Saturday, November 13, 2010
Post Office posts $8.5 billion loss for last year
The United States postal service posted on Friday that it has an $8.5 Billion lost from last year, even though it cut almost 100,00 jobs. They only estimated that they would end up loosing about $6 billion. The sharp decline in mail use is really hurting the postal service. Most of the people are taking advantage of the internet and alternate ways of getting stuff to other places. Mail volume totaled 170.6 billion pieces, compared with 176.7 billion in 2009, a decline of 3.5 percent. This is not good for the post office and the management teams are trying there best to innovate the mail system and make it more attractive, I just do not seeing that happen though. The next option is to reduce the mailing system to only five days a week and to eliminate the annual health payments for future retiree health benefits. So, it sounds like things are not going well for the postal services, and most of the mail will be sent using the web. This is good in a way, because it will cut down on paper usage at least.
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7 comments:
It should be interesting to see what the postal service does. I bet a good amount of the 170 billion pieces sent are junk mail to like coupons, magazines etc. Their best option is to only deliver mail at the most 5 days a week. Closing of major postal service offices and creating a way to increase profits especially in the first class mail segment.
This was only a matter of time.. The current mail system is outdated technology, things like the internet make mail appear right away and also doesn't cost the sender anything. They are going to have to come up with some solution to make up for the loss of profits they are going to keep having, if nothing else changes.
By using the internet with such things as email, many jobs will be lost in the Postal Service. If they went to a 5 day mailing system I think this would be for the best and would definately cut down costs. However with companies such as UPS and Fedex, they will still be needed for distributing packages and other items that can not be sent through email, so it definately will be interesting to see what will end up happening here in the next few years with the postal service.
Postal service is being out-competed by more efficient technologies such as internet and private competitors. Although I believe that they will probably cut down deep in their cost and be supplied with government aid, I do not see the whole operation disappearing anytime soon.
I would agree with almost everything people have been saying. The Post Office was very successful many years ago and was a necessary government provision, however now, there are more efficient ways as stated before. This should be one area in which the government should consider slowly downsizing.
I agree that perhaps the Postal Service should probably downsize however I do not think it should be completely done away with, at least not yet. I would imagine there is still a significant portion of the population that relies on the Postal Service and so called "snail mail". Many people do not have access to the internet or have some sort of need for paper copies of documents and the like which need to be sent through the postal service. As long as this need exists there needs to be a way to accommodate it.
I think that postal offices should deliver mail fewer days in the weeks and should probably cut locations as well. They cannot be done away with because they also deliver many packages that cannot be sent through e-mail. Though there is UPS cutting the postal service would allow UPS and the other few postal services would have a lot more control over prices and the services. Regardless of what the postal service decides to do, they need to do it quickly before they continue to loss huge profits.
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