You think USPS is a pretty good service? Have you ever used them? I HATE going to USPS location. The staff is rude and slow. It takes forever to get even the smallest thing to be taken care of.
Compare this to UPS/FedEx. Generally, there won't be any lines and you can be in and out in less than 3 minutes.
As ck2 mentions, our experiences with USPS may be location specific. My experience is the exact opposite of yours, my local USPS shops (I patronize two locations almost daily) have been outstanding (adding postage to letters that need additional postage and leaving a note in my PO box asking to reimburse them, routing mislabel mail to my address, etc), and my experience at the local UPS/FedEx shops have been underwhelming and their hours generally suck.
I've shipped something like 3000 packages via USPS priority mail over the last 3 years, and there have been a grand total of two that have gotten lost (and I'm pretty sure that one of those two was a customer ripping me off). That's a much higher success rate than I've gotten with FedEx & UPS, at lower prices.
I guess the experience varies widely. I love USPS, very accessible and affordable, send anything up to 3 ounces in just a few days anywhere in the continental USA for $1.60
However I absolutely loathe, beyond description UPS. I wish Amazon used anything but UPS for prime, it ruins the whole experience.
> I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.
No need to "swear", they've been caught in that exact act several time by people who'd cleared their daily schedule entirely (or taken a home-work day for office drones) to get their package, either catching them trying to leave after having pinned/dropped a notice or plain not saying them the whole day.
And that's beyond their basic "rules" such as a home number not being clearly visible from the truck means you don't exist and fuck you very much.
Seriously? Having to pick up a package at UPS is usually the worst customer service experience I've had that week. I'd be pleased as punch if when they failed to deliver, they'd just drop it off at my local post office. I have spent over an hour in UPS more than once.
I don't have any data for <100 miles, but I've gotten stuff across the country in 3-4 days at the basic rate, 2000 miles not just 100 miles. And there are options for next day delivery, it's not like it's not available.
Canada's low and spread out population has to count for something in this argument.
You can get stuff across country in the US in 3-4 days too. And I didn't say there weren't economic/geographic reasons why Canada's mail service isn't as good, just that it isn't as good.
It would be nice to have a postal service not running billions of dollars in tax-payer funded deficits every year that was more reliable. A private for profit entity where innovation could improve service would be a very nice change.
Get out of here with your facts. We're here to whine about "entitlements" and "sustainability" and vent whatever other stories we can concoct about how the government can't do anything right, how turning over all government functions to for-profit corporations will fix everything, and how the USPS is evidence of the truth of these assertions. Communist.
