Posts for Tag: mail

US Postal Service vs Private Delivery

Posted In: Government

The US Postal Service mail volume is enormous and can’t easily be replaced by private delivery services

The US Postal Service (USPS) has been getting a good deal of press recently because of Trump’s attacks on the security of mail in voting and recent moves by political appointees to reduce the capability of the agency to delivery mail in a timely fashion. These changes reportedly include removing mail sorting equipment and changing overtime hours.

Some have suggested privatizing the postal service but currently the volume of mail and packages through private delivery services is far smaller than that carried by the federal agency.

Note that the USPS carries about 55 billion pieces of first class mail annually out of the reported 143 billion pieces of total mail.

Source and Tools:
Data on Fedex, UPS and Amazon deliveries is from this theverge.com article. Data for the USPS comes from usps.com. Graph is made using the plotly open source javascript library.