The Postal Service Wasn’t Built for Boxes

You might have read the recent news report that Amazon now delivers more packages than established companies including UPS and FedEx—the latest sign of the e-commerce company’s dominance. But if you read closely, you also saw that the U.S. Postal Service still handles more parcels (about 7 billion a year) than any of these companies, and in fact delivers hundreds of millions of packages for them.

Americans’ reliance on package deliveries presents a massive opportunity for the USPS at a time when people are sending less and less paper mail. Until the e-commerce boom, parcels represented a small side business for the Postal Service; over the past year, of its $78.2 billion revenue came from parcel delivery. The agency increase that share and become the nation’s go-to option for shipping. “A first class letter used to be treated like gold,” a letter carrier in upstate New York recently wrote to me by email. “Parcels are the new gold for us.”