Say the stamp costs double and it now costs a dollar to mail an envelope instead of 50 cents. No one is priced out of mailing a letter, and we are in a better position s the net benefit is better off (total cost is lower than the previous total cost)
I personally doubt that the drop in volume is all that much related to prices. If they cut the price of a first-class stamp in half, mail volume would not go up much, because what we mail vs what we call/e-mail/fax/whatever is almost always based on capabilities, not cost. Likewise, if the price of a first-class stamp went up by 50%, I really don't see the extra 22 cents (or whatever it would be now) influencing all that many people to stop sending mail. A letter is already vastly more expensive than an e-mail. It seems to me that those items which are being mailed are those items which more or less have to be mailed.
1. You always know how much a standard letter will cost, no matter where it's going. If you're mailing 100 letters to 100 locations, they all cost the same. Standard exemptions apply for rate changes every few years and for heavy items.
2. Based on the cash flow of the USPS, you're not subsidizing anyone by buying stamps :)
That unsolicited mail is what keeps it cheap though. Without that, a stamp would cost a few dollars each. Chances are all the people who send you paper that you do want would want to charge you for the privilege if it cost that much.
It doesn't have to be more expensive. if they cooperate with the companies that the deliver the profitable part of mail, the gain access to those economies of scale.
Because it's a small price to pay for being able to send mail across the country for 55 cents. If most of the funding for the USPS came from people buying stamps to send out birthday and christmas cards, they'd either have to jack up the price considerably, or they wouldn't stop by your house 6 days a week to see if you have anything to send.
It’s more beneficial to have a flat postage rate that doesn’t price people out of living in certain areas simply due to postage rates. First class mail is an essential service.
Actual prices for bulk mail, that is. It costs a lot less to deliver the same piece of mail into 1000 adjacent mailboxes than it does to send 1000 letters to different addresses around the country.
Whatever utility they find in it. Economic benefit doesn't necessarily mean you find cash in your mailbox, it could be something that saves you a few minutes every day or improves your productivity by simply making you feel good.
At current prices, sending out physical letters isn't a cheap process. A dollar or two to handle stamps is only going to send out two to four letters, and that's before counting paper, envelopes, printing, and handling.
It's a service that charges the same for mailing a letter from rural Alaska to New York as it charges from New Jersey to New York, to facilitate communication and commerce. A situation where a loss on this one service is far outweighed by the benefits it brings to the society and economy. And it's not even running at a loss a fair portion of the time.
> The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.
That's also true of the internet. It doesn't cost anything to email someone who's right next to you or who is across the globe. There is very little demand for mail these days and that's pretty obvious from watching the linked USPS advertisement.
This reminds me of the time in the mid-90s when the USPS wanted to charge the price of a stamp for "email". I believe this was because the word mail was used in electronic mail.
I have not had a positive interaction with USPS in years. I don't understand why our taxes subsidize people to hand-deliver junk mail. What an inefficient use of taxpayer funds. With the exception of federal mail, why not jack the prices up tremendously? Stamps are 55 cents now per letter. Make them $1.50 and make everyone else rent a PO box or do digital scanning.
The theory is that (as, at one time, with rural electrification and universal telephone service), there is societal value to having more or less universal mail delivery. That said, as the importance of physical mail as a communications mechanism declines, it becomes harder to argue that the USPS shouldn't need to cover its costs.
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