Thought For the Day on Government Management
On that note, economist Justin Ross points out on his blog how, for 44 cents, you could mail a letter via USPS - or buy a kiwi fruit that had to be grown and watered in New Zealand, picked, carefully packaged, and shipped across the world to a store near you.
Government mismanagement. And these are the people that want to run our health care.
This is not really fair. That kiwi didn't have to be address scanned and individually routed, with routes to every single address in America maintained.
As Langan said, the big problem with the USPS is it's in this weird half-in/half-out corporate/government service thing in that it has to try and operate under a regime where it makes back it's costs from it's users and yet is also mandated to provide service to EVERYONE, including people who no sane for-profit service would extend service to.
Ok, let's make it "apples to apple" - a 1lb package from my office to my biggest customer FedEx ground (they pick it up & deliver) costs me $6.10 and arrives the next day.
That same service for the same package is $10.41 USPS, and $6.21 UPS.
Guess which one I use?
Mickey Langan, it's not as if the vast majority of that database of routes and addresses changes on a daily basis, though.
Rick C:
You perhaps should have mentioned that 1)UPS and FedEx also have the same number of routes and addresses to maintain and 2)USPS contracts with FedEx to air-ship their 'priority' packages, they don't run an air fleet, shipping nexus nor any of the fixed and long term costs that FedEx does...
tom