Amazon is reportedly considering discontinuing use of the US Postal Service and building out its own shipping network to rival it, according to The . The e-commerce behemoth spends more than $6 billion a year on the public mail carrier, representing just shy of 8 percent of the service’s . That’s up from just shy of , and Amazon continues to grow.
Over the past decade, Amazon has invested heavily in shipping logistics, , and slowly building out a . Last year, Amazon handled over 6.3 billion parcels, a 7 percent increase over the previous year, according to the . USPS, for its part, handled roughly 6.9 billion, just a 3 percent increase over 2023. That is to say that Amazon’s shipping network can already handle over 90 percent of the volume of the US Postal Service (at least by sheer numbers).
The USPS has been in dire financial condition for some time, a year. Negotiations between Amazon and the public carrier have reportedly stalled, which, together with the agency’s need to keep raising its prices, may create more urgency for the company to eliminate its reliance on the service altogether.
The Postal Service has struggled to modernize and adapt (its attempt to electrify the truck fleet ) in a market where the likes of Amazon and Walmart are investing billions in delivering packages around the country at lightning speed. The ever-accelerating digitization of communication and heavy investment in privately owned shipping operations threatens the very existence of one of the country’s greatest public goods.
