The postal service is governed by the Postal Regulatory Commission and is a financially independent federal agency, meaning it must raise its own money to operate and does not receive tax dollars.
The commission approved a temporary two-year increase in the price of stamps to help the USPS make back some of its losses after the recession. Postmaster General Megan Brennan said the agency applied to make the price increase permanent, but commissioners declined.
“Given our precarious financial condition and ongoing business needs, the price reduction required by the PRC exacerbates our losses,” Brennan said in a statement Friday.
She said the agency has worked to reduce costs in the wake of years of operating deficits. She said the postal service has reduced expenses by $15 billion since the recession began in 2008.
The U.S. Postal Service has suffered with more people turning to email and electronic payment methods, while also encountering stiff competition for parcel shipping in the private sector from UPS and FedEx.
In addition to the reduction in price for first-class stamps, international letters will drop from $1.20 to $1.15 and postcards will drop from 35 cents to 34 cents. The reduction affects commercial shipping rates, as well.
The changes go into effect Sunday.
I doubt they actually reduced costs, they just raised their prices.
If anyone has shipped USPS you have noticed how package shipping costs are through the roof.
They did away with Parcel Post in a lot of areas.
They are screwed with the legacy of pensions and entitled assholes working for them like a certain asshole presidential candidates father.
Put it at 50 cents a letter and leave it alone for a decade or more
I live on the Nevada frontier. The postal service can go screw themselves. I take local letters to the post office and they can’t simply postmark them and deposit in the local post offices boxes, everything has to be driven to Las Vegas, postmarked from there, and then driven back up (more than 200 miles). Screw them. I hand deliver all local my bills now.
This is such a relief. Before this huge price reduction I couldn’t afford to mail a post card.
Ill be taking my forever stamps I bought last month and asking for a refund.
Many years ago, I lived in Germany as a dependent. Mailing a letter by Bundespost was a very different experience, from just putting a stamp on it, as I was used to doing.
It was much like mailing a package, in the US. Letters mailed to friends living in different German cities, cost different amounts of postage. The further away, the more the cost.
Of course, we could use the APO system, but that often took longer and did not get delivered to your home.
Since then, I’ve had an appreciation for our postal system, even with its flaws. I especially like the FOREVER stamp because, I don’t have to make up the difference when there is a price hike.
Maybe, if the damn congress didn’t take money from the postal system to pay something else, it would be self-sustaining. But of course, congress thrives on figuring out how to ways of juggling money into their own, or favored others’, pockets.
Brown eyed girl-
The letters have to go to the bigger cities for “post marking” because they have to scan each piece for the NSA.
It once took 5 days to get a letter sent to me from a town 29 miles away because it had to go thru Indianapolis first.
Recently I needed to get my 2015 Flex Spending reimbursement request to the plan administrator by a deadline of March 31. I didn’t have time to get the paperwork ready until March 29.
Because the envelope had to go to a post office box in Lexington, Kentucky, I knew I could overnight it via USPS. So on March 30 I went to one of the main borough post offices in New York after work. I got there at about 5:50 p.m. and spent about 35 minutes in line. When I got to the window the clerk told me I couldn’t send it overnight because pacakage acceptance for that service cut off at 6:00 p.m.
I just looked at her and said, “Madame, FedEx accepts packages for overnight delivery right up until they close at 9:00 p.m., and I’ve never seen a line this long there. This is why they make a profit and USPS does not.”
Overpaid, slow-assed civil servants!
Paying over $9 for a book of 20 stamps sucks.
I can remember when that was 60 cents. I was a teenager when they went up to 4 cents.
90 plus percent of our daily mail goes directly to the shredder.
A lot of people overpay. The second ounce is only about 23 cents so a lot of people put on two 49 or now 47 cent stamps for that letter or card that feels a little heavy.
Wow – a two-cent decrease in the price of stamps! I can afford to get that new car now…
😉
The article starts off with a bald faced lie.
The USPS gets loads of tax dollars. Maybe they could overlook many of the small bailouts that were pocket change of mere hundreds of millions each time, but in 2004 they got $11billion of our tax money.
Forgetting about $11billion stretches credulity to the breaking point.
Unfortunately USPS gets both government subsidy and government regulations. Privatize it – it will be bought by Amazon and turned into an efficient, profitable enterprise that actually serves us.
I can’t imagine even Amazon buying the USPS.
Just lift the monopoly so that fedex and ups can get into the letter business and let the dinosaur die a natural and long overdue death.
But JohnS, b b but but their PENSIONS.
Exactly what got them in trouble – doncha love how they howl about having to “fully fund” their respective pensions, and they’re the ONLY govt entity that in forced to?
@JohnS: I doubt that FedEx and UPS would even WANT the letter business, since it is a lot more trouble and (obviously) not very profitable, but even if they had it they would probably hand it right back to USPS to handle for them, just like they have a lot of their package deliveries:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fedex-ups-1407182247
😛
Vietvet, and organization receiving $billions of taxpayer money SHOULD be able to undercut legitimate businesses, that is only logical.
However, Congress passed a law granting the USPS monopoly status on letters due to FedEx starting a letter handling service. I suspect FedEx knows how to make a dime.
I love bashing the PO as much as anyone, and I can’t stomach union shops, but I recently sent my grandson a box (sh – $3.47) that travelled 1200 miles and arrived in 3 days.
Pretty fucking impressive when one considers the logistics.
izlamo delenda est …
JohnS: And the way they would make that dime (assuming they had the letter business) would probably be to collect the postage fee, skim off their profit, and then pay USPS to actually deliver the letters, just like they are doing now with a lot of their package business. Thus they avoid having to hire thousands of letter carriers, train them, provide benefits, purchase a nationwide fleet of mail trucks, etc., etc.
And so the dinosaur lives on…
🙂