Outbox vs. USPS: How the Post Office Killed Digital Mail

[rhoenix]

Evan Baehr and Will Davis, were summoned to Washington for a meeting with the Postmaster General. Evan and Will wondered what it could be, “They must have seen the recent coverage in CNBC, maybe they’ll help our company expand?” Or, “maybe they wanted the traditional photo opportunity and positive media buzz that political actors care so much about. Surely their company made the Post Office look good, right?” But when the Postmaster General came out to meet them, the stark reality became clear, they weren’t interested in a photo-op.

As Evan and Will describe it: “This 30-minute meeting was the end of our business model.”



How Outbox Set Out To Help Consumers

Evan and Will were both former staffers on Capitol Hill, but they left Washington to go to Harvard Business School and then decided to build something new. They wanted to continue to tackle public problems, but they “aim[ed] to do so with private solutions.” So having worked on the Hill they knew of the USPS’s well-documented inefficiencies. As they describe it, they “knew that the USPS would not be able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost savings.”

They wanted to allow consumers to digitize all of their postal mail so that individuals could get rid of junk mail, keep important things organized and never have to go out to their mailbox again. They set out to “redefine a long cherished but broken medium of communication: postal mail.” Customers would opt-in for $5 a month with “Outbox” to have their mail redirected, opened, scanned and available online or through a phone app. Consumers could then click on a particular scanned letter and ask that it be physically delivered, or that certain types of letters not be opened (e.g., bills etc.).

Will and Evan may have been inspired by their time working on Capitol Hill, as this is essentially the type of technology used in every Congressional Office to manage the deluge of millions of letters from constituents to Congress. If it’s good enough for Congressional offices, they thought, why shouldn’t average people have access to similar technology?

There aren’t many politicos that leave DC to found a company, but Will and Evan did. They started out with an idea, at first a simple Word document, but eventually a full deck of their proposal, and they received funding from Silicon Valley, including from well-known venture capitalist Peter Thiel (one of the major backers of Facebook and PayPal).

They started out small, testing their hypothesis that consumers would want to limit or eliminate their junk mail, save a copy of their mail forever like e-mail, and be able to access their most recent mail anywhere in the world while traveling.

And they were right.



The Launch

They launched in Austin, Texas, and grew quickly. They were limited mainly by their ability to expand and meet demand. Users were gushing with positive reviews and Outbox had hundreds of paying users signing up and loving their service. Once customers had experienced digital mail, they didn’t want to go back. As one customer, Marcia Navratil, explains “I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t get their mail this way, unless you just really like having paper delivered to your house.”

Technology entrepreneurs also loved the concept:

“Outbox is one of those ‘wow’ products. The moment I got my first batch of mail through their interface, I couldn’t believe it. It was pure magic. I’m a customer for life.” – Matt Galligan, CEO of the newspaper disruptor Circa

“Amazing service – can’t live without it. Read, sort, forward and unsubscribe from your physical mail, all online.” – Naval Ravikant, founder/CEO of Angellist

As they started to grow, positive press coverage kept increasing and the local Austin Magazine of Tribeza named Evan Baehr as one of 10 People to Watch for his success in co-launching Outbox. CNBC carried their story nationally and they expanded from Austin, TX to San Francisco, CA.

It was around this point that they became vulnerable by their own success. The local Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA Post Offices allowed individuals to sign forwarding contracts to have their mail forwarded to Outbox with the intention of it being opened and scanned – without these agreements Outbox’s market model wouldn’t be possible. In practice there are many types of forwarding contracts that the Post Office allows, so these contracts were not necessarily unusual. Further, there were no reports of complaints by customers. These were all customers who wanted their mail to be forwarded, opened and scanned by Outbox.

But once Outbox started to get successful and was covered on CNBC, Evan and Will got a call requesting them to come back to Washington to meet with the Postmaster General. Evan and Will thought about discussing how they could work with USPS nationally, perhaps even to provide some of their technology through a license for USPS to offer it directly to all their consumers.

They believed that their technology could actually save the Post Office money. If consumers started to opt-in to Outbox, or other services like Outbox, then the Post Office could receive the full benefits of the stamped envelope but never have to deliver those packages, which is one of the biggest costs for the Post Office. In fact, if properly implemented, when a customer sends a letter from Austin, TX to Alaska, if the Post Office knew that they weren’t going to receive the letter anyway, then the Post Office could forward the letter from Austin directly to Outbox, and never have to ship the letter across the continent.

Thus digitization of mail could actually save the Post Office a large amount of money, but that wasn’t how the Post Office would see it.



What does “Disruption” mean to DC?

When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the Postmaster General they were joined by the USPS’s General Counsel and Chief of Digital Strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that US Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.’” Further, “‘You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”’

According to Evan, the Chief of Digital Strategy’s comments were even more stark, “[Your market model] will never work anyway. Digital is a fad. It will only work in Europe.”

Evan and Will would later call the meeting one of the most “surreal moments of their lives.”

Donahoe’s comments are even more incredible for people with technology backgrounds. In tech vernacular, “disruption” is an extremely positive term for when an old market model is displaced by a new market model that is better for the consumer and often cheaper to provide.

One of the metaphorical gods of innovation is Harvard MBA Professor Clay Christensen who’s thesis and book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” explains how old successful companies, that were innovative themselves at first, eventually refuse to adapt to new technologies and new market conditions, and are thereby displaced by a scrappy underdog providing a new service or product. But Christensen’s key insight is that this “disruption” starts out very small, often with a niche market that the large goliath company ignores. Often the “disruptor” is providing inferior technology but at reduced margins providing a cheaper or better product for part of the market. Then the “disruptor” grows, sometimes very quickly, and competes with the large old successful company eventually “disrupting” the older industry paradigm and kicking out the incumbent player. Christensen’s findings were that if a large successful company refuses to innovate and is satisfied with its steady return, it will often be displaced by these underdogs, and therefore the mantra for a dynamic market must be “innovate or die.”

Entrepreneurs across the country know how important “disruption” is to offering consumers innovative and useful products and services. TechCrunch, a major online blog for the tech and venture community, which previously featured Outbox, has an annual conference called “Disrupt” in honor of the innovative process of disruption.

Outbox was a disruptive innovation. Outbox offered utility for many consumers and offered new technology that the Post Office should have been offering for years. In a well-functioning market, we would expect a company like Outbox to disrupt the dominance of the incumbent and force them to either innovate or die. But of course, USPS is not a normal company; rather, it is an entity of the US government, and the market forces that lead to innovation and growth in the free market are completely missing in DC bureaucracy.

DC bureaucracy literally doesn’t speak the same language, as can be seen with their negative use of the term “disruption.”

Unlike in the free market, USPS didn’t have to compete with Outbox on the merits of their services; instead, they could simply tell them that they wouldn’t cooperate because Outbox could “disrupt” their service. Anyone who has looked at USPS’s balance sheets can tell you, if any government bureaucracy is in need of disruption, then it surely is the USPS.

In 2011, the GAO released a report entitled “Mail Trends Highlight Need to Fundamentally Change Business Model.” That report found that “trends underscore the need for USPS’s business model to undergo fundamental changes to reduce personnel and network-related costs.” In 2013, GAO released a report entitled “Urgent Action Needed to Achieve Financial Sustainability” urging that USPS “reduce its expenses to avoid even greater financial losses.”

But Postmaster General Donahue didn’t apparently want any “disruption,” even if it may have saved him money by reducing the expense of physical delivery.



Down But Not Out

Evan and Will had fought through every barrier that had stopped Outbox so far, they weren’t going to allow a simple regulatory issue like this stand in their way. After all, they were attempting to do something no start-up had tried before. They used all the tools available to them, and when the tools didn’t exist then they invented their own technological solutions. They 1) developed the legal framework to open users’ mail, they 2) built new logistics software to handle their operations, they 3) created new industrial-grade scanning machines that were 80% cheaper than the market rate and 4) developed specialized optical character recognition software technology. Outbox was able to break through every technological and legal problem they confronted. They couldn’t simply give up in the face of a Washington bureaucracy that refused to adapt. The very reason they created Outbox was because they didn’t think DC would innovate and the best way to force innovation was from the outside – how could they stop now?

So instead of shutting down their operations they decided to hire a team of drivers to “un-deliver” mail out of customers mailboxes – of course with very explicit contractual permission. If the Post Office wouldn’t cooperate with them by forwarding the mail, then they could physically get the mail from users’ mailboxes and carry on their operations. They called their drivers the “Unpostmen”: reflecting a completely economically inefficient impediment created by government regulation. The government would deliver the mail, and Outbox would un-deliver the mail, to provide a service, digitization, that the Post Office should have been providing a decade ago.

With this outlandish new market model, Outbox continued to expand. They were unable to meet with large scale growth of demand. Outbox’s prime service was to help unsubscribe customers from spam mail, and they unsubscribed customers from over 1 million senders of mail. Outbox scanned over 1.5 million pages, and when requested, re-delivered over 250,000 requested mail packages. A nationwide survey found that they had a brand awareness of 10% even though they could handle only 2,000 customers in two markets. CNN praised their concept, and they even made it into Jay Leno’s monologue.

But while they had many satisfied customers, their overhead from un-delivering the mail was extremely high. Maintaining a fleet of vehicles to go to every person’s house every day was costing them a fortune when they were trying to allocate their resources towards marketing to expand. While they believed the market model was profitable, it would take precious time that they didn’t have. With the onerous requirement imposed by the Post Office, this new overhead had made their easily scalable company almost impossible to scale. And their market model needed to scale quickly to become profitable.



Closing Time

They knew that the only way to sustain Outbox was to have the Postmaster General change his mind. But they didn’t have time on their side. Even if Outbox tried to overturn the decision of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, by petitioning the President of the United States, by leading some advocacy effort, or by lobbying Congress for change, that would require resources they couldn’t divest from their current operations, and it would take years. As Evan and Will would explain, their company “lost because the main asset of the government is time – which is the resource of which startups have the least.”

In February, 2014, they announced on their blog that they were shutting down their company because they could not profitably scale the company unless the Post Office allowed consumers to forward their mail.

In their parting message, they explained, “You may think government organizations are completely, insanely backwards; you are wrong—they are worse.”

It’s likely news to the American people, but the Post Office apparently doesn’t consider you to be its customers. Two years after the launch of Outbox allowing consumers to have digital access to their mail, the Post Office still has not announced any plans to allow consumers to have access to a digital version of their mail. In February 2014, the same month that Outbox shut down, the Post Office incurred a net loss of $354 million, following a fiscal year 2013 loss of $5 billion. With comments like “digital is a fad,” it’s no wonder that the USPS is bankrupt.



USPS’s Response

While investigating this piece, we reached out to the USPS, by phone and by e-mail, to hear their version of why they decided to stop cooperating with Outbox and to see if they contested Outbox’s account of the meeting in Washington, DC. The entire response by USPS is included here:

Hi Derek

Thanks for contacting us about your story. Please see our statement below—that is all we have to say on this topic at this time.

Thanks

Dave Partenheimer

Manager, Media Relations

U.S. Postal Service

The Postal Service is focused on providing an essential service in our mission to serve the American public and does not view Outbox as supporting that mission. We do have concerns regarding the destruction of mail—even if authorized by the receiver—and will continue to monitor market activities to ensure protection of our brand and the value and security of the mail.

The comment by the Post Office presents more questions than it answers.

We followed up with the Post Office to find out if there were any consumers who lodged a complaint against Outbox. We also asked them, since their statement mentions concerns regarding the destruction of mail as authorized by the receiver, if Outbox had simply archived the mail and not destroyed it, then would that have been allowed and then why was that not presented as an option to Outbox? We also asked them if they could explain how Outbox undermines the “protection of their brand and value and security of the mail”? Since the Post Office mentions that they don’t think Outbox supports their mission, we asked them how does that justify the service not being an option for consumers that want to pay for it? We also asked them to provide relevant internal e-mails on the subject of Outbox and this meeting for us to see their version of events.

USPS declined to provide further comment, or respond to these questions, of any kind, despite repeated requests. USPS did not dispute Evan’s recollection of their USPS meeting in DC and did not comment on whether junk mailers are the Post Office’s customers versus average Americans.

This... is just mind-boggling to me. That the USPS does not consider all private citizens its customers, and instead just the people who bulk mail crap to people are the customers, and hence why something like Outbox was a threat.

[B4UTRUST]

Wait, how is this at all surprising? It's a government agency that is at the top corrupted by petty politics and corruption from one segment of big business or another. I'd be shocked if the USPS actually worked with Outbox, but not that they took the safe route that guaranteed them a big payday.

[rhoenix]

Wait, how is this at all surprising? It's a government agency that is at the top corrupted by petty politics and corruption from one segment of big business or another. I'd be shocked if the USPS actually worked with Outbox, but not that they took the safe route that guaranteed them a big payday.

I suppose I'm still getting used to seeing what kind of cronyism actually goes on, and just how blatant it is. It's still new enough to me to be shocking. Naive, I know, but there it is.

[frigidmagi]

I need to point something out. The main reason the post office has difficulties is because they're hampered by some truly insane regulations. In 2006 Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) a bill that demands, among other things and I qoute

“prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span”

Bluntly speaking, it must pay out health benefits in full for employees that haven't even been hired! No other government agency or corporation is forced to labor under such an obscene burden. That is what makes up most of the Post Office's decifit.

In fact the Post Office because of this has ended up spending somewhere between 25 to 50 billion dollars in overpayments.

You can read about it here and here.

Now has to the complaint about the junk mail. When you get mail, you are not a costumer. When you send mail you are a costumer. It's only when you send mail that you are paying money for a service. When you recieve it you are getting a service someone else paid for. When was the last time you had to pay to get a letter after all?

Due to Congress' petty schemes, the Post Office is desperately hungry for cash and has such people who send millions of letters a year and pay a nice bit of coin for the chance... Is a revenue source that the Post Office cannot afford to lose. Weep for Outbox if you must, but keep in mind it was the Republican Congress of 2006 that ensured that the Post Office could not afford to lose junk mail providers.

As for the Outbox founders complaints. I would like to hear more then a single source before I jump on any band wagons. They have a tendency to run into walls.

[rhoenix]

Now has to the complaint about the junk mail. When you get mail, you are not a costumer. When you send mail you are a costumer. It's only when you send mail that you are paying money for a service. When you recieve it you are getting a service someone else paid for. When was the last time you had to pay to get a letter after all?

Due to Congress' petty schemes, the Post Office is desperately hungry for cash and has such people who send millions of letters a year and pay a nice bit of coin for the chance... Is a revenue source that the Post Office cannot afford to lose. Weep for Outbox if you must, but keep in mind it was the Republican Congress of 2006 that ensured that the Post Office could not afford to lose junk mail providers.

As for the Outbox founders complaints. I would like to hear more then a single source before I jump on any band wagons. They have a tendency to run into walls.

That's a very good alternate perspective Frigid, thank you. It does suggest that whatever the details of what happened with Outbox, it speaks to larger money issues with the USPS. In my mind, this makes cronyism of this sort more likely, if I'm understanding the circumstances correctly.

[frigidmagi]

That's a very good alternate perspective Frigid, thank you. It does suggest that whatever the details of what happened with Outbox, it speaks to larger money issues with the USPS. In my mind, this makes cronyism of this sort more likely, if I'm understanding the circumstances correctly.

I disagree. The set up makes cronyism unnecessary. Look here's how it goes boiled down to it's simpliest roots.

Step 1: Congress fucks over the Post Office, forcing it to spend more money then anyone else has to, therefore it must make every bloody red cent it can.

Step 2: Outbox comes up with a service that honestly sounds cool but will put 400 costumers who spend shittons of money that the USPO needs out of business.

Step 3: The USPO may crash and burn (as some members of Congress seem to intend) without that cash. So the company acts to protect it's own existence.

Step 4: Outbox and other companies doing the same service are put out of business, junk mailers are protected, USPO revenue is secured.

Where does the cronyism drift in? Especially since securing revenue is what corporations do on a daily basis.

[rhoenix]

I disagree. The set up makes cronyism unnecessary. Look here's how it goes boiled down to it's simpliest roots.

Step 1: Congress fucks over the Post Office, forcing it to spend more money then anyone else has to, therefore it must make every bloody red cent it can.

Step 2: Outbox comes up with a service that honestly sounds cool but will put 400 costumers who spend shittons of money that the USPO needs out of business.

Step 3: The USPO may crash and burn (as some members of Congress seem to intend) without that cash. So the company acts to protect it's own existence.

Step 4: Outbox and other companies doing the same service are put out of business, junk mailers are protected, USPO revenue is secured.

Where does the cronyism drift in? Especially since securing revenue is what corporations do on a daily basis.

First, thank you for laying out the steps as clearly as you did.

In my understanding of the situation, the cronyism is an effect of step 1, where the entity in question is forced to get by using ridiculous accounting tricks mandated by the government (Congress, as the event you linked above), and therefore becomes more reliant to stay afloat.

Such a situation creates a mindset less of improvement, and more of survival. I'll attempt to use a metaphor from your area of expertise, so if my understanding of the situation of that metaphor, or of this reply is incorrect, please let me know. I would liken it to a society that's fairly meager for resources versus a society that has more than enough to satisfy their needs - at the point where a society has all their needs met without drama, technological advancement, improvement, and the sciences become much more of a priority.

In this case, because the USPS's overall mindset is set more for survival due to their budgeting issues, and less toward improvement, it would make them much less accepting about newfangled ideas such as Outbox. Effectively, Outbox's presence creates a disruption in the delicate balance the USPS currently has setup, which makes it very easily viewed as a threat instead of a good idea.

With all that said, I don't think "cronyism" is the right word in this case, so I'll withdraw it. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better term - if you have a suggestion, I'd be grateful.

[frigidmagi]

I do think Cronyism isn't the right word. Cronyism is when you promote people not based on their skills, but their loyalities. This is an act of revenue security which makes it more akin to protectionism (which is controlling market access to protect industries).

In case anyone is wondering, I do think the Postmaster General was either blowing smoke or is utterly out of touch with modern society (Digital is a fad... Okay, tell me another story!), but bluntly I think that statement clearly clashes with "this would work in Europe" and "Junk Mailers are our costumers." This frankly exposes what's going on. Euro Post Offices don't have this problem and the statement of Junk Mailers was basically "We need their sweet sweet monies or we're bumfucked."

[rhoenix]

I do think Cronyism isn't the right word. Cronyism is when you promote people not based on their skills, but their loyalities. This is an act of revenue security which makes it more akin to protectionism (which is controlling market access to protect industries).

In case anyone is wondering, I do think the Postmaster General was either blowing smoke or is utterly out of touch with modern society (Digital is a fad... Okay, tell me another story!), but bluntly I think that statement clearly clashes with "this would work in Europe" and "Junk Mailers are our costumers." This frankly exposes what's going on. Euro Post Offices don't have this problem and the statement of Junk Mailers was basically "We need their sweet sweet monies or we're bumfucked."

"Protectionism" fits nicely, I think - and much better than "cronyism" does.

I do think there are better solutions to be found for these issues, but I agree with you that blindly saying "digital stuff is a fad" or "this works well in Europe" don't really offer solutions. I do strongly think the USPS has a place in our society, one whose purpose for-profit companies cannot fulfill - so, while I am interested in full disclosure, I certainly don't want the USPS "downgraded" in purpose, let alone abolished.

[White Haven]

The USPO may crash and burn

...Bye. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. The US Postal Service is a sad, antiquated relic of the pre-internet age, and I will not shed a single tear when it finally finishes caving in. They're just like any other private company that's facing obsolescence, frantically scrabbling for capital and backstabbing anyone within reach in a desperate attempt to remain solvent. Until November, all but one of my bills were handled online; now all of them are. I doubt I'm alone in that. I barely even bother checking my physical mailbox anymore; it almost never contains anything but spam, and since the USPS is on its knees before spammers, they refuse to implement the most basic of filtration techniques that we demand as a matter of course from the providers of actual worthwhile mail services.

Now, the US isn't quite ready for paper-mail to die out yet, but the USPS would only get my respect if they acted to speed up that transition (secure, federal-backed, delivery-verified email accounts? An effort to port the mandate to provide mail delivery to the entire US over to providing universal broadband access? Be creative.). As it is, they're just an anachronism.

[Hotfoot]

And what about the people who live in remote locations that private mail carrier won't deliver to?

[Dark Silver]

It should be noted that the USPS is federally mandated to exist, even in the Constitution, but has to act like a Corporation, but be hampered by fuckbrained rules that no private company has to work with.

Is there any reason to think that the USPS couldn't provide better service if it wasn't being kneecapped in a effort to kill it by actual cronyism in Congress (read: Congress Critters cowtowing to the Private Mail Handlers like FedEx, UPS and DHL).

[frigidmagi]

The US Postal Service is a sad, antiquated relic of the pre-internet age, and I will not shed a single tear when it finally finishes caving in. They're just like any other private company that's facing obsolescence, frantically scrabbling for capital and backstabbing anyone within reach in a desperate attempt to remain solvent.

Wow... Just wow. So much wishful thinking. So much kneejerking. So much not bothering to look at the thread. Okay you might have grasped by now that I hate repeating myself? Well you're making me repeat myself. First of all, the USPO isn't "a sad antiquated relic of the pre-internet age" not until amazon invents a bloody transporter. Second of all, it's not the grand almighty digital age that's the burden on the Post Office, it's Congress, a decidely pre-internet invention. It's frantically scrabbing for capital because someone makes them spends billions of dollars on pension payments for people who haven't even been hired yet! Did you miss the part where this has cost them 50 billion dollars in overpayments they ain't getting back? Or do you think that much money somehow doesn't matter?

[White Haven]

I'm not saying and never have said that it's current financial issues are due entirely to its own obsolescence. That will come in time. I am, however, gleefully awaiting the time, whenever it arrives, that it can finally implode and stop serving as the most spam-prone mail service in existence today. At the very least, they could have the grace and common decency to partner with municipal waste disposal services, so they can cart away the mass-mailed garbage they litter inside mail slots.

Is the USPS dealt a bad hand by Congress? Hell yes. Do I care? Not so much, except insofar as there are better ways to euthanize it than saddling it with bizarre pension funding requirements.

[Dark Silver]

To be honest if it wasn't for those "bizarre pension funding requirements" then the USPS wouldn't be in need of euthanisation, and wouldn't be worried about selling it's services to those same spam-mail generators as highly.

[frigidmagi]

I'm not saying and never have said that it's current financial issues are due entirely to its own obsolescence. That will come in time.

If it's financial issues aren't coming from obsolescenace maybe you should consider the only place it's obsolete is your own damn head. Also citation needed man, because this reeks of unsupported opinion.

I mean let me throw out some numbers here for you. The Post Office web site is visited by 1.2 million people every day. The Post Office as of 2011 was ranked 35th on the fortune 500 list for the US and 109th on the world. It made as revenue 66 billion dollars, it's single biggest lost of revenue was benefits payments, a good amount of that overpayments it has to make by law (again, no one else has to do this, just the Post Office). Fed Ex and UPS pay it to deliver over 400 million packages a year (you know that stuff that you order from Amazon.com?) because they can't reach those areas or they don't have the manpower.

Interestingly enough it's profit report only starts to slide down in 2006, when they were hit by this law. Which has costs them 10s of billions of dollars a year. Before this, it was moving upwards. Because the internet, is actually pretty damn good for the Post Office. Newsflash, when the Internet became a major shopping center? The Post Office got an increase in busineess! This has nothing to do with this obsolete fairy tale you peddle and have provided no proof for.

Another fun fact, did you know the Post Office has the world's 3rd largest computer system and delievers 3 million emails a day? It also provides internet service to 3500 remote locations that would be utterly cut off from the world if not for the Post Office.

That will come in time. I am, however, gleefully awaiting the time, whenever it arrives, that it can finally implode and stop serving as the most spam-prone mail service in existence today. At the very least, they could have the grace and common decency to partner with municipal waste disposal services, so they can cart away the mass-mailed garbage they litter inside mail slots.

Cry harder man. You get junk mail, you are awfully inconvienced, I get it! You know the Post Office (which made a better functioning web service then Obamacare, just gonna throw that out there) could afford to do something abou it... Expect they were slammed with a burden that frankly would have flat out killed all their high speed low drag competitors. The ones who have openly admited to be dependent on the post office (400 million packages a year don't lie bro).

The United States Postal Service has been ranked as the best postal service in the world. In 2011 it delivered 168 billion pieces of mail and was directly or indirectly responsible for 10 trillion dollars worth of economic actiity (seriously Amazon and Ebay would be in deep trouble without the Post Office). Without it millions of Americans aren't gonna get shit, because there is no profit in maintaining service to their communities. Billions of dollars worth of shipments will not be shipped and the ecomony will suffer for it.

So I'm just gonna say this. Make with some facts and supports for your arguement or admit it's just your opinion with nothing backing it up. If it's just your opinion that's fine but cop to it.