You can see this isn't going the way you want it to.

At $4.50 per piece, marketers are going to move away from physical mailers, and toward other marketing options. Most are going to do that at far less than $4.50/pc. Most bulk mailers would abandon the practice well below even first class mailing rates. USPS sets their bulk mailing rate with the specific intention of keeping the bulk mail business that funds their operations.

USPS money orders are (were) the standard for reliable, secure transfer of money. Recipients of postal money orders knew they were good, and demanded them over personal checks and even cashier's checks in some cases.

There is room for the USPS to enter into basic, universal access banking services, providing accounts to anyone who needs one. They could then reasonably expand to compete with usurious payday lenders, driving them out of the market. They could operate as a payment processor, competing with Visa and MasterCard, driving down their obscene rates on every purchase.

Basically, there's a lot more that the postal service could, and should be doing instead of delivering trash.

It costs about $4.50/pc to send local junkmail via UPS or FedEx, vs $0.24 via USPS.

Junk mail exists only because the USPS exists to deliver it. USPS exists (in its current form) only because of junk mail. There is no "root cause". It's a synergistic relationship between the two.

Transition the focus of the USPS to other essential services, like cashless banking. Abandon the trash delivery service.

Very well aware of both SurePost and SmartPost. You're not telling me anything new. Both of those services rely on the fact that the USPS subsidizes their delivery services through trash distribution. They charge businesses to transport trash to mailboxes, where it ends up in a wheely bin > trash truck > landfill.

As I've mentioned in other comments, I don't want USPS privatized. I am only pointing out that their core competency is not delivery. They are trash distributors. Garbage providers.

The old "every door, every day" model is propped up by hundreds of pieces of trash for every actual delivery. It is not sustainable.

USPS needs a presence throughout the country. Every residence should, indeed, be served by the postal service. But, that doesn't mean they need to go everywhere, every day. They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.

Yes, of course.

The service they provide is, primarily, the conveyance of trash to every residence in the US.

Sure, they also transport various papers and small packages, including (once upon a time) children.

But their core service is trash distribution. They transport hundreds of pieces of trash for every letter and package they also deliver.

I don't know what the solution to all that trash is. I don't think the postal service should be privatized or disbanded. But, it is a trash-supported platform.

I think they should become a basic, cashless banking service. Direct deposit, debit card, nothing fancy. No commercial loans; only treasury securities, with interest paid through to depositors.

Universal access banking. Force commercial banks and payment processors to unfuck themselves if they want to keep customers.

Let banking become their core service, and they can reduce/eliminate their trash distribution service.

They transport trash. Literally.

Their business model is collecting literal trash, in bulk, from various businesses, and evenly distributing it to every residence in the nation. From there, that trash is deposited directly into solid waste streams, recollected by sanitation engineers, and transported to landfills.

The only value the postal service brings is establishing a baseline price for low-speed package delivery that keeps UPS and FedEx from jacking their prices to the moon.