Before post offices existed, most people had two options for delivering a letter. someone with money to spend (or a particularly important message) could hire a courier for hand delivery. In the era before trains, planes, and automobiles, this could mean days spent riding from one state to another, with prices reflecting the intensive labor involved in delivering the mail.
Alternatively, many people used the local inn as a way to send mail. they would throw their letters on a table in the room, address included, so that travelers heading in that direction would pick them up and leave them at an inn when they arrived. as you can imagine, this informal system was not reliable.
In 1775, the Second Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the nation’s first Postmaster General, charged with overseeing a mail delivery organization that would eventually become the United States Postal Service, or USPS.
This was not an accident or the fluke of a great man who got bored. the postal service unites the united states. ensures that all men, women and children have access to cheap and reliable communications throughout the country. it allows citizens to talk to their government and their government to contact them. The government may have restricted access to the USPS for official business; certainly that would have been cheaper and easier. Instead, the USPS caters to all, with mail carriers dedicated to delivering greeting cards as reliably as they do audits.
The founders believed this was so important that the postal service is one of the few government agencies specifically provided for in the constitution. article one, section eight, charges congress with the power to “establish post offices and postal roads,” and since 1775 and the second continental congress, it has.
How many people does the post office employ?
the united states postal service usps manages one of the largest organizations in the country. it has the second largest number of civilian employees with 634,447 career and non-career employees. It is the third largest employer, government or private, in the country, behind the military and Walmart (WMT). (No other employer comes close to Walmart’s 2.2 million employees.)
According to the postal service’s own data, the USPS pays $1.9 billion in wages and benefits every two weeks to its staff, who, in turn, handle a whopping 47% of the world’s mail. This includes a huge amount of mail that we normally think of as delivered by private companies such as UPS (UPS), Federal Express (FdX) and Amazon (Amzn ). it is very common for private shipping companies to rely on the postal service to transport packages long distances and then take over last mile delivery services.
In 2018, Postal Service employees traveled a total of 1.4 billion miles to deliver their letters, and the USPS spent $70.6 billion in operating income to do so.
And while we’re on the subject of facts and figures, the USPS delivers more than 146 billion pieces of mail each year.
How much do postmen earn?
To move that kind of volume, the postal service needs an army of letter carriers, and we don’t use that term lightly. The USPS employs 342,410 people to deliver letters. (These data are from the most recent collection of 2018). More than half of the postal service’s personnel are engaged in the physical delivery process alone, a group almost as large as Turkey’s standing army.
other postal service staff work in a wide range of fields, including customer service, mail sorting, maintenance and repair, infrastructure and data, and all the jobs a large organization needs to maintain daily operations.
mail carrier earnings are fairly consistent across the country and show less variation compared to costs of living than many other professions.
According to the most recent data available, a mail carrier earns the following:
• average hourly wage: $24.89
• median annual income: $51,780
• median salary: $26.54
• median annual income: $55,210
letter carriers receive raises based on seniority, leading to higher pay over time. Additionally, because they are paid by the hour, overtime can significantly affect a letter carrier’s income. in particularly crowded markets (like big cities), a person can earn more by taking extra hours when available.
These factors lead to a wide range of pay scales. At a minimum, the bottom 10 percent of letter carriers earn about $17.78 per hour, or $36,990 per year. At best, the top 10 percent of letter carriers earn about $30.75 per hour, or $63,970 per year.
The local cost of living can also affect a postman’s salary to some extent. The median annual salary for this profession in very cheap states is about $50,000, while the median annual salary in expensive states ranges from $51,890 to $57,330.
Where does the money come from?
As many Americans have learned during the government shutdowns of the last decade, the USPS doesn’t really depend on the federal government’s coffers for its money.
Despite operating as an essential government agency, relied upon by services such as the IRS, local boards of elections, and the military, the postal service is entirely self-funded. This means that you do not receive income directly from taxpayer dollars. instead, it raises all of its money from business operations. its biggest moneymakers are first-class mail (which brought in $24.9 billion in 2018) and parcel shipping (which brought in $21.5 billion in 2018).
Marketing mail is the third largest USPS revenue tent with $16.5 billion in 2018.
Competition from multiple sources has caused the postal service to struggle financially, but possibly the biggest change has been to email and other forms of digital documentation. This has increasingly undermined the agency’s first-class mail operations, its largest source of revenue, causing the USPS to lose more and more money each year. Internet commerce hasn’t been all bad, and has helped the postal service tremendously in some ways, with rising shipping rates partially offsetting losses in first-class mail. but it hasn’t been enough to stop the red ink.
Not that the postal service has a revenue problem, far from it. The USPS earned more than $70 billion in revenue in 2018. However, that same year the USPS spent more than $74 billion in operating expenses, resulting in a net loss of $3.9 billion. the problem? postal service expenses are not elastic. Unlike a private company, the USPS effectively operates like a government agency and cannot simply cut off unprofitable routes or charge triple for remote locations.
why we keep the post office
despite some sarcastic criticism, keeping the postal service has nothing to do with nostalgia.
One of the central functions of government is to set minimum standards for society. In a free-market economy like the United States, citizens do not always expect the government to create far-reaching or ambitious services. instead, they expect the government to create the baseline of services necessary for modern life. The postal service exists to ensure that all Americans have access to an affordable and reliable form of communication.
The postal service offers this service without favoritism or prejudice. anyone can send a letter across the us uu. mail, and they can send it to any address in the country (or, often, outside of it). more importantly, a postman will deliver that letter even when it’s not profitable to do so.
This is at the core of the financial problem facing the USPS, and this is why this agency is so critical.
In the age of federal express, amazon prime, drone delivery and email, private services seem to have made traditional mail obsolete. They can deliver a message or package faster and with seemingly better customer service than a US employee. uu. postman.
But any private company can go out of business, change services, or find that its business model isn’t as strong as everyone thought. (Just ask the cities that have consistently gutted their public transportation systems in favor of Uber, only to face serious questions about the sustainability of the ride-sharing business model.) working for profit means working only when it brings profit. a private delivery service won’t deliver a package unless it makes financial sense. will cut unprofitable routes and charge extra for expensive ones.
the USPS doesn’t do any of those things. the postal service delivers to everyone by the same stamp, whether you live downtown or 100 miles away. (it does charge extra to go from one part of the country to another, but the price is the same within a region). he makes those deliveries even when he loses money. guarantees that no one in the united states will be isolated or left alone.
That’s why there’s still a postal service.