The United States Postal Service is great for two reasons. First, for a couple quarters a letter can be sent across the country. Second, books, and other media free of advertising, can be shipped nearly anywhere for barely more than fifty cents a pound. The drawbacks of the USPS include stuffing your mailbox with rainforests worth of direct mail, providing no real service in the event of a lost package, barraging website users with a spammy array of services during a simple address change, charging for sundries like paper and tape at their retail locations, and many others that I’m sure Americans of all stripes can come together and complain about. However, I was a little bit surprised to find a new one today.

Over the course of my life I have gradually been acquiring books more quickly than I get rid of them. Some are great novels I’ve read, some are textbooks from college or grad school, some a books I never read about a subject I wanted to learn about, and some are on the to-read list. No matter how fast I give away books, I always seem to continue accumulating them. This presents a problem each time I move.

For my current transition from Atlanta to Berkeley, I decided to ship my collection via media mail. I calculated I had about 300 pounds of books I wanted to keep, so USPS would charge me about $150 to move them all. Not bad. I then figured that since I was shipping books, I may as well ship all my stuff. I went to my friendly local Midtown ATL post office this morning with 10 small (16″ x 12″ x 12″) Home Depot boxes plus a few others.

First I was informed that each USPS customer can only ship 10 packages per day! Huh? I would love to know if this is actually true and, if it is, what kind of insane business wants its customers not to use its services. However, my clerk bent the rules for me and agreed to ship all 12 of my packages as long as I rewrote all the address labels.

Then came the prices. Media Mail was about $0.50 per pound, as expected, but by non-media boxes rang up at almost three times the price without tracking, insurance, or any other niceties included with competitors’ rates. I know USPS loses money on first class mail and media mail, but I would have thought that their destructively cheap behavior at the retail locations and direct mail cash cow would let them charge competitive rates on regular shipments. I was wrong.

For a 50 pound 16″ x 12″ x 12″ package going from Atlanta to Berkeley insured for $500, USPS charges $92.70. FedEx Ground only charges $68.46. I had looked up the FedEx Ground rate before walking in and would have assumed USPS would have parity, but realized I was totally wrong as my first non-Media Mail package got rung up. The fact that USPS is so uncompetitive (35% more expensive!) was really surprising to me. In fact, given how many packages I had, the dramatically higher rate drove me right to the FedEx office down the street.

I realize the government holds down First Class Mail and Media Mail rates and direct mail is an important revenue generator for the USPS, but the fact that they can’t compete on regular parcel price while offering a significantly worse experience to most customers was very surprising for me. I don’t know what the solution is to improve the USPS experience, but given the current letter volume, distaste for mass mailings, and excellence of FedEx and UPS, I think the time may soon come to pull the plug.