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Transportation The Almighty Buck

Postal Service to Impose Its First-Ever Fuel Surcharge on Packages (cnbc.com) 219

The U.S. Postal Service plans to impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages (source paywalled; alternative source), adding an 8% fee starting in April as it struggles with rising fuel costs and ongoing financial pressure. The surcharge will not apply to letter mail and is currently expected to remain in place until January 2027. The Wall Street Journal reports: Other parcel carriers, including FedEx and United Parcel Service, have imposed fuel surcharges, as well as a basket of other surcharges and fees, for years. Both FedEx and UPS have dramatically raised their fuel surcharges in recent weeks as the price of oil has increased amid the turmoil in the Middle East. [...] The post office has been trying to increase the volume of packages it delivers. It previously differentiated itself from commercial carriers by saying that it doesn't apply residential, Saturday delivery or fuel or remote-delivery surcharges.
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Postal Service to Impose Its First-Ever Fuel Surcharge on Packages

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  • If I get a $2000 laptop delivered to my home, they leave it outside the gate, a half mile from my home, in an unlocked box. Wouldn't I be better off having the package delivered to an Amazon Lockbox right next to or even inside of the post office, and then not pay any fuel surcharge?
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:34PM (#66062114)

      Packet delivery is really important. That is why we use TCP. Lost or delayed packets are resent to insure data integrity.

    • > Wouldn't I be better off having the package delivered to an Amazon Lockbox right next to or even inside of the post office, and then not pay any fuel surcharge?

      You realize this is already a thing the post office does [usps.com], right?

      You can also have items shipped to, say, a UPS store or have it held at a FedEx shipping hub for pickup.

      =Smidge=

      • Lockboxes are available 24/7. As someone who actually works for a living, I am unable to visit the post office (30 minutes away) during normal business hours. I have picked up packages on Saturday in the past. Rural post offices are not well staffed...
        • by haruchai ( 17472 )

          it's often difficult in big cities too.
          i've long had similar difficulties with getting deliveries during business hours and had to opt for weekend pickups but for a long time the carriers facilities were in the suburbs and I don't own a car.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Do you not already have this? Amazon has local lockers here in drug stores, gas stations and convenience stores, most of which are open 24 hours. Most of the postal locations are also in drug stores.

      • I had something delivered to the local CVS by UPS once. It wasn't in a locker, it was just left on an unattended shelf near the front of the store. If I order something high value, I prefer to either have it delivered directly to my door when I know I'll be home. If I have to go out and pick up the damn thing myself, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of shipping.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          You can of course have it delivered to your door as well. If you can't receive it at home, as is the case being discussed in this thread, then you can have something delivered to a locker. When you go to pick it up you tell Amazon you're there and they pop open the correct door.

    • If I get a $2000 laptop delivered to my home, they leave it outside the gate, a half mile from my home, in an unlocked box.

      So what you're saying is that if I figure out where you live, I can score a free laptop?

      • Risky. The millionaire that bought all the property got pissed off when one of his houses was broken into and mounted a battery-backed camera and light system with it's own SkyLink connection right next to the gate. So be sure to smile for the cameras if you come digging through the drop box The irony is that the thousands of dollars word of equipment mounted to that pole is worth far more than anybody got by breaking into his empty old house.
  • Winning! (Score:3, Funny)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:20PM (#66062066) Journal

    Tired of all the winning yet?

    We were promised that we were going to be crying about how we couldn't take all the winning. I'm just wondering if we're there yet.

  • by Jabes ( 238775 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:21PM (#66062076) Homepage

    US postal service should invest in electric vehicles.

    Oh, wait. â¦

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Japan's postal service uses lots of electric vehicles, both vans and motorcycles. Seem to work well enough, so I'm not really getting the target of your Funny. The YOB appointed a guy with a vested interest in destroying the postal service, and he seems to be accomplishing his mission.

      Solutions? On Slashdot? ROFLMAO.

      But what if we used email to make postal mail more convenient? A user-controlled linkage between email and physical address? Naw, that trick would never work.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:33PM (#66062110)
    They've been undermining the postal service for decades now. Doing stuff like requiring them to fund pension plans 30 years into the future and blocking off sources of funding and requiring them to be profitable despite the fact that they are a government service...

    And you can bet your ass that if or when they kill the postal service the private alternatives will shoot up in cost like you wouldn't believe.
    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Doing stuff like requiring them to fund pension plans 30 years into the future

      Imagine expecting an organization to have real plan and concrete assets in place to meet their defined benefit contractual obligations to employees.

      I mean they should be able to use rosy predictions about asset performance and when it does not work just dump the bill on the taxpayers like state and local pension funds for teachers, police, etc do! Or maybe they should be like the cool kids in corporate American declare bankruptcy, sell all the assets to an other entity that just happens to be owned by the s

    • Given how it has been losing money, why not privatize it, and let it compete w/ UPS, FedEx, DHL and others? Also, how many people still send paper letters or postcards these days?

      That way, if they can't compete, let them get acquired by UPS or Amazon or somebody else

  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:56PM (#66062162)

    Gee, what ever could the reason for rising fuel costs be?

    Duh. Hunter Biden's laptop!

    • Gee, what ever could the reason for rising fuel costs be?

      Duh. Hunter Biden's laptop!

      Wait... I thought it was Hillary's email server?

      Or was it O'Blama standing by and doing nothing during the attack on Pearl Harbor?

  • by Nicholas Grayhame ( 10502767 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @08:03PM (#66062180)

    Do you know about the USPS 75-year pre-funding mandate?

    In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

    If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years. This extraordinary mandate created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. Additional cuts in service and privatization would be devastating for millions of postal workers and customers.

    https://ips-dc.org/how-congres... [ips-dc.org]

    No other government agency or any corporation has to deal with such a mandate, but now the USPS can make money but republicans can claim the lazy bureaucrats are wasting the taxpayers money.

    • The PAEA mandate on the postal service was lifted 3 years ago.

      Your larger point remains though. The GOP is determined to kill the postal service. The GOP's obsession with the postal service being profitable is stupid. It's right there in the name: it's a service provided by government. You don't see anybody insisting your local fire department show a profit at the end of the year.

  • by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @08:12PM (#66062196) Homepage

    Providing services to citizens is currently not a priority.

    • All the more reason to privatize it

  • by sziring ( 2245650 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @09:15PM (#66062276)

    This supercharged the crisis of 2007-2008. not sure there was many articles written about it, but the patterns are the same.
    First person tax 8% on the seller bumps their price by 8% to offset it. If there is an intermediary, they tack on 8% and so on and so forth until the costs outweigh the benefits.
    Nail people have to make hard decisions as to what they want to purchase and of course cry about their V8 single driver vehicle costing so much to fill up.

    The shit is about to come off the rails. Once one person does it a.k.a. USPS it's gonna greenlight everybody else.

  • Amazon will deliver to my door. Same day. I live outside city limits. Great service.

    USPS uses a Contract Delivery Service. They only deliver to the parcel boxes. Never to my door. If it doesn't fit in the box, it's a 16 minute drive and 16 minutes back to the post office without traffic to fetch my package. I avoid USPS.

  • We're gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you'll say, Please, please. Its too much winning. We can't take it anymore, Mr. President, it's too much.

  • Americans should count themselves lucky that most of Trump's initiatives have been neutral and ineffective at best. You are lucky if skyrocketing inflation is all you have to deal with.

  • So I'm Gen X, which is important to what I'm going to say. My best friend from high school worked for the post office after graduating college and he retired a few years ago. USPS is essentially a government job and for those who don't know, US government employees are allowed to retire earlier than those who work in private industry do. I have to go to my local post office sometimes and the older employees are all gone now, having retired. Those guys cared. And it's not a case of "Blame the lazy Gen
  • Better raise usage fees on normal people instead
  • If the post office disappeared today, nothing of value would be lost. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Door Dash, etc. There are now any number of options for delivery of things to our homes. We don't need the post office now, and that's been the case for at least a decade.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. -- Poul Anderson

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