[ender7]

Anyone complaining about USPS quality of service should really travel to other countries. From my experience in Europe and elsewhere, USPS knocks it out of the park.

One of the reasons that USPS is a national monopoly is that it provides an important piece of national infrastructure. I don't see how that is going to be replaced, as many features of federal and local government depend on systems for reliably sending citizens messages, such as censuses, legal notifications such as court summons, drafts, various aspects of voting and elections, information and notices from local governments, etc.

Most of these depend on every citizen being reachable by mail, which is in the USPS's charter, and which causes a lot of overhead. If the USPS goes away, private companies will not provide service to everyone. I have no idea how these systems will continue function (e-mail is, for various reasons, not an acceptable solution at the moment).

I would love for USPS to develop alternate forms of income in order to essentially "pay for" traditional mail delivery. I'm not sure it's in their DNA though.