Cutting Apart USPS Priority Mail Supplies To Use For Packing

I ordered a bunch of priority envelopes yesterday from the USPS website (yes, for actually shipping things) and they make you click on a button that says you understand that these are to be used only for their intended purpose and that they remain property of the USPS. So there, you see? They ARE doing something about it!

As an update to this thread, here's the first article I've read that puts a dollar figure on the cost to the USPS for the these "free" Priority and Express Mail boxes that are given away to postal customers:




More here:

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abb...7317393.html

https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/boxes-...s-everywhere

That U$D 192,000,000 expense is provided without context.

Annual totals have some slop, but will not mislead us by much.

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/p...-figures.htm ... USPS 2015 package volume was U$D 4,500,000,000

So the boxes come to less than one nickel out of every dollar in revenue.

(The math for 2010 was just slightly more than one nickel, so the problem is not getting worse.)

Yeah, okay, 4c would be better than 5c, but saving that 1c might cost them market share, gross revenue, and net income.

Wrong place to save money.

Q/ How much are they spending on TeeVee advertising for their package delivery services?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Up North in Canada.....the Priority Post envelopes are behind the counter....you have to pay the full amount to use them.
I've seen a couple of dealers here that use the USPS envelopes to pack purchases at shows.
About the only item Canada Post will hand out for free are the glassines.

It doesn't sound like much, but that percentage is a pretty significant line in any company's costs and would get a lot of attention from management. That's a lot of dough to shell out to provide free boxes for a service that's already the cheapest way to send a package. However, as has already been said, they probably figure it's worth it because they probably gain some efficiency through standardized box sizes, etc.

Artful: I will cop to having expected the expense to be somewhere south of 2c/$.

The simplest/fastest/cheapest way to offset some of the expense is to assess a convenience fee ($2?) on the boxes ordered online & delivered for free.

That, of course, would conflict with the goal of reducing the foot traffic in/out of physical post offices, and with the online USPS Store goal of capturing traffic.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I'll preface this by saying I don't know a darn thing about running a postal service. But if I were running it, I'd be looking pretty hard at that number and would want to drive it downward or even eliminate it. But any action you'd take toward that end would entail other considerations. If you merely put them behind a counter (free or not) you would then make the lines at post offices even longer, so you probably have to hire more people just to deal with it. The cost savings you'd incur by giving away fewer boxes may well be eaten up by increased headcount, at least somewhat. You'd basically be forced to charge for them in order to pay for the necessary staffing. If you start charging, maybe people use their own boxes and they lose some efficiencies, etc. Regardless, if the USPS were a publicly traded corporation, I can pretty much guarantee they'd be working pretty hard at reducing or eliminating that expense.

I think you are missing one important factor in the USPS giving the boxes away for free. How many people choose to use them and send a package priority mail instead of as a first class parcel (or even lower class of mail)? What is the added revenue they generate from the up sell? Looking only at the expense side does not show the whole picture. I have been in the post office when someone wants to send a package, and they use the priority mail box because it is free, when the item could have shipped cheaper (in this case, media mail), had they provided their own box.

Nobody has mentioned that the envelopes and boxes in question all contain a USPS print statement that they are to be used for USPS business purposes. The exact statement is

This packaging is the property of the U.S. Postal Service and is provided solely for use in sending Priority Mail shipments. Misuse may be a violation of federal law. This packaging is not for resale. July 2013. All rights reserved.

Note the keywords are "may be". You have to wonder if anyone has actually been convicted of such a thing.

UPS & FDX are publicly-traded corporations.

Neither is charging for boxes.

I have never been challenged when I've asked for boxes at any of all three.

USPS might suffer from people thinking that they are somehow entitled to take from the post office, as they own the post office ... and a light-handed education campaign might cut into that ... but I think the Big Picture is:

Cost of doing business.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey