USPS Office of Inspector General

With $72 billion in revenue and 154 billion pieces of mail moved in a year, the U.S. Postal Service deals in the billions. That’s why you sometimes hear people joke that “a few million here and a few million there and pretty soon you are talking about real money” with the USPS.

How prepared is the U.S. Postal Service for a sudden increase in the price of diesel fuel? When diesel climbed by $2.03 a gallon from March 2009 to March 2012, the USPS’s fuel tab soared by $341 million.

It’s what happens when you operate one of the biggest vehicle fleets in the country: 7,600 of its own in addition to almost 16,000 contract vehicles. In fiscal year 2016 alone, USPS bought about 251 million gallons of diesel at a cost of over $570 million.

Mail volume is in decline…you may have heard. So it might surprise you to learn that many posts around the world still earn more than half of their revenues from lettermail.

With more than 226,000 different decorative pillows to buy on Amazon, you could spend a week just browsing for them. And then you could use another week to peruse all the pillow choices on the other online marketplaces, like eBay and Etsy.

Suffice to say, you can find a ton of options online for just about any trinket you need. On the other hand, if you are one of the millions of online sellers, you have an awful lot of competition. So, sellers really need to differentiate themselves from the pack to earn customers, especially repeat customers. 

Whether you live in a bustling city like New York City or Los Angeles, a rural area in the Midwest or Great Plains, or somewhere in between, we all have one thing in common — we’re still using the mail in some way.