Nice list and good points. Minor disagreement: from the USPS

For motorized city routes, and where the use of street names and house numbers is authorized on rural and con­tract delivery service routes, the mailbox must display the number on the side of single mailboxes or on the door of grouped mailboxes. If the mailbox is on a street other than the one on which the customer resides, the street name and house number must be on the mailbox. When rural and contract delivery service route customers have assigned box numbers, the numbers must appear on the side of sin­gle mailboxes or on the doors of grouped mailboxes, visi­ble to the approaching carrier. The street number, box number, and any other address information must be inscribed in contrasting color in neat letters and numerals not less than 1 inch in height. In all instances, placing the owner’s name on the box is optional, but not recom­mended by USPS.

My favorites are the regulations that you must have a mailbox approved by the postmaster general. But they kind of skirt around, how custom and art boxes can be acceptable. Oh and 1" high contrasting letters, make sure?

I went through the regulations, not because of postal problems, but because big farm equipment knocked mine down twice. I discovered that there are height and road setback regulations for rural routes as well. Mine was OK but way too close to the road. I don't blame the farmers. I moved it back a foot and it's still closer than any of my neighbors. Maybe next time the snow plows push it over (the wet snow does that, not the plow) I'll move back again. I expect that will be Spring, because mine has survived two years in a row, which is a record.

Some suggestions to improve the Post Office.

1. Raise cost on junk mail

2. Eliminate Saturday delivery

3. Drastically reduce requirement to fund medical costs. 75 years. Ridiculous

4. Privatize? Should be run as a business. This is a very sticky issue. No wonder Amazon is a major success.

Maybe these would work or not. Just my opinion.

Also good points, except #1, my Tuesday fire starter delivery. If there wasn't a price benefit for junk mail, we'd probably see the end to that. And although the stats say 1/3rd of all mail is advertising or junk mail, I'd say for us, it's more like 66%. Who really writes letters anymore? I invoiced by fax for years, but now people want an email. Fax is dead but I keep an account just in case. I think it's time to cut the expense.

But back to the point. Junk mail keeps the post office alive. You can't "return to sender", it is pre-sorted first class mail. Often there are merge mails also, but if the USPS wasn't being supported by junk mail, the price for a letter, first class, would probably be a dollar. I'd think packages are already priced for a competitive market.

Remember when we got mail twice a day for 3 cents. (air mail was 17c by the way) Well times do change. A nickle candy bar is a dollar or more and probably has shrunk. I think a dollar for a first class letter isn't out of the question for the future, without junk mail. And virtually all mail is air mail. There's got to be some that is trucked locally and I wonder about the "mail car" on trains.

2,3,4 you win my vote.

Anyone notice the International rate increases recently? Global, 1oz letter or postcard is $1.20 Canada is global!

I forgot another issue, not of our making. There's an International treaty, very old one, intended for letters. But shipping from Asia, as one example, is taking advantage of this. The shipper must get the letter or package to the US, then out post office must deliver it. With the imbalance of trade, that means, offshore people, selling on eBay for example, can send a whole cargo container of mail, which gets dropped on the USPS, who must deliver it for no charge. That's costing us millions if not more.

I can't ignore that I can buy electronics and many other items for less than the shipping costs from a US distributor. Fair trade? Maybe a little protectionism isn't a bad thing for our home businesses.

There was a deal struck after Trump threatened to drop out of the treaty. Did we win, as citizens? ...more than half the 192-country body voted in favor of “option V,” which will allow the US to raise prices for packages arriving from other countries, in exchange for a contribution into the Union’s “voluntary fund,” which covers security and pensions. I don't know, but the Union did.

So a leaking bucket, with a hole in it, and the answer is just add more water instead of plugging the leak? And this allows the offshore competition a way to keep shipping cheaper goods, into our country. Just can't wait to see how all of this changes starting in two weeks.