An Assessment of USPS’ Negotiated Service Agreements and Platforms’ Direct Entry in Delivery

This paper starts from USPS’s Negotiated Settlement Agreements (NSAs) to understand the evolution of the postal sector in the US linked to the growth of e-commerce. It goes on to explore reasons for platforms’ entry into last-mile delivery and its likely consequences. As a backdrop, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is under financial pressure. Over the period FY 2006 through FY 2016, the Commission noted that the Postal Service suffered a cumulative net loss of $59.1 billion (PRC, 2019a, p. 6). On 6 April 2018, President Trump stated on Twitter, “Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon,” Trump tweeted. “THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed.” The president’s broadside launched a full-scale news media debate that produced mainly opposing opinions (see for example, Banker, 2017 and Segarra, 2018).