Postal Service Urged to Weigh Delivering Mail Three Days a Week
Privatizing the Postal Service, as countries including Germany and the Netherlands have done, is an “unlikely” option for the U.S. because it wouldn’t be attractive to investors, McKinsey said.
When you start from flawed and invalid premises, you can only come up with flawed and incorrect conclusions.
Where does McKinsey & Company get off stating that privatizing mail delivery wouldn't work. The only reason why we don't have private mail delivery today, is because it is against the law. Federal Express, U.P.S., ... are all currently delivering packages daily, around the world. How difficult do you think it would be for them to also deliver mail?
Leave it to a government funded study to prove that the government is the only organization that can perform a specific function.
Actually, there have been some independent tests run, from back before Fedex took over USPS's parcel service. Turns out that USPS was consistently the fastest, most reliable, and did the least damage. Fedex came in a reasonable second. UPS broke and lost as much as they delivered, and what did arrive came late. If you've ever been to the UPS regional sorting warehouse in Pacoima, why becomes painfully obvious. You don't see the USPS using a forklift to push around a mountain of broken parcels, but that's the norm at UPS.
ReplyDeleteCanada-Post is privatized, and despite that Canada and the U.S. are comparable otherwise (it's not like Canada is some 3rd-world country) mail service is HORRIBLE compared to USPS. Slow, high loss rate, high damage rate (it's not at all unusual for mail to arrive looking like the sled dogs chewed on it) and at small offices, there is some snooping in private mail, since there's no real oversight outside the company. (I've had regular correspondence with Canadians since 1974, so I've gotten to see the results at first-hand.)
The big problem the USPS is having financially is that they were forced to switch to a more-costly retiree-health-benefits arrangement, which along with the 2007 spike in gas prices, caused a big operating loss. Before that, they were in the black. Handy chart: http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt07/summary.htm
I also wonder how much revenue might actually lost by subcontracting parcel delivery to Fedex, and how much that has caused the price of USPS parcel service to go up?? After all, Fedex needs to make the same profit on parcels it carries for USPS as on parcels it carries solely for itself. Conversely, USPS only needs to break even; it is not required to make a profit, as it WOULD be if it were privatized. Do you really want your mail held hostage to the ol' bottom line??
There are a *few* things gov't does better than the private sector. Mail, in my observation, is one of them.