gcomeau wrote:
No, your "source" does not say that. It just says Amazon entered into a delivery contract with USPS in 2013.
It doesn't say one single damn word about "President Obama pressuring the US Post Office to provide delivery services to Amazon at a small fraction of fair market value."
Because that never happened. Trump says it happened, but Trump says about 150 untrue things an hour last I checked.
It also says USPS says they are making a profit on the deal.
If the seller is making a profit, and the buyer is getting what they want for their payments, that is pretty much the definition of "fair market value".
The 2006 rules for USPS were predicated on the presumption that the marginal cost of handling the packages being shipped would be minimal. The rules reflected the historic paradigm that the volume of packages would be low enough that mail carriers carriers who deliver the packages would usually not have to make extra trips. The 2006 rules also include a discount for presorting by Zip Code and another discount for submitting the packages for delivery to the branch post office that they are to be delivered from.
Amazons sales volume and numerous fullfillment centers do not conform to the preexisting paradigm. Amazon delivers huge volumes of packages to individual post offices (say two pallets each with a cubic meter of packages weighing 500 kg to a small town of only 1,000 people) that vastly exceeds the volume of normal mail and packages from other shippers. This huge volume exceeds the capacity of mail delivery vehicles. As a result, carriers have to make extra trips to finish their route or more carriers have to be hired to handle more volume.