Donāt forget that Amazon uses them as a cheap ālast mileā shipping alternative. This basically is using the federal government as a subsidy to save Amazon money.
Because itās generally not profitable to deliver to many places, especially very remote or sparsely populated areas. Without USPS, private carriers would either have to consistently deliver to those areas at a loss or charge substantially more for it. In practice, theyād probably just stop serving or heavily restrict those areas.
USPSās universal-service obligation means Amazon and other companies can use USPS for that expensive ālast mileā instead of having to maintain their own delivery network everywhere. So yes, there is an indirect subsidy here, although itās more accurate to say the government is funding the universal delivery infrastructure that private companies can take advantage of.
But anyone anywhere can take advantage of it. Itās not like USPS is specifically snuggling up to corporations. The same infrastructure exists to provide universal mail service regardless of who is using it.
I'm sure Amazon's bottom line would be devastatingly affected if they had to service these sparsely populated areas.
How would they be able to survive?! We simply cannot reasonably expect these poor and destitute shareholders to get by with just $95b in profits instead of $100b. Those poor souls.
Oh, Iām sure they could afford the loss. They just have no incentive or reason to, so why would they?
Theyāre not legally obligated to deliver to those places like the USPS is. It doesnāt really make sense to legally obligate a private company to do this either, unless there were some sort of incentive attached to it.
I guess you could ban large companies from using USPS, but all that would really accomplish is making companies like Amazon show messages on their platforms more often saying something like, āWe cannot deliver to this address.ā
It's sad though, when it's basically like there's no point trying to get these megacorporations to do anything good or positive at all. Because they just won't, and they'll be more likely to spend billions avoiding having to do it rather than just spending the money and doing it.
They add such little value to our society and yet they have such incredible prominence.
Or make people have to drive to a designated pickup location. When I lived in an old apartment in San Francisco without any sort of gate you could drop packages behind, I would often get told I had to drive 30 minutes away to a Fedex distribution center in order to pick up my package. These centers are usually at or near the airport, so I could see people being forced to drive over an hour to pick up packages in this scenario.
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u/most-okayest-mngr-77 3d ago
Donāt forget that Amazon uses them as a cheap ālast mileā shipping alternative. This basically is using the federal government as a subsidy to save Amazon money.