IN 1753 the British Crown appointed Benjamin Franklin postmaster of its American colonies. He brought in new accounting methods, established the penny post, arranged for mail to be carried day and night and introduced newspaper delivery for a small fee. By 1760, the post office in North America turned a profit for the first time. The Crown eventually dismissed the canny postmaster for his revolutionary activities. Today, the United States Postal Service (USPS) badly needs something similar. On November 13th it reported a net loss of $5.1 billion in the 2015 fiscal year.
The loss is the latest in a steady delivery of poor results going back nearly a decade. The last year America’s post earned a profit was in 2006, when mail volume peaked at 213.1 billion pieces. By 2015, total mail volume had fallen to 154.2 billion pieces, a 28% drop. The biggest decline has been in first-class mail, its main moneymaker. Shifts in the way people communicate and pay bills means fewer letters are in the post. Banking is done electronically and people use social media, texts or e-mail to send messages, pictures and Christmas cards. Even weekly newspapers sometimes arrive on mobile devices.
Yet this shift has also had its benefits for the postal service. Online shoppers have increased from 172.3m in 2010 to 201.7m. Package volume at post offices is up 14.1%, and package...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1T1f6zp
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