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."
Their business model sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, the idea of a company opening my private mail for me, reading it, scanning it in, then making it available to me bugs the crap out of me.
Were these guys trying to get a contract with the NSA? Or did they just want to read my stuff themselves?
Re:Incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
OH so I guess all of that DIDN'T happen.
Thanks Ralph!
Re:Their business model sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you willing to pay them more than the combined members of the Direct Marketing Association, who'll crush the USPS like insects if they allow you, the product, to opt out of their service?
Direct Marketers own the USPS, lock, stock and barrel.
Re:Incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet Congress gets to set their budget and give them unrealistic unfunded mandates that no business or government agency could hope to achieve (ie funding retirement for workers not yet born).
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2010 the USPS brought in $17,300 [npr.org] million dollars from standard mail, there were 117.5 [wikipedia.org] million households in 2010 which means the USPS was paid roughly $147 per household to deliver bulk mailings.
Re:Their business model sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Google "Earth Class Mail."
These services existed before Outbox and continue to exist now that it's gone. They just don't assume that the USPS wants to facilitate their businesses for free (or at a loss), so you don't see their CEOs being interviewed for hand-wringing articles about how bad the government is.
I have no doubt that the USPS is run by incompetents, but that doesn't mean they're the only incompetents in this story.
Call the Waaaaaaahhhhmbulance.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than continuing to bitch about how your darling child idea didn't work out, maybe you should just come up with something else and move on?
This is getting a bit old...
Re:USPS should offer a subscription service (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Their business model sucked (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, if I could just find a service that would burn my mail instead of delivering it to my door, I'd be happy. I have to empty the bin into my fireplace every few months and it's irritating.
Re:Incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
While they don't collect funds collected via taxes, they also don't PAY taxes on many things
See, they aren't that different from other big corporations, after all.
Re:Incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
It only seems fair since the government has already spent the wages of those not yet born.
Re:BOO FUCKING HOO! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree completely. Were the founders of this startup really that naive? I could have told them this was a stupid idea years ago. The USPS has two main revenue streams: 1) junk mail, and 2) small packages (they're a big fan of Ebay; they're also working with Amazon now to do Sunday deliveries in some places). They also are a fan of Netflix, and work with them to ship movies faster (the USPS scans the returned movies before Netflix gets them, so Netflix can send your next queued DVD before they get the old one back).
What ever gave them the idea that the USPS would be in favor of screwing over one of their main customers (the junk mailers)?
If you don't like junk mail, think about it this way: the junk mailers are keeping the USPS afloat, and basically subsidizing cheap First Class delivery for everyone.
Re:Incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Not entirely true. While they don't collect funds collected via taxes, they also don't PAY taxes on many things, like say property taxes for their offices, sorting facilities, etc. So they indirectly are Government funded, at the state and municipality level.
So they're funded in the same way religious groups and non-profit organizations are funded by the government.
Re:Incomplete (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a completely untrue myth. Much closer to the truth is that the government has massively slashed taxes on the mega-wealthy without dropping its spending nearly enough to pay for the overwhelming cut. If taxes on the wealthy simply returned to the levels we had in the 1960s, the deficit would go massively negative, and the debt would be paid off in approximately two decades.
Fat chance that will ever get through Congress though.
Re:Incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, they already pay 70% or more of all income tax paid in the US, depending on which level of rich you want to look at. The 1%ers everybody gripes about pay over half. 1% of the people pay half the tax. 10% pay around three-quarters of the tax. And yet people still gripe about not paying their fair share.
Exactly what percentage of the income tax receipts in any year should be paid by the top 1%, the top 10%, the top 50%, the bottom 50%?
For all the talk about how the US is not socialized, please explain how the top half pays the whole bill and the bottom quarter actually gets money out? That, by definition, is government transferring wealth which is very socialistic.
Re:Incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Much closer to the truth is that the government has massively slashed taxes on the mega-wealthy without dropping its spending nearly enough to pay for the overwhelming cut. If taxes on the wealthy simply returned to the levels we had in the 1960s, the deficit would go massively negative, and the debt would be paid off in approximately two decades.
I guess you haven't heard of the Laffer curve [wikipedia.org] then, eh?
Are you really naive enough about macroeconomics to believe that you could simply switch from the current tax brackets up to 90% or whatever taxation of the wealthiest, with everything else in the economy just remaining exactly the same, so we could pay off the debt? Changing economic policy on such a huge scale simply cannot let everything else remain exactly the same.
Basic principle of the Laffer curve: If you tax at 0% interest rate, you'll get no government revenue, obviously. If you take at 100% interest rate, you'll get no tax revenue, because people will have no incentive to work and/or people will move out of the country to avoid taxes. So, at some point between 0% and 100%, there is a point where you get maximum revenue.
You see, when you decrease tax rates below 100%, you leave more money in the private economy. That additional money goes into whatever rich people do with it -- most don't simply bury all of it under their mattress. Often, a lot of it gets invested. Those investments earn more money. And that additional money then gets taxed as more income -- hence additional government revenue. If rich people invest in companies, those companies might hire more employees, and those employees earn wages, which then can be taxed, for more government revenue. So, at least in some cases, leaving more money in the pockets of the rich will ultimately result in more tax revenue, not less.
Now, there are plenty of people who will debate the effects of tax breaks for the rich, and whether that money ends up "trickling down" to help middle class and poor people or not. But we don't need to debate Reaganomics here, because that's not the question. The question is not whether tax breaks help poor people, but whether tax raises will actually bring in more government revenue in the form of taxes.
And the answer is that maximum revenue probably lies somewhere in the middle. It's definitely less than 100%, but more than 0%, obviously. It's probably greater than our current tax liability for wealthy people (though some would disagree with that). But it's probably less than the 90% tax rate or whatever it was in the 1960s.
If you did increase taxes to that rate, you might be able to maintain some sort of revenue for a couple years, but it would drop off as rich people pulled back on investments, sent money into other countries or various tax shelters, etc.
And anyways... you really don't want to just suddenly pay off all the national debt. Trust me. Again, go read a macroeconomics textbook. I know that there's a lot of the mindset out there that we need to run our country like you'd balance your home checkbook, but your home checkbook doesn't issue sovereign currency, it can't force people to use its currency as legal tender, and it can't force people to pay it back in the form of taxes.
The point is: when the government goes into deficit, it increases the base money supply [wikipedia.org] (referred to variously as M0 or MB). Basically, the government "spends" money and that money shows up in the private economy as "currency." Central banks lend out that money. Other banks lend out that money. Rich people invest that money. Credit gets built on credit, which gets built on credit -- but it's all built on top of the base money supply.
If you start a massive debt reduction, you'll suck huge amounts of base money supply out of the economy. The only way for the private econom