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Fixing the USPS; Why Not Try THIS?

Big Problems, Possible Simple Solution

Doug Harris
2 min readMar 18, 2021
Official USPS Logo

It’s been widely noted, over the past decade or more, that the US Postal Service (USPS) isn’t doing its job — delivering letter and package mail daily, as required, to every household and business address in the country — as efficiently as earlier efforts had proved it can.

There’s been considerable debate, in and beyond Congress, which oversees the service and, to some degree, funds it, why this is so. No conclusions have been reached — as ever more questions have been raised.

Between 2015 and 2020, the number of households in the US increased from 124.59 million to 128.45. The SBA (Small Business Administration) reported in 2018 that some the US was home to 30.2 million small businesses. That is to say, those that are “privately owned and operated” and, by the numbers, amount to some 99.9% of US businesses. Collectively, in 2018, they7 employed some 58.9 million individuals — 47.5% of US employees.

Staggering Numbers

Overall, the USPS was delivering some 4.7 billion packages annually as recently as 2019, Morgan Stanley estimated to Forbes. At the same time, FedEx was delivering around 3 billion packages a year — but its handling count was about to be surpassed by Amazon, which then was shipping in the…

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Doug Harris
Doug Harris

Written by Doug Harris

50+ years a writer, 80+ unique bylines. Two blogs have reached 60+ countries.

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