Posted on 01/24/2014 4:31:53 PM PST by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(CNN) - The U.S. Postal Service is raising the price of stamps by three cents, from 46 to 49 cents, beginning Sunday.
The hike is the largest increase in consumer postage prices in more than a decade.
It will affect millions of people, even though fewer Americans these days use snail mail to pay bills and keep in touch.
(Excerpt) Read more at 19actionnews.com ...
(1) Eliminate Monday deliveries
(2) Allow 3 times a week regular mail and express pickup for rural addresses at a centralized site.
(3) Be like Facebook, become a social media site where people can get all their junk mail, regular mail, coupons, etc at a government-grade secure @postoffice.com address. Allow ads for free subscribers; implement an annual fee ($39.99) for no ads and full subscription benefits.
(4) Cut the price of all stamps and package deliveries by 20%
(5) Give retirees a lump-sum payout and existing workers get moved to a 401(k) plan.
(6) Buy out MoneyGram or Western Union, and become more involved in the bill-pay and short-term lending business.
Why Monday? Saturday delivery is useless. In fact, I get little to no mail on Saturdays anyway.
They aren’t open on Sunday, so how can they raise the prices on Sundays?
I get my most important mail on Saturday.
(7) Create a time machine and go back in time to when their service was more in demand.
You didn’t mention “eliminate the postal employees union”.
THAT is the REAL source of their financial woes.
Unions are an economic time bomb. Particularly public sector unions.
Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, President's Day, Labor Day, Christmas Eve & Christmas Day, 4th of July - all falls on a Monday.
I can not remember the year when I last bought a stamp.
For me, they are as obsolete as the buggy-whip.
I can recall back in 07’ I believe I used a postage stamp on a letter.
“(7) Create a time machine and go back in time to when their service was more in demand.”
(8) Develop a process for back charging bulk mailers for your time and effort in disposing of their useless crap. Virtually all our mail is throwaway stuff. The idea that we are subsidizing these people in their quest to kill trees with higher first-class postage is nuts. It angers me to have to walk from the mailbox to the recycle bin every day.
Pathetic increase for international mail/packages. My Home business has sales which are 65% overseas. Over the last two years USPS rates have gone up 20% for the sake of inefficient Gov. unions. THIS WILL HURT!
(3) Be like Facebook, become a social media site where people can get all their junk mail....
Personally, I would RAISE the price of any/all “junk mail” to over a dollar a page. You cannot imagine the amount of crap mail that arrives everyday here in my office. Not only do we receive one copy of something, we receive MULTIPLE copies of the same things. That needs to be completely stopped. Our rural mail carrier says it drives her crazy to have to sort that crap and include it with whatever mail she has to deliver at EVERY stop.
I agree, our government is far and away the most wrong-headed spender around.
Company after company, has stopped retirement spending, and even exported jobs.
Our government however continues to spend, and spend.
Stop spending. But bring back American jobs. Now
Yes that and eliminate the union and outsource much of their retail operations to actual established retail operations.
Postal Service, union wrangle over Staples
The average postal clerk earns about $25 an hour, according to the union, plus a generous package of health and retirement benefits. The Staples post office counters are run by nonunion workers often making little more than the minimum wage.
Yes it takes someone making $25 an hour + benefits to sell me a book of stamps or take a priority or certified mail package. / s
The only postal mail I get is junk mail (and I even don’t get much of that anymore) and a couple of magazines to which I subscribe but probably won’t renew. I have all my payment reminders sent to me via email. I pay all my bills on line. I haven’t written but one or two checks or mailed anything in years. If I order something from Amazon or make any other online purchases, it typically comes via UPS. If I have something really important or valuable to send, I send it FedEx.
The last time I wrote a check and mailed it was about a month ago and fortunately I had some of those “Forever Stamps” that I bought several years ago. This was for a small medical bill that I didn’t know I owed that had been sent to a collection agency but since they and the medical office had my address incorrect, I didn’t receive any notices. It wasn’t until the collection agency called me and I asked them to send the bill to me in writing (I wasn’t going to pay over the phone) that I discovered they didn’t have my correct address. When I got the bill, there was no option to pay on line so I had to crack open my dusty checkbook, find a stamp and an envelope and then I tried to find a mailbox. Jeeze I remember when there was one on just about every corner. I ended up putting it in the outbound mail bin at work.
If the USPS permanently closed up tomorrow, I’d barely notice.
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