I still remember my first MIS course professor (AN). Like most business school professors, he wanted us to conceptualize problems in terms of cost-benefits, opportunity costs, etc., avoid not-invented-here syndrome. The IBM PC had started to revolutionize the business world by the time I started on my MBA part-time. I had been working in the computer timesharing business. Timesharing was an interim solution, say, for companies facing the high costs of deploying mainframe computers.
Even though microcomputers at a few thousand dollars were not cheap, they were relative to the costs of providing information services at the mainframe level. There was a move to drive smaller applications to cheaper, more commodity computing, including PC's. To give an example, my first long-term computing position post-academia was for a marketing research company later acquired by Equifax. They had gotten their start leasing time on a client's mainframe (say, after prime hours) and eventually leased their own mainframes (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per year). We were buying a bunch of Sun Microsystems and downsizing applications off the mainframe. Basically we had a payback period of 6 months, which was phenomenal, i.e., the Sun machines paid for themselves in savings in less than a year. (Ironically, it cost me a management position. My then boss, a co-founder of the company, left and recommended me to replace him. The mainframe programmers were paranoid about the shift to microsystems, and someone started a rumor I was the company's ax man and would be replacing them with Unix engineers just out of college; the programmers threatened to resign as a group if I were named manager. There was no truth to the rumor; the company was committed to retraining the workers, valuing their acquired industry experience. But management threw me under the bus.)
The timesharing business model just didn't work in an industry driven by cheaper commodity computing; my pursuing an MBA was a way to expand my professional opportunities. My primary computing language, APL, held a narrow niche in the industry (mostly statistical applications, e.g., insurance companies). As a grad student living on a penny-pinching budget, I couldn't afford a PC or most clones starting at over $3K. I wrote most of my papers on a cheap Commodore 64. I got access to a 2-PC department faculty lab (the faculty had one in their own offices) which I used to write my dissertation.
But getting back to Professor AN, he used to mock people buying a $3K computer and using it to do things like store recipes in it vs using a 99-cent recipe box from Walmart.
The impatient reader may think, what the hell does this have to do with USPS? I'm getting to it. One day he had us looking at the design of an elaborate sorting application; what was wrong with it? At the risk of oversimplification: the USPS, with its massive scale and mail sorting capacity, could do the sorting for us better. faster and cheaper than our basically building our own post office from scratch; we were not in the mail delivery business.
Now I've made it clear through the history of the blog and other social media like Twitter. that I'm a critic of the USPS and its unsustainable public union workforce; there is a blog tag on the USPS with dozens of related videos and commentaries. Yes, the Constitution provides for it, but it has become an anachronism. Home delivery was not initially part of its services. The proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner in the mid-nineteenth century provided profitable, cheaper delivery services than the USPS, and then basically the Congress banned home delivery competition from the private sector. The Congress a few decades ago basically spun off the USPS into a quasi-independent government agency, but the USPS is hobbled by Congressional ties where Congressmen and workers vociferously oppose closure of money-losing offices and facilities, oppose money-saving policies like 5-day delivery schedules, use of subcontractors, flexible market-based pricing, etc. In the meanwhile, many, if not most advanced economies have reformed their postal monopolies to allow private company competition, and the USPS cash cow of first-class mail delivery has been drying up for years as the Internet economy, email, etc. have made most mail delivery obsolete.
Now my opposition to the USPS is primarily based on free market reasons, but there are past experiences that have personally annoyed me. Below is from a recent Facebook post, based on a brother-in-law's post; I may have shared some of these earlier in the blog, but it's a good summary:
Well, you may know a couple of my stories involving Mom. I had bought her a nice little jewelry box with stained glass inside. When Mom got it, the glass was shattered. Dad, who was then working for USPS, criticized me for not upgrading delivery to get better handling.
Then a few years back Mom mailed me a birthday package back when I lived in a different Baltimore suburb. I had an argument with Mom for years because she would send packages insisting on personal signature which didn't work with my work schedule. I preferred to have the apartment complex sign for my packages which was far more convenient. Anyway my local postman was an asshole, and let's just say he celebrated the fact he couldn't leave the package for me. I ended up going to the local post office that said they didn't hold packages and I would have to call to arrange redeliver. This was one of those towns with a small mid-street post offices with no parking to speak of. I'm really not happy with Mom over this crap. So over the following 2 weeks I then tried to get them to reschedule the package delivery, only no one had seen the package since the asshole left his nasty message in my box. Never got it; to this day, Mom never mentioned what was in it, apparently some one of a kind thing. She collected on the insurance, but it literally took several weeks with different post offices blaming each other.
More recently, about a year ago last Valentine Day, I sent your granddaughter [given name] a card which had a little hairpin in it. The post office returned it: return to sender. [sister] confirmed I had the right address.
My all-time worst incident was at the El Paso post office. I had returned a software package, and the company refused to acknowledge receipt and refund me. So I went to the post office to file a claim. They gave me a form that the vendor had to sign under risk of perjury they didn't receive it. The vendor had no intent of doing that; I argued, and then a manager had me go to his back office so we wouldn't "disturb other patrons". I smelled a rat, and then after I got there a ring of maybe 8 Latino workers entered the room forming a semi-circle behind where I was standing. I smelled trouble but went back to arguing with the supervisor. I suddenly felt a sharp blow from behind to my left kidney. No shit. This happened in real life. All of the Latino bastards behind pretended they didn't do or see anything. Long story short, the vendor suddenly discovered the return shipment and refunded me, and I got a letter of apology from the USPS where they assured me assault and battery of patrons was not official government-approved behavior.
Now I'm not going to get into the current kerfuffle of where Trump is using USPS funding as a political weapon to be used against Dem Vote-By-Mail schemes. I do agree that Vote-By-Mail lacks internal controls of in-person polling. But states hold elections, not the federal government, and Trump's attack is self-serving and unconstitutional in nature.
And by principle I oppose bailouts of USPS and/or Dem schemes to intervene in the private sector using corrupt government monopoly privileges to expand USPS non-delivery businesses.
The current kerfuffle, accordingly to sources like WashPo, is based on aggressive USPS modernizing activities which involve reallocating resources from its dwindling first-class mail cash cow to more profitable package handling. So some letter-sorting technology is being decommissioned. Now Dems are stoking conspiracy theories over the timing, essentially arguing that Trump is trying to manipulate the election by delaying and hence disqualifying potentially millions of ballots by eliminating letter sorters.
This is crackpot for many reasons; first of all, you don't have to use the mail to vote. You can vote in person on election day. There are other things that can be done, including free-standing ballot boxes (say, locations at local USPS offices and/or Walmart stores). States can also extend voting periods. Second, the reduced number of sorters may be sufficient to handle the capacity, especially by extending operating hours near election day if necessary. Third, voting is a limited-time need; the USPS has legitimate reason for allocating more resources for its money-making package delivery service for the long term. You might speculate on the timing of retiring sorters but not the underlying economic case.
