The postal service's lack of flexibility (including cutting personnel, locations, and benefits) isn't the underlying problem though. The "fat" you speak of has been plaguing the post office for decades but it has also been plaguing every other employer- healthcare and fuel costs rise for every business. Also, despite the unions and the lack of flexibility of the post office, they have still found ways to cut costs- the biggest being that they've dropped the amount for career employees from 700,000 in 2004 to 500,000 in 2019 and reduced pay for many non-career positions.
Every business needs to adapt to a changing market and I understand that the USPS can't adapt as much as other businesses but, realistically, they shouldn't need to. Their mail volume has been dropped significantly but they've more than compensated with their package volume and increased rates. So tell me, despite all these countermeasures (cutting employees, raising rates, package increase), why are they still losing so much money? Honestly, I think what pushes them over the edge (into the red) is simply a loss of negotiating power. Why does Amazon get such great shipping discounts? epackets? Why do corporations send junk mail for pennies? It all has to do with the USPS losing its negotiating power. There are too many alternatives for regular mail (email, texts, etc) and it's a race to the bottom for UPS, FedEX, and USPS when it comes to Amazon.
Amazon is simply too big for the USPS to refuse its discounts to. I'm not going to say this is the main cause of our rates going through the roof, but it certainly doesn't help. I imagine that if Amazon had to pay what we pay, the post office would be more than capable of being in the black again. As mentioned before, it would also greatly help if China wasn't considered a "developing" country anymore and actually paid the correct price for shipping.
-We can certainly talk about cutting the fat, maybe restructuring benefits or something, but we have to be careful with how far we're willing to go. If you suddenly privatized the post office (or got rid of the unions) it would likely result in many cutbacks that many Americans probably don't want. Cutbacks like removing Saturday deliveries, holding mail back, and even more extreme measures like completely shutting down certain post offices or forcing people to have PO boxes/communal mail boxes. I also believe people won't deliver mail for $12 an hour without benefits unless the job became much easier. Before I left (7 years ago), they were hiring people for $14 an hour and every single one of them quit because of the stress.
