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Several outfits in the business already. It would be my guess the US Postal Service may have no interest in such a service. It's overheard would be non-competitive.
By a large margin people will be paying to send advertising will stop if the postal service allows the minority to pay them to shred the paying customers product
Many of us have all our bills sent electronically and are paid via our banking apps or bank e-bills/e-pay. I get very little mail that is important; it is mostly ads, credit card offers, insurance offerings. Stuff I never bother to open and it goes straight to the recycle bin.
With a virtual mail box, you get an email or smart phone alert when new mail arrives. You can use your phone app or go online to view an outside image of your mail and packages. Then you decide if you want the mail forwarded to you (delivered), scanned or discarded.
This is the future as the younger generations are more computer savvy. By offering Virtual Mail as an OPTION for those who wish to pay for it, it will generate income to USPS. But those of you who like getting mail to your home, you will still get it.
Let me see if I understand...I pay the USPS to delay my mail so they can send me five or ten texts a day until I take the trouble to go online and screen everything and then I tell them how to sort everything into a keep or throw away pile and then wait to see if they got it right and deliver some of it a day or two later and toss the rest, all based on what the outside of the envelope looks like instead of simply taking it all out of the mailbox and taking a minute to screen it myself?
And if the post office gets a bunch of people to do this their income will drop off dramatically from their loss of bulk mail volume.
Oh yeah, why wouldn't everybody want to do this? Virtual insanity.
Virtual Mailbox Service via USPS (or commonly referred to as P.O. Box address portability) was examined years ago. A major takeaway was the USPS can not discard people's mail. If you didn't want it you had to throw it away or use some other method allowed by postal regulation for the mail piece to be abandoned. There was also concerns over foreign scams and abuse. But I belive in the end, the interest just wasn't enough for the investment the USPS had to make. From that research came Informed Delivery. Even today, some of the private virtual mail services formally used by full time RVers have pulled out of the business and some PMBs that offered the service have discontinued offering it. Apparently, the cost to provide the service was a bit too expensive for what people in reality were willing to pay. Many current services now simply offset the cost by data mining the mail piece.
It eliminates what is by far the most costly element in mail delivery, the last mile. Which isn't necessarily a reason anyone would want it, but it makes the USPS push understandable.
(I saw a poster for this the other day at my PO... wasn't familiar with the term "virtual mailbox" for it.)
Really???? USPS does NOT offer this service, so I am curious what this poster read.
They don't offer this service because it would kill their business model. USPS makes a lot of its money from bulk mail. This is the junk that most people wouldn't read or have delivered, if they had a choice in the matter. If advertisers could measure how little their bulk mail was read, they wouldn't pay to produce and send it in the first place! Or they would send far less of it. Both scenarios take money away from the USPS.
Let me see if I understand...I pay the USPS to delay my mail so they can send me five or ten texts a day until I take the trouble to go online and screen everything and then I tell them how to sort everything into a keep or throw away pile and then wait to see if they got it right and deliver some of it a day or two later and toss the rest, all based on what the outside of the envelope looks like instead of simply taking it all out of the mailbox and taking a minute to screen it myself?
This is not a service for those who can simply take it all out of the mailbox and take a minute to screen it yourself. What if you live in a motorhome and are never in one state for more than a few months, or you're an OTR trucker or airline pilot, or you travel 80% of the time for business, or you're on a 90 day work assignment out of the country, or any other situation where you cannot easily physically access your mailbox? Not every service is relevant or desirable for every user. That doesn't mean the service doesn't have it's place. There are 3rd parties already providing this service and they are thriving.
The USPS is already having a problem with "informed delivery". Their customers time sensitive products now sit for days untouched in residential mailboxes waiting for the recipient to see something worthy of his time to go empty a mailbox
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