How the USPS Killed Digital Mail 338
An anonymous reader writes "In 2013, a startup called Outbox drew a lot of attention for its ambitious goal: digitizing everybody's snail mail. It was a nice dream; no more walking down your driveway six days a week to clear out the useless junk it contained. But less than a year later, Outbox shut down. This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. 'We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said Outbox's business model 'will never work anyway. Digital is a fad.' The USPS wouldn't work with Outbox to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business."
Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Do you like golf, Mr. Kramer?
Re:Incomplete (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Incomplete (Score:5, Informative)
The USPS is, in fact, a Government agency: [wikipedia.org]
"The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office and U.S. Mail, is an independent agency of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. The USPS traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, where Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general. The cabinet-level Post Office Department was created in 1792 from Franklin's operation and transformed into its current form in 1971 under the Postal Reorganization Act."
Required by the US Constitution, and a cabinet-level post back in 1792. Spun off as an independent GOVERNMENT agency in 1972.
Re:My biggest gripe (Score:4, Informative)
WRONG.
USPS does have such a service. It's called click-n-ship.
https://www.usps.com/business/... [usps.com]
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:5, Informative)
The postmaster General is right, those 400 junk mailers are paying for the entire system. That letter you send once a year for $.50 doesn't even come close to paying the billions those junk mailers pay that provides the money the USPS needs to have 100K employees and a fleet of vehicles and planes that would dwarf some governments.
Contrary to what some small government people claim, the USPS is the envy of the world. The overhead is near non-existent and the delivery network is world class in efficiency. Private companies can't come near the efficiency of the post office. The reason we have a system so efficient is that the natural monopoly was recognized and non-profit corporation beholden to government was created. It's a good thing that the post office recognizes that the customers paying the bills are the junk mailers. It's also a good thing that the USPS is overseen by government regulators (except of course congresses attempt to kill the USPS by mandating that they contribute 75 years worth of retirement in 10 years). That government regulations guarantees that it's a crime for anyone to open my mail, and that the courts have precedence putting searching the mail as equivalent to breaking into your house and reading your diary. This "service" would be a field day for the NSA because the digital records would not have the same protection that he physical envelope does.
If private run companies like UPS were doing first class mail the delivery charge for a first class letter would be several dollars.
You don't need it (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need something like this anyway.
1) get your bills electronically, and/or set them up for automatic payments
2) use dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com to stop virtually all junk mail (former for 'regular' junk mail, latter for the credit card offers). Yes, they're run by the junk mail companies, but they work, and no, I don't work for them.
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:5, Informative)
The USPS has not received a dime in Tax dollars while I've been alive and that's a long fucking time. That $5 billion dollar loss you heard about last year and trumpeted by the small government pinheads was in fact a fake loss created by congress that had no material affect on their operations. It was a failure to deposit $5 billion into a retirement fund for USPS employees that haven't been born yet.
Get your facts straight.
Re:Their business model sucked (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the failure of Outbox is barely connected to USPS policy. "their market model needed to scale quickly to become profitable". It didn't. The end. Their big problem was paying for the fleet of vehicles? Wow, no one could ever see that coming [wikipedia.org].
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what USPS service you have, but in my experience:
1. USPS is rarely less expensive sending packages than FedEx or UPS.
2. USPS has slower delivery times than FedEx or UPS.
3. USPS has a much higher rate of package damage than FedEx or UPS.
4. USPS has a generally less helpful and less polite staff in the offices than FedEx or UPS.
It is inferior in every way. We can talk about delivery of letters to mailboxes, but I'm sure you know that the mailboxes on the side of the road are considered to be property of USPS. It is illegal for anyone other than USPS to deliver a letter, package, or anything else to that mailbox.
This means that if FedEx or UPS wanted to enter that business they would forced to set up secondary post boxes or deliver directly to the house by foot. I don't know how much this enters into the economics, but god dammit, that's my fucking mailbox.
I paid for it. I dug the hold. I set the post. I poured the concrete. It's my mailbox. Their dictatorial annexation of the mailbox that came from me is exceptionally douchey and for that alone USPS should be smacked upside the head.
If you have USPS service so exceptional that you find it to be truly better than all other alternatives, well, great, good for you. It just doesn't seem to mirror the experience that I and everyone else I know has.
Re:Their business model sucked (Score:3, Informative)
All of my paper mail, thankyou. I will decide what is private and what is not.
Google wannabes can fuck off.
View from the other side (Score:5, Informative)
http://postalnews.com/postalne... [postalnews.com]
If nothing else, TFA doesn't sound like a particularly unbiased source.
Re:Incomplete (Score:2, Informative)
they lied. businesses have always funded retiremen (Score:1, Informative)
Someone lied to you. When a private business tries to pull the shit USPS did with their retirement plan, someone goes to jail.
What's being required of USPS is that they do what everyone else does - if you promise today's employees that you'll pay them for today's work, but pay them later, you have to actually set aside money to make that payment. What they were doing is telling people working today that they'd get billions of dollars in pay 10, 20, or 30 years from now when they retire. They weren't putting any money aside to fund those promises, though.
When a private employer makes a promise like that, not only do they put money aside, they almost always hand it over to a third party trustee so that the company couldn't even spend the money if they wanted to.
Here's the thing about long term into the future. USPS was decades behind, they were having trouble paying people who worked 30 years ago with money USPS just got last year. Basically, they were 30 years in hole. Congress said that they needed to a) stop getting further behind and b) have a long-term plan to eventually get caught up, so that 30 years from now they'll be paying for work as it's done, not promising to pay for it years later.
Re:BOO FUCKING HOO! (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not. The problem with USPS is that they have to pre-pay pensions 70 years out. No other Government agency or private company needs to do this, that's purely USPS regulation thanks to Congress. That is their main hurdle, not the unions or employees "getting paid too much" (seriously, do you even know any postal workers?).
That's not how memory works. (Score:4, Informative)
The problem you're having is that you don't understand how memory works. Your brain isn't a tape-recorder. You remember some of the ideas expressed, and then use those to reconstruct the conversation after the fact. Everything you remember is paraphrased. It's not creative license, nor is it a lie. You simply don't remember the precise details.