The USPS is United States’ postal service with a very bold statement — while private sector enterprises (read: the big banks) are using taxpayers’ money to recover from the crisis they created, USPS, though a public enterprise, has been self-sufficient most of its time — funding its operations and employee benefits from its own revenues and profits.

But with technological changes and stiff competition from private sector, USPS is going through survival challenges.

As you can see from this article, they are brainstorming a bunch of ideas to improve the state of the company, but — in my opinion — have not considered what could be a landmark option. My idea is something I improvised based on what I read somewhere.

Today, every shipper uses their own last-mile delivery network to come to your homes and deliver mails and packages. Every day, if you are at home, you can see the USPS guy, the Fedex guy, the UPS guy and every other shipper send their own vans to deliver the packages. While all of them do essentially the same thing, USPS has got the reputation to be reaching the “most number of addresses”, since USPS does not get to decline shipments to otherwise inaccessible places, which other shippers frequently decline.

If you read my previous line again, it is such a powerful service statement no one other than USPS can make. So how do we protect/ save a company with such great service mindset?

The idea I am about to propose is to have private shippers like Fedex and UPS, outsource partly or fully the last-mile delivery task to UPS — so while companies like Fedex will still do the bulk of the work and get the bulk of the revenue, the last mile revenue will be passed on to USPS. So whether you send something through USPS, Fedex or UPS, your recipient will get it delivered in a USPS van only.

In addition to saving USPS, it has several direct benefits (improve the margins of private shippers) and indirect benefits (lower traffic congestions due to fewer vehicles on the road, lesser use of fuels, lesser pollution and carbon emissions). I am sure they have thought about it and evaluating it. Will this get implemented?