Every year, the Post Office negotiates these lucrative deals with large companies—giving minimal consideration to family businesses—to subsidize their high number of deliveries. This happens ever year but little, if anything, is revealed to the public.
The fact that USPS gives away its services at below-market prices to one of the world’s largest companies, while demanding additional taxpayer support, is simply unfathomable. Sweetheart deals for large corporations disadvantage mom and pop businesses, leaving them on the hook for peak surcharges, while e-commerce behemoths take advantage of backroom arrangements to subsidize their immense shipping activities.
It is unfair for USPS, as a government agency, to punish Americans who simply want to use its public service to connect with their customers, neighbors and families across cities and states.
This holiday season, pricing increases come into effect without any degree of transparency about who pays surcharges and who does not. The immense discrepancies between those who deliver at a high volume and those who may deliver less will remain.
Innumerable family-owned businesses across the country serve communities that lack access to large retail and consumer good stores. For these areas, family businesses passed from generation to generation serve as lifelines. Those that face pricing burdens from USPS must pass the costs onto consumers who will not only pay more, but also have to deal with slower deliveries of their items.
USPS’s sweetheart deals represent one more devastating hurdle for small business owners during a year in which they have been forced to endure a pandemic that has devastated their livelihoods. There is no good reason for the Postal Service, a constitutionally mandated, public service institution, to hand small businesses a new disadvantage by subsidizing competitors with a market cap larger than many countries’ GDP. If these exorbitant discrepancies continue, some family businesses may have to close their doors and put out “for lease” signs on their buildings.
Palmer Schoening serves as the Chairman of the Family Business Coalition, a diverse collection of organizations united for the common purpose of protecting America’s family businesses across the country.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
