Consider the plight of today’s U.S. mail carrier. Your employer is slagged off in the media for being fiscally irresponsible, your pension is a political football, and you may or may not be delivering mail on Saturdays depending on which way the wind is blowing. And now you may not even be sure who your employer actually is anymore.
That’s because today Amazon announced that it has struck a deal that will see the Postal Service delivering Amazon packages to consumers on Sundays starting in the New York and Los Angeles markets – first deliveries will begin next weekend. The program could be expanded to Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix (our editor just did a happy dance) next year. Financial details of the arrangement have not been disclosed.
Let’s take a look at this step by step, shall we? Businesses and individuals pay postage rates set by the USPS’s governing board and can expect their items to be received six days a week…unless threats of reducing that to five days a week are made good on.
Along comes one retailer that pays the postal service a bit extra to get special Sunday delivery treatment. When this happens in dustier countries, we call it a bribe. Here, where Amazon may be the last high-volume customer the post office has, we call it a good idea.
