In 2006 the Republican-controlled Congress and White House
passed and signed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act; this was
clearly an underhanded effort by Republicans to make the Postal Service
non-competitive with private carriers, and force it—by the requirement to pre-fund
retiree health care benefits to the tune of $5 billion a year—to shed services
in order to stay solvent. Their ultimate goal is to shut down the Postal
Service and privatize all postal delivery; although USPS receives no funding
from the federal government, it has certain expected responsibilities to
customers mandated by Congress, and cannot conduct its business like a private
business. While this is actually a good thing, it also suggests that Congress—or
at least Republicans—doesn’t have an inkling of the kind of “service” people
might expect if the mail delivery system as we know became privatized.
The aforementioned act prohibits the Postal Service from
functioning in a “non-competitive” fashion. But it already does so, in relation
to for-profit carriers like UPS, Fedex, DHL, Ontrac and others. It has been
reported that “thousands” of people woke-up Christmas Day to discover that
their presents were missing, thanks to undelivered packages that retailers like
Amazon promised their customers would be delivered in time for the holiday. Carriers
like UPS claimed that they were “swamped” by packages within a shortened
window, thanks to the late arrival of Thanksgiving Day this year, and bad
weather.
Yet strangely, USPS had rather less problems in this regard.
An order that Amazon informed me would arrive after Christmas in fact arrived
on the Sunday before, thanks to the fact that regardless of rain, hail, sleet
or snow, the Postal Service is mandated to provide “maximum” service regardless
of the cost—thus unlike those private carriers, it feels it has a greater “responsibility”
to customers, despite losing money in the process.
Perhaps like many people who make purchases from e-commerce
retailers like Amazon, I much prefer the shipping by USPS, and become disturbed
when any other carrier is involved in the process. Fedex, UPS, Ontrac and
especially DHL almost never deliver standard packaging on “expected” delivery
dates, while USPS quite often delivers a day or two earlier than “expected.” This
is because there is no profit for the private carriers in small package delivery
for home consumers. While ins some cases private carriers have coordinating agreements
(like Fedex’s “Smart Post”) with USPS to fly mail to certain locations and hand
it off to local post offices for the actual delivery, these “partnerships” seem
to benefit the private carriers more; they only ship when they have the time or
space, and USPS takes the blame for their tardiness.
The Postal Service handles 160 billion pieces of mail a year, about 40 percent of the world’s
total; yet its network is such that it can handle this volume that the private
carriers cannot possibly match even if
they tried. DHL, supposedly a U.S.-founded company but now a subsidiary of the
privately-run Deutsch Post, is an example of a carrier that dominated the world
small package delivery market everywhere—except the U.S. If you check the
Internet, you will find countless people expectorating their bile on DHL and
its “services.” International deliveries via DHL to the U.S. is beyond
horrible, with packages sitting in a warehouse in some place called Croydon, UK
for at least a month, but its domestic U.S. service makes one’s hair stand on
end. Whenever I see DHL as the shipping carrier for something I ordered, I’m
thinking NOOOOO! No matter how often I write Amazon begging not to use DHL—or any
other private carrier—on anything I’ve ordered, they still persist on using
them.
It is a fair question to ask “why?” since Amazon’s consumer
forums continually bewail the use of private carriers. While USPS works
overtime, in 2008, less than seven years after it entered the U.S. market, DHL temporarily
called it quits; it had suffered net losses $10 billion and let go 15,000
workers. Apparently that famous German “efficiency” is a matter of who defines
it. According to a story in BusinessWeek,
“DHL has faced massive criticism for the way it managed the U.S. business.
Readers responding to an earlier report on BusinessWeek.com,
many of them identifying themselves as DHL employees or customers, savagely attacked
what they said was lackadaisical service and top-heavy or even incompetent
management.”
DHL reentered the U.S. market recently, but only to overseas
shipments. Its chief competitors here, UPS and Fedex—despite longer presence in
this market—are no better suited or equipped to handle the enormous
responsibility that USPS has succeeded for the most part in carrying out. Unfortunately,
Republicans in Congress have made the Postal Service a partisan politics project,
making bogus claims that it is riddled with inefficiency while deliberately
making it more difficult to carry out its mission in the hope of eventually
killing it and privatizing the mail delivery system. We should all rue that day
if it ever comes.
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