Amazon is offering the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service a lifeline, The Washington Post reported.
On Monday, the online retailer announced plans to use the postal service to deliver packages to U.S. customers seven days a week.
Thanks to the new deal, Amazon customers will pay regular mailing rates for weekend deliveries, The Los Angeles Times reported. In the past, a Sunday delivery sent via Express Mail cost extra.
Amazon will launch the new Sunday service in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas immediately, just in time for the holiday shopping rush. The rest of the country will follow suit in 2014.
To handle the additional mail load, the Postal Service will use its flexible scheduling of employees, USPS spokeswoman Sue Brennan said. The USPS isn’t planning to hire additional workers.
The partnership is expected to help the Postal Service, which lost $16 billion in the last year. Prior to the partnership, the USPS had been asking Congress for the authority to end Saturday delivery of letters in an effort to cut costs. According to The New York Times, the move will also help the Postal Service in its competition against United Parcel Service and FedEx.
“As online shopping continues to increase, the Postal Service is very happy to offer shippers like Amazon the option of having packages delivered on Sunday,” Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe said in a statement.
(Source: HuffPost)
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5 Responses
UPS and FedEx operate without subsidies and bailouts – unlike the Post Office. Why should the taxpayers be subsidizing parcel deliveries? If FedEx and UPS will deliver packages without charging the taxpayers, who needs the Post Office?
“UPS and FedEx operate without subsidies and bailouts – unlike the Post Office. Why should the taxpayers be subsidizing parcel deliveries? If FedEx and UPS will deliver packages without charging the taxpayers, who needs the Post Office? ”
1) Neither UPS nor FedEx deliver on Sundays. The USPS does.
2) The USPS will get your letter across the US in two days for $0.46. UPS and FedEx will as well, but for $16.19 (UPS) or $26.35 (FedEx). (I just priced both.)
First-class mail is going the way of the pony express.
The USPS does not get government handouts, in fact, the government borrows money from the USPS pension fund. The postal service is losing money because of a requirement to prefund their healthcare costs. Take that out and they are profitable.
The only reason letter delivery of the private services is because it is illegal to compete directly using the same methods of the post office.
For example it is a Federal offense to put anything other then US (Post Office) mail into a persons mail box nor are the private companies allowed to put up public mail boxes along city and neighborhood streets as USPS does.
Also forging stamps and stealing or tampering with US mail is a federal offense while the private companies are not protected like that.
Let them both compete equally on an even field and then we will see who is cheaper.