I completely agree with melek_taus. I hate FedEx and UPS (and Purolator); for international shipments especially, there is no substitute for the good old USPS (and I am not even American!
) You can't even compare the prices and the service, to my mind, is pretty much equal for what I want. I wasn't aware that they did Saturday deliveries, but that would definitely be the first thing to go for me.I could just copy my rant about the Canadian Postal service from their strike, but what it boils down to is this: yes, people are writing less letters and general correspondence because of email, but I would argue that letter writing as a generality decreased substantially before that. And when you start talking about letters and documents from the business world, well then they are/would be only handled by couriers anyways. So that leaves parcels, which to me have only been increasing exponentially with the advent and growth of online shopping. There is no way you can compare, say, the packages being shipping in the pre-Christmas months to what it was in the decades prior to this access.
If the USPS really wants to survive, it needs to target this consumer base. There isn't any significant revenue from letters anyway. As far as I am aware, Amazon, arguable one of the biggest online retailers, uses USPS for its shipments (I could be wrong though). But this is what the postal service needs to do, focus on arrangements with these companies, streamline online shipping options, and I don't see how people would ever let them go under. As a consumer, for most of us the bottom line is price, and that equates to the USPS. They've got their market already set up for them.
I can't speak for the management, but obviously if 80% of your costs are in labour there is something wrong, and this isn't something that happened overnight. Short of highly specialised fields (and I am no knocking the post office, but come on) there is nowhere this would ever be acceptable. Fix that stuff, and you are already looking a more prosperous business model.