Minor things that bother you

[SEWIGuy]

Regardless, USPS isn't a business. It's a government service. Yes, they should strive to be more efficient, but government services cost money. Why should we expect them to be profitable?  Do we expect the same of other services like the Department of Transportation?

In many cases, state DOTs contract out basic services such as patching, guardrail repair, excavation, paint striping, signage, etc., to private businesses. For many of those contracts, there are financial incentives in place for projects to be completed ahead of schedule, and penalties if they are finished late.

But that's not privatizing. That's merely contracting with a third party to provide a service - something that USPS already does by the way.

Privatizing would involve making the entire DOT a private company of some sort.

[kphoger]

Also, privatization doesn't equal for-profit.  See, for example, private non-profit hospitals.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

It's funny because HB lives in a part of the country where a privatized post office would be a major detriment to its citizens. Direct mail delivery would cost a pretty penny, or companies would just decide it's not worth it at all and make you travel 50 miles to a centralized distribution location, and a privatized PO box would cost 5-6 times as much as a USPS one.

[SEWIGuy]

Also, privatization doesn't equal for-profit.  See, for example, private non-profit hospitals.

All "not-for-profit" means is that they do not distribute profit to their owners but reinvest that profit into their charitable purpose. Not-for-profits that don't turn an operating profit won't be in business for long.

You can't have a privatized mail service that doesn't generate an operating profit. Unless of course it is subsidized by the government - which is no different than the current situation.

[kphoger]

Local mail (from one PO box to another) now goes to Louisville to be sorted before it's delivered. In the past, a piece of local mail was sorted in-house and ever left the county. Then, it started going to the regional post office (Campton, KY 41301), then to Lexington, now to Louisville. That's ridiculous and inefficient.

Last week, I got a newspaper from the first week of July. If a private business ran so poorly,it would go out of business.But since the post office is a government operation, it just chugs along and there's nothing anybody can do.

I realize that these two paragraphs are two separate complaints about USPS.  However, may I point out that, if you FedEx a package from one side of town to the other, then it's going to go through a regional hub first.  That is to say, it's going to leave the county.  Not being intimately familiar with the FedEx logistics flow, I'm assuming that means it will either go to Indianapolis or Memphis first.  That's how a private business has chosen to do things, because it's more efficient and/or profitable than sorting everything locally.

[formulanone]

Last week, I got a newspaper from the first week of July. If a private business ran so poorly,it would go out of business.But since the post office is a government operation, it just chugs along and there's nothing anybody can do.

When was the last time you've worked for a private business? Ever used a phone app or a website that absolutely won't work properly until the next update in three years, which probably has fixed one thing at the expense of losing two other features. Tell me you've never heard a complaint from someone about a workplace process gap that has a bizarre workaround which takes multiple more steps because someone on the other end just wants it a specific way?

There's inefficiencies all over the place, once you work with/around them long enough they transpire to become part of the expectation. Lethargy and perceived success prevents change if "it's always worked that way" (or perhaps under contract and financial burdens to deal with suboptimal solutions). Of course every well-oiled business isn't going to reveal their weaknesses to the public. The mouthpieces of any business or organization is going to blame every other difficulty on some other systematic problem rather than tackle the problems from within, or just dress up the issue as making the solution personalized or tailored.

That's how the whole business of consulting works; they poke around and ask questions and then write up a bunch of reports, then give some ideas to management which hasn't had a unique idea in a decade or lacks confidence to make changes. I have doubts that throwing a million bucks at an outside consulting firm to find $500,000 in waste is anymore money well-spent.

The public is more apt to noticing issues with a service they commonly use than some private business they use sparingly or singularly. It's always an easy target and the same Johnny One Notes use it to distract so spending can be redistributed into other pork products.