The Postal Service’s Problems Are Good News—for UPS and FedEx - Barron's
The U.S. Postal Service—an organization older than the country—is getting more press than it wants as the fight over mail-in ballots and the organization’s funding heats up.
The post office is a secret giant. If it were publicly traded it would be worth, very roughly, $50 billion, making it the third largest non-rail logistics company by value in America. It generates about $71 billion in annual sales in 2019, just short of UPS’s $76 billion in sales and a touch higher than FedEx’s $69 billion.
The USPS has a funding problem, however. Even though the parcel business is booming, the marketing mail business is being badly hurt by the downturn. If the Postal Service were a publicly traded company, it would simply exit the mail business. It can’t, for obvious reasons.
The U.S. Postal Service—an organization older than the country—is getting more press than it wants as the fight over mail-in ballots and the organization’s funding heats up.
The post office is a secret giant. If it were publicly traded it would be worth, very roughly, $50 billion, making it the third largest non-rail logistics company by value in America. It generates about $71 billion in annual sales in 2019, just short of UPS’s $76 billion in sales and a touch higher than FedEx’s $69 billion.
The USPS has a funding problem, however. Even though the parcel business is booming, the marketing mail business is being badly hurt by the downturn. If the Postal Service were a publicly traded company, it would simply exit the mail business. It can’t, for obvious reasons.