[PLUG-TALK] OT: [PLUG] Spam law update

[Dylan Reinhardt]

At 01:08 PM 10/21/2002 -0700, you wrote:
<snipped>why does USPS advertise?</snip>
>It's necessary in this day and age because they have to build up their 
>image in the general publics eye.

Perhaps.

It seems pretty clear to me that first class mail requires no 
advertising... it is their *other* services which require 
advertising.  Fundamentally, I think it's a mistake for the USPS to be 
pursuing this hybrid public/private business model.  It's a government 
agency, not a business.  It may well pay for itself and provide an 
important, necessary, service.  But it is not a business and can only do 
itself and its customers harm by attempting to create expectations it can't 
fulfill.

>Right, wrong or indifferent, if the USPS doesn't toot it's own horn, then 
>it will suffer from the negative campaigns put on by the profit motivated 
>competitors. And don't get me wrong, they ARE competitors.

Only to the extent that USPS attempts to penetrate markets that others have 
created.  It's not as though FedEx came along and stole USPS's lucrative 
overnight letter business.  Such a thing simply didn't exist (on a large 
scale) before FedEx offered it.


>We're paying for delivery of our first class letter to it's destination. 
>At about 40 cents, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than any other country in 
>the world, and we have better service.

The price of a service and the cost of a service are not necessarily 
related.  Just because you pay $.40 to send a letter and a bulk mailer 
spends $.30 to send a brochure doesn't mean that the costs are proportionate.

To be sure, the major cost of postal delivery is the frequency with which a 
carrier has to visit each address.  Judging from my own mailbox, it seems 
that fully 3/4 of the time the carrier visits my house, it is for the 
purpose of delivering bulk mail.  At least 1/3 of that is addressed "Resident".

Bulk mail certainly may sort faster, but it appears to ensure a baseline 
level of daily visits.  One might argue that this makes first class 
cheaper, since the cost of a visit becomes assumed as a sunken cost... but 
the reverse is at least equally true.  So long as your baseline service 
assumption includes daily visits, bulk mail appears cheaper than it is.

Either way, the assumption of daily visits to every address is the major 
cost of mail and the thing which we most vehemently protect.  Bulk mail is 
only cheap insofar as we're willing to assume the costs of visits as a given.


>First, if you don't have any inbound mail, they aren't required to pick up 
>outgoing. So that's a half arguement.

But you always have inbound mail since the volume of junk mail is so 
high.  I realize this is getting a bit circular... it comes back to what 
your assumptions are and I disagree with the assumptions that are being made.

>>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.
>
>And we can watch yet another great American institution go to hell. We did 
>it to the telephone system, so why not the postal system too.

Or we could attempt to preserve it beyond its useful lifetime just for the 
sake of insulating ourselves from change.  We did it for Chrysler and the 
steel industry, why not the post office?


>The move billions of peices of mail and lose a very small percentage of 
>it. For about 40 cents, you can sent a letter from anywhere in the country 
>to anywhere else in the country, and have it arrive in about 3 days.

No doubt a hurculean task and a feat of tremendous logistical 
sophistication.  Granted.


>I do not believe the money making entities could do that.

Clearly.  And that's where I have to question your assumptions.  How could 
we possibly know what we have shown no interest in finding out?

And what's so evil about money-making entities?  USPS is, after all, a 
money making entity itself, is it not?  The late, lamented Ma Bell was a 
money-making entity, yes?

Qwest, Verizon and Ameritech may not be improvements over Bell, but that 
obscures a larger point: you no longer have to use one company for your 
telco business.  You can get the full range of telco services from smaller, 
local competitors.  You can get VoIP, cell/digital wireless, and other 
feeds that bypass the phone company entirely.  They may have been in a 
position to thwart the large-scale deployment of DSL, but the RBOCS are 
getting their lunch eaten in a big way, longer term.

Allowing private companies to compete against first class mail would 
probably lead to some inefficiency and sub-optimal conditions in the short 
run.  In the longer run, buyers will gravitate toward the services they 
*actually* value and sellers will gravitate toward offering them as 
efficiently as possible.

The problem here is not that the USPS is inefficient or dumb, it's that 
they are required to deliver on too broad a set of requirements.  That is 
the advantage private companies enjoy is that they only have to listen to 
what we say we want insofar as we're actually willing to pay for it.  The 
USPS is stuck with requirements we don't want to pay for.  It's an 
impossible task and they deserve tremendous credit for delivering it at 
all.  But it's not as though the situation couldn't be made better.

Dylan