[PLUG] Spam law update
Dylan Reinhardt
plug at dylanreinhardt.com
Mon Oct 21 18:05:30 UTC 2002
>Less volume makes the system less efficient, and, in turn, cost more.
Perhaps. Or the inefficiency might come from the other business ventures
they're plodding in to. USPS, a *federal agency*, is one of the largest
advertisers in the US. Why is it necessary to advertise a service that you
hold a legally granted monopoly for? Because they are actively branching
out into other domains, and that is simply not what they are good at, nor
what they have been created to do.
>> And that junk mail is subsidized *by* us, it's not a subsidy *to* us.
>
>How do you figure? The USPS doesn't get one penny of taxes. It's supported
>entirely by postage fees.
Yes, the USPS is funded through our postage. Bulk rates are significantly
cheaper than other kinds of delivery. There may be *some* efficiency to
bulk mail, in that it sorts faster or is pre-sorted. But the real expense,
delivery, presents few economies of scale. Every time we pay postage,
we're paying not only for the delivery of *our* mail but for the delivery
of *junk* mail.
>The only monopoly the USPS "enjoys" is sending first class mail. UPS,
>FedEx, Airborne, all of them, are able to move anything else. Even then,
>you can send correspondence through FedEx, they even call it a letter.
That little, insignificant monopoly is a $60+ billion business.
>You want FedEx et al to pick up at your doorstep daily?
Why not? Seems like they're here daily anyway. :-)
More to the point, who says that a competitor would try to do exactly the
same thing? The value of competitors is that they will try *different*
things. Seems to me that one of the big cost factors in the USPS model is
that they are burdened with the expectation of daily home visits to every
address in the country. Talk about inefficiency! Eliminate the bulk mail
and the daily at-home pick-up and you've got a far cheaper model to work
with.
Would it really be such a bad thing if first class delivery happened only
three times a week or if you had to put your mail in the box at the corner
if you needed same-day pickup? There's *lots* of room for innovation, but
the USPS won't be able to make it fly... only a private competitor will.
> From what I understand, the big package movers don't want the letter
> business.
They don't want the "replicate the USPS business model" business. If they
were allowed to deliver first class mail, they'd find a better way of doing
it. There are tens of billions at stake, of course they want a piece of
that business. They just don't want to play be the same rules as the post
office and I don't blame them... the USPS doesn't want to play by those
rules either. Problem is, they're stuck with them.
The problem here is not that all government agencies or monopolies are evil
or inefficient. It's that when you ask customers to declare their
requirements up front, they usually over-specify... when you offer a range
of services at varying prices, *then* they show what they'll really pay for.
The USPS is in much the same problem as the Apple Newton (trying
desperately to make this a little on topic). When Apple did their
research, what they heard was that handwriting recognition would have to be
a *key* component of any PDA device. And they did it, and nobody bought
it. What Palm proved was that focus groups are often misleading... making
a product that worked more reliably and cheaply by *not* giving customers
handwriting recognition proved to be a much more successful proposition.
We constantly tell the USPS that daily home visits are at the very heart of
our most basic expectations. We endow that expectation with the force of a
legal mandate. But I suspect that if daily visits were put side-by-side
with a service offered a different model, we would see what people are
actually willing to pay for pretty quickly.
Dylan
(if you'd like to continue this, I'd be happy to move over to plug-talk)
More information about the PLUG
mailing list