Posted on 09/19/2011 12:33:59 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Not the guy, the whole method of the business. Try to get a UPS package delivery site changed, even just to them keeping it at their site and you’ll come get it. Go ahead. It’ll take hours and you still might not succeed. With the USPS it’s 5 minutes tops.
USPS is in the Constitution. And they actually do a good job in spite of what all the blind followers like to say.
“With that being the case, why should I as an urbanist subsidize USPS parcel delivery to folks living in the backwoods of West Virginia?”
Because the founders of the USA put in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution that national Post Office would be created so that our far-flung nation would be unified.
Ben Frankin, in particular, was rather adamant about the need for a national postal service.
If you don’t like it, change the Constitution.
If it's information, you don't need the Post Office. Letters, bills, checks, photographs, movies, newspapers, magazines, books are all pure information: modern technology can push all of those through the glass fiber to my house.
That leaves stuff that has a physical form. FedEX. Big Brown. Amazon Prime comes to mind. Unlimited free two-day. One day for $3.99 / item.
Right now, the Post Office subsists on revenue from junk mail (physical spam). That's not going to last. If it wants to remain relevant, it has to outdo the other carriers in the physical delivery of stuff I want.
Generally incorrect. You may not want information delivered to you in physical form, but there are still many people who do, and are willing to pay for it. That's business.
Currently, the ability to operate depends primarily on revenue from 1st class letters, not the "physical spam" as you have stated. That base is shrinking fast, and is why the USPS has been trying to get Congress to allow necessary changes.
Lastly, the USPS destroys UPS and FedEX in the cost to deliver the smaller sized items. Generally, the USPS gets it there as fast or faster, safer, and for less money. On larger items UPS and FedEX have the edge. This is supported in many independent studies, usually done around the holidays.
Help me out here... how is it "free" if it costs $79 per year?
Tell you what - I'll give you UNLIMITED FREE visits to a gym. You just have to give me $300.
Depends on how much stuff you buy from Amazon, obviously.
If you buy something every day, the question is, does Amazon make enough on your orders to cover the cost of all those two-day shipments, given they've given themselves a $79 head start? Of course, not everyone orders all that often — if you don't order much, you'll end up leaving some of the $79 on the table. But the whole psychology of the offer is to get you to buy more stuff, so the answer to first question must be in the affirmative.
Amazon is disruptive. Disruptive is good.
According to the July numbers, first class is about half the revenue, but is on the decline, along with periodicals. Junk and packages are on the increase.
Once you've tried automatic bill-pay, you never go back to writing checks and licking stamps.
Businesses PAY MONEY to mail stuff. You’re saying you don’t want it. Fine. Throw it away. But don’t make the implication that because YOU think it’s junk that everyone thinks likewise. I’ll guarantee you that the businesses throwing out cash to mail things don’t call it junk.
Everyone on FreeRepublic bitches and moans about Democrats attacking free enterprise, small businesses, and stuff. But by golly, if a business makes the decision to advertise via the USPS.... Freepers turn into liberal democrats. You even want the USPS to pay you for the trash.
Consider the level of hypocrisy while you look in the mirror.
Ban "Millionaires and Billionaires"TM from using the USPS.
Think of all the jobs that can be created by forcing them to use private delivery services! < /sarc>
-PJ
1) Amazon is pricing this service based on their business statistics, including frequency, likelihood of increased purchases and total shipping costs. They are doing it because they have calculated it helps their bottom line.
2) You may order enough items to get to the point where your avoided shipping costs exceed $79, but if you think you didn't pay for it you are fooling yourself, and trying to offer up your self deception as a rational argument.
3) Amazon is not going to pay any more or less for the cost of shipping because you have given them $79.
4) Amazon is not a shipping service. You are citing them as as if they are the equivalent of UPS, or FedEX, or USPS; they're not.
How any is this is disruptive to shippers is something you will need to explain. You go right ahead and pay your $79 dollars to Amazon. As you have already said, you will buy more, the items will ship, and the shippers will make more money. So disruptive. So irrelevant to this thread.
Glad you agree.
Well, duh!
2) You may order enough items to get to the point where your avoided shipping costs exceed $79, but if you think you didn't pay for it you are fooling yourself, and trying to offer up your self deception as a rational argument.
I used it once. Then I canceled within the free trial period they were offering. But that doesn't mean it's not a clever idea.
3) Amazon is not going to pay any more or less for the cost of shipping because you have given them $79.
Duh, again.
4) Amazon is not a shipping service. You are citing them as as if they are the equivalent of UPS, or FedEX, or USPS; they're not.
No, they're a Luddite-annoying service.
And, BTW, although they sell plenty of physical goods, they're also making a lot of progress moving books out of the shipping world and into the world of pure information.
They can go to 3 days a week for all I care.
To quote your inane response: well, duh.
I'm glad you have, once again, agreed with me. The next time you initiate a debate try to grasp all of those "duh" concepts before you manage to forge ahead full circle to the point where you concede. It will save everyone time.
I'm not sure if you are failing to grasp what others are writing or what you have written, but you really need some help in that area. I am sure that I would rather not provide lessons. Good luck.
Hypocrisy? Ha! You must be joking.
You must also be in the junk mail “business”.
See, for the rest of us, a business transaction is a voluntary action that both parties agree to, and from which parties mutually benefit.
Junk mail is where you pay a government-sponsored agency to deliver items I don’t want to receive and don’t need to receive and that I have to dispose of on your behalf. I HAVE TO PAY TO DISPOSE OF IT. It costs me time, and it costs me money, and there is an additional opportunity cost if it clogs up my legitimate communication channel with my creditors, business associates, friends and family.
This is not a voluntary transaction for me, and you are ignoring that very real cost. Junk mailers collude with the post office and it’s unique position to force me to recieve the crap. And overwhelmingly crap it is.
If it’s so valuable, why don’t you use UPS or Fedex? The reason is, it isn’t valuable. Just like spammers, your cost for this “service” is minimal, and you ignore the cost you and the USPS are forcing onto the recipient.
Prostitution is a more legitimate business than junk mailing. At least both parties involved that transaction are willing participants. Junk mailing is more a form of micro-scale rape than it is a business.
In post 90 I wrote: "Glad you agree" (...with me). Using your vocabulary this would translate to: "Well, Duh".
No need to thank me, it is all in the interest of improved communication. You are welcome, but now we are done.
I’m not in the bulk business mailing industry.
But consider this: You have a Post Office Box. You are agreeing to the conditions of having that box. It is a voluntary agreement on your part.
You are free to remove your box, pull the post out of the ground, and never recieve junk mail again. You would effectively be cancelling your agreement.
I suppose you’re never looking at commercials on television, listening to them on the radio, or reading billboards on the highways, either right? Good, I wouldn’t want to see you being inconsistent. Paying for cable television and there being ads on there? Shudder! The horror!
Ads are a fact of life. Paid for ads fund other things we want and need. Television itself is an ad medium. If there were no ads, we’d not have much television programming. It’s a capitalist, for-profit venture. It doesn’t exist to serve you news, entertainment, or the arts. It exists to sell ads. Rush Limbaugh isn’t on the radio just to inform the masses, he’s selling advertising.
The Post Office is lucky to have such good businesses advertising like they do. I know it costs a LOT to advertise even in small communities for a local business. But the bulk advertising is a great way for small businesses to advertise to a targeted area. Some ads go to rural addresses only, not in town, and some are vice versa. Some only go to ONE mail route in an office, even when there are multiple mail routes. This is very good for businesses.
If you don’t want ads SO BAD that you’ll stoop to such hyperbole as calling it worse than prostitution, hey, communist countries probably don’t have much advertising. Maybe you’d be happier there than in a capitalist country where businesses are free enterprise. I am so sorry for you that your trash costs are so high that a few bulk business mailings are breaking the bank, or whatever. I suppose you could burn it, that would be much cheaper. Matches are often given away, so those don’t have to cost either. Oh, wait, there’s ads in free matchbooks.
I’ve been hearing the “stop Saturday delivery to save money” for over 30 years.
Never listen to any politician. Just watch what they do.
I agree. I only check my box once or twice a week.
Beyond Netflix DVD’s and a couple of bills I can’t get online, everything else in my box is trash.
First I’m a hypocrite and now I’m a communist.
All because I don’t think a constitutionally mandated, government sponsored organization should use it’s unique position to force citizens to recieve crap they don’t want.
312 days per year, we get junk mail. 312 days I have to take 30 seconds to a few minutes of my life to sort through crap I never asked for and don’t want. Open solicitations disguised as legitimate correspondence. Do the math. It’s not inconsequential. I’ve put all the junk mail in a box, just to see how much comes in. Less than a month will fill a copy paper box. There are about 200k households in my city. That’s a mountain.
I’d love to rip out my mailbox, except they’d deliver the crap anyhow and toss it on my porch - ask me how I know. And, unfortunately, not every utility has internet billing.
How many people, if given the choice, would accept junk mail? My guess is something even less than the low-single-digit response rates most bulk ad campaigns bring in.
Unlike television, radio, internet, etc. I don’t have a choice with mail delivery. I can’t opt out of it and I have lost correspondence that I suspect got caught up in one of the many ad flyers that get immediately tossed in our house. Maybe my neighborhood in the city is unusual, but we get bunches of the stuff, despite being on the DMA list.
I’m sure that if the people sending this stuff my way knew that not only does all of it get tossed, any business I recognize I will purposely not patronize, they might not sned me any more. But there’s no mechanism to stop it, certainly not on my end. These days, the ratio of crap to legitimate correspondence is something like 10:1. It’s getting out of hand.
Worse, just like the glazier’s fallacy, it is a tremendous waste of physical and human resources, creating, printing, packaging and delivering a bunch of paper that goes directly into the trash (likely in the upper 90% of cases) without ever having been read by anyone but the sender.
I’ve heard the argument that it lowers the cost of mail. I reject it. If it weren’t for junk mail, based on my experience of the amount I receive, the USPS wouldn’t need at least half, if not more, of the staff it has. Costs would drop tremendously, and we’d all be better off.
Would it still be free enterprise if they sent me concrete blocks that I didn’t want and which had to dispose of? How about used motor oil? Why is it suddenly free enterprise when its a large amount of paper that comes a little bit at a time?
You have the option to remove your mailbox. If they still deliver by throwing it on you porch, complain to the PO that they’re trespassing.
But you can’t honestly slight businesses advertising in a desperate attempt to STAY in business in this economy, and still call yourself a Freeper? Can you?
If concrete blocks were the most efficient and cost effective method to mail an advertisement on, sure it would be free enterprise. I don’t see that happening, but in the same vein, they have a use also, just like all that paper you could be burning for free, or lining your pet cage.
You just want to whine. Face it. I don’t mind the “junk” mail as I know it is friends of mine trying to run a business by drumming up more business. I wish they could afford MORE advertising, but times are tight.
To fix the Post Office, we need to fix the economy. To fix the economy, we need to fix the Government. Like, as in neuter it. Whine all you want about UNCONSTITUTIONAL programs first, then we can get back to the PO at a later date. The PO is a constitutionally approved function of the government.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.