How old is usps

By the dawn of the 20 th century, far-flung farmers convinced the government that they deserved home delivery, too—and so letters were dropped into old cigar boxes and lard pails down country roads. Congress kicked in taxpayer money, too. The next frontier was parcel post. By the early 20 th century, the Post Office had established a four-pound limit on mail; anything heavier was supposed to be left to private companies.

But the four largest private carriers had effectively formed a cartel, setting confusing and often exploitative rates. In , after decades of fierce debate, Congress busted the price-fixing racket and made parcel service an official Post Office product. With three hundred million packages sent in the first six months the service was an immediate hit. The Post Office as we know it emerged. The year after parcel delivery began, a new post office was built in Manhattan. This has become an unofficial motto, a tribute to mail carriers and routes that became legendary for their perils.

In Alaska, letter carriers rode on dogsleds until the s; even now, mail is dropped into some towns by parachute.

Down the Grand Canyon, where a Native American tribe lives, mail carriers still deliver the post by mule. The hard work of sorting and carrying our scrawled missives across the landscape has provided steady, mostly middle-class, jobs to many Americans—in , the agency employed more than , people. Rubio notes that these jobs have been particularly important to communities of color , who were historically shunted into lower-paying roles in private industry.

They are jobs, too, that do more than just carry messages. Its website offers near-daily updates on mail carrier heroics: finding missing children, reporting fires, administering emergency first aid. This work has not always been well-rewarded. Letter carriers began to unionize in the s, almost as soon as home delivery began, and fought for better pay and work conditions. But even a hundred years later, some letter carriers were still paid so little that they lived off food stamps and welfare.

In , a presidential commission concluded that mail service would be improved if it were run as a business, a proposal that postal unions opposed. Things hit a breaking point in , when New York City carriers launched a strike that spread across the nation. The post-strike negotiations changed the face of the institution yet again.

In , an act of Congress turned the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, a government-owned company expected to generate enough revenue to pay for itself.

For nearly two centuries, taxpayers had funded the Post Office to help build a nation. Now, the nation was deemed built. For decades since then, the new U. Postal Service worked just fine, and by the s, the agency was steadily turning a profit. All that came to a screeching halt with the arrival of email at the end of the 20 th century. First-class and marketing mail is dwindling— dropping by 34 percent since Because it has a legal obligation to visit every household six days a week, the Postal Service can offer cheap rates to private carriers like Amazon and FedEx, bringing deliveries on the last step of the journey to our doorsteps.

Though President Donald Trump has complained that the Postal Service is losing money in the deal, the agency itself has stated that its costs are covered. Details of the deal are not public, but the agency is required by law to ensure such deals are profitable. An independent body, the Postal Regulatory Commission, oversees these deals. Lately, though, even this revenue has begun to plateau.

The law also included an unusual requirement, instructing the agency to pay advance for future employee retirement benefits. Then came the Great Recession that hit in December It has not turned a profit since. In , the Postal Service began to default on those retirement benefit payments —its only option, it says, if it wants to keep paying its suppliers and employees. Now, with mail volume plummeting further due to the coronavirus, there are concerns that within months, the Postal Service will lack the funds it needs to continue full operation.

Stakeholders and pundits are debating what comes next. The Postal Service has examined the potential of turning rural post offices into broadband hubs that would reach households through existing telephone lines. Politicians have talked about having the Postal Service return to banking , a service it provided for half of the last century, to reach remote communities not served by commercial financial institutions. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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