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It's not a business. It's a service.
Yes, of course.
The service they provide is, primarily, the conveyance of trash to every residence in the US.
Sure, they also transport various papers and small packages, including (once upon a time) children.
But their core service is trash distribution. They transport hundreds of pieces of trash for every letter and package they also deliver.
I don't know what the solution to all that trash is. I don't think the postal service should be privatized or disbanded. But, it is a trash-supported platform.
I think they should become a basic, cashless banking service. Direct deposit, debit card, nothing fancy. No commercial loans; only treasury securities, with interest paid through to depositors.
Universal access banking. Force commercial banks and payment processors to unfuck themselves if they want to keep customers.
Let banking become their core service, and they can reduce/eliminate their trash distribution service.
You're fixating on a symptom, not a cause. What you're really concerned about is the parasitic nature of predatory marketing. That's where all the garbage comes from. If you changed the USPS the way you say, all that trash would migrate to other delivery services. Attack the root cause: predatory marketing.
Edit: typos
It costs about $4.50/pc to send local junkmail via UPS or FedEx, vs $0.24 via USPS.
Junk mail exists only because the USPS exists to deliver it. USPS exists (in its current form) only because of junk mail. There is no "root cause". It's a synergistic relationship between the two.
Transition the focus of the USPS to other essential services, like cashless banking. Abandon the trash delivery service.
I see this is going nowhere. Good luck out there
You can see this isn't going the way you want it to.
At $4.50 per piece, marketers are going to move away from physical mailers, and toward other marketing options. Most are going to do that at far less than $4.50/pc. Most bulk mailers would abandon the practice well below even first class mailing rates. USPS sets their bulk mailing rate with the specific intention of keeping the bulk mail business that funds their operations.
USPS money orders are (were) the standard for reliable, secure transfer of money. Recipients of postal money orders knew they were good, and demanded them over personal checks and even cashier's checks in some cases.
There is room for the USPS to enter into basic, universal access banking services, providing accounts to anyone who needs one. They could then reasonably expand to compete with usurious payday lenders, driving them out of the market. They could operate as a payment processor, competing with Visa and MasterCard, driving down their obscene rates on every purchase.
Basically, there's a lot more that the postal service could, and should be doing instead of delivering trash.