If they would just double or triple the rate they charge junk mail distributors, USPS headcount could be reduced by 50%, first class rates could be reduced, and landfill costs greatly reduced.
Just check the volume of mail received by your household, and then compare it to the volume of mail you read before throwing it away.
At my house, I'm sure at least 90% goes into the trash unopened, and junk mailers pay a tiny fraction of what it costs to deliver.
It would be great if it were illegal to put anything in the mail addressed to "Occupant".
There was a time--although no one here's old enough to remember it--when the post office made two deliveries every day, to each address, one in the morning, one in the afternoon.
It was actually possible for a letter to be posted in one city in the morning, and received in another (nearby) city in the afternoon, the same day.
This twice-a-day service was ended sometime during the 1950s.
The unanticipated consequence of this "efficiency" was that the post office suddenly needed storage room it hadn't needed before (as the mail was always moving, no need to store it), immense square miles of storage room to hold the mail until it could be delivered the next day.
There was a time--although no one here's old enough to remember it--when the post office sorted and delivered long-distance mail via railway train; they actually had guys on the train, sorting mail and putting it into bags or cubbyholes (as needed), picking up and dropping off large bags of mail as the train passed by each town. The mail was always moving, never standing still.
This had largely disappeared by the 1960s, being replaced with sending all long-distance mail via airplane.
The unanticipated consequence of this "efficiency" was that the post office suddenly needed even more storage room it hadn't needed before, to hold the mail for shipping. And because the mail just sat around in airports most of the time, waiting for the next flight, long-distance delivery became slower and more cumbersome.
And then there's this bulk-mailing bit.
Back when I was in college, when first-class postage was 15 cents, I read a book (now long gone; I don't even recall its title) about the postal service, in which it was said that bulk-mailing was subsidized by users of first-class postage, and that if the post office handled
only first-class mail, no junk or special rates, efficiencies would be such that postal rates, again at the time 15 cents, could be lowered to eight and a half cents.
Politicians are like primitives, they think things only halfway through. Once they think to a desired conclusion, they stop thinking.
