South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Time magazine offers a frank assessment of the core issue in the fight over the future of the United States Postal Service.

In the end, the debate about the USPS is simple: it’s the privatization of a service that is supposed to be universal. But universal access doesn’t exactly sync with the market’s guiding hand. That’s why UPS and FedEx don’t ship everywhere. It’s just not profitable for them. So where do they turn for last-mile delivery? To the postal service. Those private mail carriers are two of the USPS’s biggest customers.