Hello I'm probably Andrew Heaton
and you’re eagerly watching Mostly Weekly.
The post office:
the answer to the burning question:
“how can we make email slower, more expensive, and stressful?”
Nobody likes the post office, including and especially:
the people who work there.
At this point the postal service is basically a costly way to deliver junk mail.
The mail is getting slower, while email, Facebook, and sexting
keep increasing in speed and efficiency, making the post office less and less relevant.
It’s time to update the postal service.
The best way to do it?
Privatize it!
Goodbye letter, you're private now!
Why should we?
Well, for one thing it’s hemorrhaging money.
Last year it ran a deficit of nearly six billion dollars.
It’s been running at a loss for ten solid years.
Since 2007 the post office has lost over 50 billion dollars!
That’s over 133 billion Katherine Mangu-Ward commemorative stamps!
The reason it can operate with deficits that large
is because the federal government provides a huge line of credit to keep it afloat.
Which it desperately needs,
because the postal service has 70 billion dollars worth of unfunded liabilities
for its retirees.
And you know who'll wind up covering that expense?
The postal service is half government agency and half corporation,
combining all of the efficiency of a government agency
with the cuddliness of a large corporation.
And even though it loses billions of dollars every year, it can’t go out of business,
because it’s not really a business.
What it really is is a monopoly.
It is literally illegal for anyone except the postal service to deliver letters.
The exception is “extremely urgent letters,”
which is the only reason companies like FedEx and UPS are allowed to exist at all.
If not for the post office monopoly, they could deliver non-urgent letters
like birthday cards, ransom notes, and packets of sea monkeys
just like the postal service does.
Incidentally, catalogs and junk mail are most of what the postal service delivers, not letters.
Less than 5% of mail is personal correspondence.
Half of all mail is just advertisements nobody wants.
That makes the postal service a 70 billion dollar spam folder.
The only really important thing the postal service still takes care of is bills,
but I have a feeling people I owe money to
will figure out how to get those bills to me with or without stamps.
Damn it!
The post office uses revenues from its monopoly mail services
to subsidize their express and package delivery services --
because they lose money on those services.
Why?
Competition does it better.
For example: I can get a package and order it on Amazon Instant.
But whenever the postal service tries to find ways to save money,
like by trying to scrap Saturday mail delivery,
or shutting down inefficient rural offices, or automating,
their 535 micro-managers in congress freak out and order them not to.
There are 31,000 post offices in America.
That’s more than all Starbucks and McDonald's combined.
And most of them lose money.
Maybe that’s why they lost $5.6 billion last year.
That’s why I say: privatize the postal service .
Make the postal service compete,
but also give it the freedom to be innovative without some crusty senator ordering it around.
Other countries have already privatized their postal services in one form of another:
the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan
and that place with hobbits.
Now we use email instantaneously and cheaply.
We don’t send letters, we use Facebook or Whatsapp or Grinder-
I mean Tinder- I meant- everyone heard me say Tinder.
It was Tinder.
The fact of the matter is, times have changed and keep changing.
It’s time for the post office to catch up and modernize.
If you love something, privatize it.
Go on letter, get out of here!
I never liked you anyway!
Go on!
You're better off without me!
No matter how painful.
If it comes back, that’s beautiful.
If it goes out of business, well, maybe it was never meant to be.