[exabrial]

We could immediately provide relief to fuel prices, while doing the climate a huge favor, by immediately suspending the USPS accepting marketing material through the mail.

My mailbox is permanently jammed with paper that useless paper that is both produced and hauled away to a landfill by diesel fuel.

No I do not want your credit card offer.

No I do not want to switch phone plans.

No I do not want an extended warranty.

[usefulcat]

Reducing the frequency of mail delivery would have a much larger impact, since most of fuel is probably consumed by last mile delivery.

Delivering less mail each day doesn't really make much difference if the mail carrier still has to come to my neighborhood 6 times a week.

[browningstreet]

Fewer mail carriers could hit twice as many places in a given time-frame and reduce overall gas usage.

[lokar]

A lot of the USPS budget is from delivering bulk mail. They already fail to break even (albeit with absurd retirement funding rules imposed on them). Without the fees from bulk mail they would need to raise prices, and it's not entirely clear they could given they face strong competition.

[SoftTalker]

I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026. Yes, the Constitution grants congress the power to establish "post offices and post roads" but it doesn't mandate it AFAIK.

Other countries (Denmark is an example) have completely privatized physical mail delivery. All official mail is electronic. There's some nostalgia for the postman on his red bicycle (or in the USA, walking the neighborhood or driving their funny looking trucks) but are they really necessary?

Edit to add: since running post offices is explicitly a Federal power, a conversion of US Mail to being electronically based would be completely within scope. There would be no arguing over "states rights" that tends to become a logjam for any other national infrastructure or policy changes.

[stryan]

Practically speaking, USPS does a lot of last mile package delivery that no one else wants to do, including Amazon. If USPS wasn't delivering to those locations no one would be. And we're not talking middle-of-no-where-Wyoming locations, plenty of places east of the Mississippi have only USPS too.

There's all sorts of philosophical arguments as well: government services shouldn't need to turn a profit, all citizens need to be able to interact with the State and the post office provides a way to do that, mail-in voting, Post Offices can offer stuff like general delivery for those without permanent addresses, etc.

[SoftTalker]

There are lots of rural places the USPS doesn't deliver to. They require you to get your mail at a PO Box at the nearest post office, or have a mailbox at a common spot on the nearest public road (which might be a fair distance from your house).

[stryan]

They won't deliver to the house but they'll still deliver to that area. Amazon/etc wouldn't even deliver to the area without the infrastructure of the USPS.

[hadlock]

You need a non-electronic way to bill land owners for property taxes. That's it. Physical snail-mail is the de-facto way for the government to legally serve property taxes and other bills to private citizens. Yes we live in 2026 and everyone has email, but there's no legal requirement to give the government your email address, or even have one. You are however, legally required to provide a mailing address for your property tax bill to be sent to.

Sure, by that standard we could probably reduce to weekly or even monthly mail service. It's been suggested since at least 2008 we drop Tuesday mail service as almost nobody sends mail on Saturdays and there's no mail service on Sundays.

[precommunicator]

Who says anything about e-mail? Government could legislate specific government electronic inboxes, with e-mail and SMS notifications of delivery, as has been happening in several, if not all EU countries.

I haven't got a snail mail from my government for years at this point, nor did I needed to send one that way.

[exabrial]

I pay all of my property taxes online.

[15155]

That's wonderful: the option of a payment portal isn't the point. The purpose of snail mail is process can be served prior to seizing/applying a lien on the property when you don't pay (online or otherwise.)

[raw_anon_1111]

Because you can’t make money serving rural areas and no for profit company would touch deliverying to those areas

[lokar]

Another case of the evil, unamerican cities subsidizing the real Americans

[michaelt]

Traditionally, the state has certain duties it needs to perform for every member of the population.

Passports, driving licenses, polling cards, draft registration, pensions, company registrations, patents, copyrights, court summons, speeding fines, inheritance, tax paperwork, census, etc etc.

It’s much simpler to perform these duties if you have a means of communication that can reliably reach every citizen.

[SoftTalker]

I'm not sure I'd put "reliable" in any description of the USPS. I get my neighbors mail in my box often. I can only assume some of my mail gets delivered to them as well.

[joemi]

That's still far more reliable than trying to email someone who doesn't have a computer or smartphone.

[lokar]

I think it's mostly not needed, but there are a lot of edge cases or narrow situations where it's important. They could be fixed, but no one is doing that.

IMO, a better option is to switch to 3 days/week delivery, and where addresses are very spread out, require centralized boxes.

[dawnerd]

Those other countries are much, much smaller in land mass than the US making it much easier for private companies to be competitive. Privatizing post in the US would be potentially life threatening to some rural communities. More than just mail is delivered. Saying we don't need one is pretty out of touch IMO.

[duskdozer]

It provides the best service of all of them. I'm not sure why you would want to add a profit-seeking middleman when you can just fund the service at cost.

[46493168]

> I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026

Mail in voting.

[conception]

Denmark is like twice the size of Massachusetts.

[Hikikomori]

Danskjävlarna ruined posten.

[duskdozer]

>They already fail to break even

It doesn't need to make money or "break even." We just pay the cost in tax or postage that is needed to run the service.

[lokar]

I don’t mind a public subsidy, but that’s not current law or the majority attitude

[exabrial]

yeah... I'll take clean air and pay a few extra bucks the 3 times a year I actually need to mail something.

[jackling]

Not sure how it is in America, but in Canada you can post a note inside your mailbox stating that you don't want unaddressed mail.

https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/personal/consu...

[rkagerer]

I'm tried that, I've even plasterd the inside of my mailbox with a mini-poster directing to not leave it, and it hasn't worked at all.

[mikestew]

$8, and that all stops for ten years: https://www.dmachoice.org/static/consumer_choice_tools.php

I’ve done it (several times, ‘cuz ten years), you’ll notice an almost immediate reduction in junk mail.

[youarentrightjr]

Sounds like a racketeering operation (not saying it doesn't work).

[culi]

Smells fishy indeed by it's just $8 per 10 years...

Also I'm sure that if a bill were ever passed to stop junk mail by default, it would be utilizing the infrastructure built by this service

[mikestew]

It indeed has a fishy smell to it. But as I thought through it, if it were free then some bozo would spam an entire address database and then we can't have nice things anymore. The ten year expiration is sketchy, but I guess someone is hoping you'll let it expire (I've never received a "renewal notice", as it were.) And, yeah, "nice mailbox, shame if it got filled with shit you didn't ask for."

OTOH, for less than a dollar a year, I can go find other clouds to shake my fist at.

[ssl-3]

What percentage of overall vehicular fuel use does junk mail (from inception to landfill) constitute, might you suppose?

[tshaddox]

Percentage of mass is probably the wrong metric to look at, because it assumes that the USPS could simply eliminate the X% of mass used by junk mail and save roughly X% on fuel/delivery costs.

But of course the issue is that the junk mail is subsidizing the actual mail. There's likely no way the USPS could be financially solvent, at least with the current level of service, if junk mail were eliminated. Personally I'd be fine with that. One or two mail deliveries per week would be more than enough!

[ssl-3]

I think the real issue in this context is the 3.5% surcharge that Amazon may add, and whether or not elimination of USPS junk mail could ever make a dent in that 3.5% figure.

(My gut says that it would not; that the fuel use of junk mail constitutes a very small drop in a very large bucket. But I'd love to be wrong about this.)

[digitalsushi]

If the majority of mail stops are junk mail only, I would love to see some napkin math of the effect of all those diesel/gasoline accelerations per mailbox, dropped across the daily fleet of drop offs.

[slillibri]

Stopping marketing mail wouldn’t change the number of accelerations per mailbox. USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail. The only difference would be in weight carried.

[mikestew]

USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail.

No they don’t, that’s what the red flag on the mailbox is for. Everywhere I’ve lived, if you don’t put the flag up and there’s no incoming mail for you, they don’t stop.

[jghn]

Depends. Where I live outgoing mail goes into the closest blue USPS bin. And given that most days all mail I receive is slop, removing the slop would remove the need to come to my house.

Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.

[Teever]

It's not just the vehicular fuel that goes into this process, it's the growing the trees, harvesting them, making them into paper, then combining that paper with ink that likely has a similarly complex supply chain on a printing press that consumes a lot of power.

Getting flyers that are subsidized by the post office for stuff like lawnmowers and patio furniture even though I live in an apartment is peak absurdity.

[lenerdenator]

I live in what was a family member's house before her passing in 2014.

I still receive her mail.

Here's the kicker: the mail is addressed to a name she hadn't legally had since the late 1970s. She divorced and remarried - which meant taking her new husband's last name - then lived another 30-ish years, died, I moved in, and it's been ten years of me there.

It's an insanely wasteful practice.

[singleshot_]

Write “rejected” on all the mail you don’t want and leave it unopened in your box. Cuts it down nearly to zero after a few months.

[lenerdenator]

Will give that a try, thanks

[culi]

If you live in the US you can stop almost all junk mail for $6 for a 10 year registration to DMA Choice

https://consumer.ftc.gov/node/77522

[calvinmorrison]

In FY2022, fuel consumption was 221 million gallons of gasoline equivalent, with gasoline or diesel making up 99%. USPS fleet greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) made up 70% of overall GHGs for federal fleet vehicles in FY2022.

50-60% of all mail is marketing slop

[mrguyorama]

Mail delivery vehicles have to travel roughly the same paths as long as there is most anything to deliver.

That's what makes it a public service.

Junk mail just makes stamps cheaper. That route had to be driven anyway. You have generally what amounts to a right to put a stamped letter in your box at the end of the driveway, put up the flag, and get serviced. The route has to be driven regardless.

We could eliminate all marketing mail, make a large push to make all billing digital, and USPS would still have to drive most routes most days.

A fix would have to reduce service significantly, or introduce a new "Register for pickup" process to signal your need of service.

We could have also made those brand new mail vehicles hybrid or something.

[calvinmorrison]

yes a public advertising delivery service

[exabrial]

Honestly I'd be surprised if it's that low. My guess is by weight its closer to 85%-95%.

Your numbers show exactly what I was guessing to be true though. Incredible this has never been enforced.