares?  If the economy is truly built on creating trash, then it’s destined to fail.