I would point out that the delivery services, UPS & Fedex & etc, in an effort to control their costs of "last mile" delivery, have all partnered with USPS to hand off the home delivery of their packages. That increased significantly the Post Office load. I'm sure the USPS thought that was a good deal, grabbing a piece of the pie of the package companies, however, the outcome, handing off from a high efficiency process to a low efficiency process has been poor and especially stressful for the USPS employees.
I have noted that USPS tracking has collapsed in the last year or so. You used to see each leg of the trip. Now, you see the package go out and may not see any progress until it is delivered. That probably was an effort to reduce the scanning of all packages at each stop. That kind of scanning is, by necessity, built into the package companies automated processes (packages are bar coded, machine scanned, and machine sorted). The USPS isn't as well automated and an increase in number of packages, increases work loads on PEOPLE. The USPS system is ill designed for expansion. The cost to do so would be enormous. They are stuck because the USPS management failed to have a vision of the future of "mail".
As the USPS collapses under its own, people heavy, weight, there will be a shift in what needs to be mailed. Many bills and legal notices will become email because that will be more reliable and laws will change to support what is a "legal notice" (now requiring a USPS notification). The vast amount of merchandise mail (that is mostly trashed) will dry up. Simple and easy to use devices will be in homes to allow people to receive email without the complexity of a full capacity computer. The USPS will be extinct.
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