I have a friend who saved all his junk mail for a year, so he could weigh it. He was convinced that he received more unsolicited mail than anybody, and wanted to prove it. The pile weighed over 40 pounds. Imagine his disappointment when he found out it was no more than average.
Indeed, Americans receive an average of 41 pounds of junk mail every year. That is over 5.5 million tons of paper, most of which ends up in landfills. One environmental organization claims junk mail contributes as much carbon to the atmosphere as seven states.
I know how to fix the problem, and in the process, solve most of what’s wrong with the Postal Service. It’s not complicated – it’s the price of junk mail.
Mail service has been an important part of American history, since the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as Postmaster General. His system became the Post Office Department, an organization so important that the Postmaster General was a member of the President’s Cabinet until 1971. Then, the Department was reorganized into the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), an “independent agency” that, in theory, would pay for its own operations from its own revenue.
Congress was tired of appropriating subsidies – also part of the long-term history of the service. But despite the best intentions, it still loses money every year. Today USPS has nearly 650,000 employees and 210,000 vehicles, the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleet. It serves, by law, every American home and business, for the same prices. Every day, 484 million pieces of mail are delivered by 30,825 post offices. Some of that is first class letters from friends and family – but the vast majority of it is not.
The Data and Marketing Association says businesses send 149.5 billion pieces of “direct mail” or “marketing mail” every year, along with 10 billion catalogs. That’s what most of us call “junk mail.” That just means mail we did not ask for, expect, or want. It doesn’t mean it is all junk, strictly speaking. Businesses would not waste money sending it if it didn’t work. Many Americans still buy from mail order catalogs, much more than they do from email solicitations.
That effectiveness is precisely the point. If such unsolicited mail is effective, and businesses are making money from it, why are they not paying the total cost of delivering it? Considering that the cards and letters we enjoy receiving cost 55 cents to mail, why should we charge less for advertisers to send us material we neither expect nor want? Yet when direct-mail marketers send first class bulk mail, they only pay 38 cents each. Even worse, 200 pieces or 50 pounds of marketing mail can be sent for just 19 cents each. With USPS losing between $5 billion and $16 billion almost every year in the last decade, those rates are a gift to advertisers that we cannot afford, and should not have to pay. If “marketing mail” paid even the same 55 cents as first class letters, the annual deficits would evaporate.
In explaining its financial mess, USPS invariably blames congressional mandates, especially the requirement to maintain small rural post offices. And when the agency proposed abolishing Saturday delivery, Congress blocked it. But if they really want to eliminate subsidies, neither of those cuts are required. They need only to charge advertisers the true cost of the service.
That sounds simpler than it is, because USPS does not control its rates. Congress created a separate regulatory agency to do that. But Congress never misses a chance to meddle on behalf of favored friends. Thus, the law requires lower rates for magazine publishers, non-profit groups, and of course, political parties.
Still, even the post office’s 244-year-old legal monopoly cannot force Americans to use services they no longer need. The real problem is simply that we no longer depend on snail mail, so the price of first class letters is almost irrelevant. Financial institutions, retail outlets, and even utilities now conduct transactions online, and most Americans communicate electronically.
Post offices were once the center of communities, a vital thread in the economic and social fabric of the country. Today, the daily mail is more of an irritation for most Americans, who no longer rely on it for important communications. Surely the service should be paid for by the advertisers who still need it.
The current business model, in the Internet age, is as obsolete as the Pony Express became in the age of telegraphs and railroads.
This column first appeared in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel April 26, 2019.
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