Latest Postage Stamp Price Hike Buys The US Postal Service Two Weeks Of Extra Time

from Zero Hedge

The US Postal Service may be a woefully overstaffed anachronism of a bygone era, with a painfully mismatched cost and revenue structure, which last year reported a massive, and record, $15.9 billion annual loss for the last Fiscal year, but that doesn’t mean it is going away without a fight. As of yesterday, the USPS valiantly hiked the price of first-class mail by another 2.6%, to 46 cents, up from the 45 cents which in turn was hiked a year previously. Alas, somehow we doubt this latest increase in pricing which is supposed to keep up with inflation, will do much for the long-term viability of the government service which employes some 500,000, and which has warned would run out of cash by October 2013 for two simple reasons: the ongoing collapse in mail volume sent via the USPS (with free or more effective alternative widely adopted), and a cost structure that unlike the revenue side, has managed to stay leaps and bound ahead of inflation courtesy of some rather vocal labor unions.

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