It will have been simple to overlook. Buried deep inside Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to company shareholders — a glowing, energetic 5,000-word essay launched in April — was a foreshadowing of the corporate’s eager curiosity in capitalizing on the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Postal service staff and people who worth public mail supply must take this risk severely: The corporate, which began out 30 years in the past promoting books on-line, has an insatiable urge for food for capturing and squeezing earnings out of any a part of financial life that it could actually monetize. At the moment, with Donald Trump angling to dismantle and privatize USPS, Amazon executives have their privatization dance companion, and they’re salivating at this potential prize. As Jassy’s letter suggests, the corporate is taking steps to place itself first in line when Trump places our U.S. Postal Service on the public sale block.
Jassy’s letter spotlights the continued meteoric rise of Amazon — 11 % income development in simply the final yr to $638 billion, itself a 75-fold increase over two decades ago; staggering 2024 earnings of $69 billion, a rise of 86 % over 2023’s report take. Jassy, after all, fails to say that this company largesse comes on the expense of the greater than 2 million warehouse staff and the drivers chargeable for shifting Amazon’s 6 billion packages yearly, who endure low pay and job precarity whereas experiencing staggering injury rates. As Amazon air cargo employee Josh Crowell advised Truthout, “Amazon made $20 billion in earnings final peak season whereas we get nothing however obligatory time beyond regulation and a Panera dinner field.”
However buried in Jassy’s letter under the astonishing revenue information, and likewise following his declaration in regards to the firm’s monumental funding in AI, is that this:
As another firms are abandoning small-town prospects as a result of price to serve, we’re going the opposite approach — we’re investing to serve our rural prospects even higher. We’ve already expanded Identical-Day and In a single day Supply to dozens of smaller cities and cities throughout the U.S., with extra coming. This enlargement will present even sooner Amazon supply speeds for a lot of tens of millions of consumers, significantly in much less densely populated areas, enabling us to ship over a billion packages every year to prospects residing in 13,000 zip codes spanning 1.2 million sq. miles.
In Amazon’s world, this can be a shocking growth. The corporate reaps its billions by delivering packages to a lot of individuals with as little price as doable. Density of distribution community and buyer base matter. It’s rather more worthwhile, for instance, to arrange a supply community to serve Baltimore, with a inhabitants slightly below 600,000, than it’s to do the identical for the state of Wyoming, which has about the identical variety of individuals.
At the moment, about half of Amazon’s rural deliveries are achieved not by way of the corporate’s intensive supply service supplier system, however slightly by way of USPS.
USPS works below what known as a “common service obligation” to supply postal service to all Individuals, no matter location, at inexpensive costs. It’s the solely service that works below this obligation, and Amazon has historically taken benefit of this by turning its higher-cost rural deliveries over to the post office.
In 2024, USPS reported a lack of $9.5 billion — one of many causes Trump has known as it a “tremendous loser.” However given its obligations as a common supplier of a public service, it merely can’t be judged in line with typical private-sector enterprise metrics. Truly, making USPS a “winner” in these phrases would inevitably imply reneging on its common service obligation, each when it comes to geography and affordability. Certainly, in an effort to chop prices, USPS has already proposed reductions to rural service.
A mere decade and a half in the past, Amazon would have been in no place to be on this dialog, having no last-mile supply community. At the moment, it was fully reliant on the postal service, FedEx, UPS, and different opponents to ship its ecommerce items to prospects. At the moment, Amazon’s U.S. community has roughly 600 supply stations, the overwhelming majority of that are positioned in or very near main metropolitan areas. As considered one of us noted elsewhere, supply stations make use of a number of hundred individuals straight, on common. Roughly the identical variety of drivers — working for subcontracted companies, however directed and managed by Amazon’s algorithmic administration system — additionally work out of every station.
This financial system of scale works on the city stage, however it makes a lot much less sense on the subject of rural components of the nation. Therefore, the corporate has relied closely on USPS for last-mile rural supply. However since 2020, Amazon has been constructing out its “rural wagon wheel” community of supply stations in additional distant areas. Roughly 100 of their supply stations are wagon wheels, and that is the quickest rising class of supply station, with 17 added in 2024 alone. That quantity goes to proceed to go up, if Jassy’s phrases carry any weight.
It’s price noting, nevertheless, that Amazon’s potential capability to supply country-wide postal protection nonetheless lags behind that of UPS and FedEx, each of which may also be angling to make the most of publish workplace privatization. FedEx has about the identical variety of last-mile stations as Amazon, however they’re extra evenly unfold out by way of the nation, slightly than being clustered round inhabitants facilities. FedEx additionally has a extra environment friendly and succesful air community. UPS has extra last-mile stations than both Amazon or FedEx, even taking into account its recently announced network reductions, and it has about twice the air capability as Amazon. Even with the buildout of its rural last-mile community, Amazon’s case for coming near having the ability to meet USPS’s common service obligation at the moment lags behind that of both of the 2 main personal parcel giants. However Jassy seems to be making ready to make up floor right here, and Amazon has a well-earned repute for making daring entries into new market sectors.
Along with infrastructure build-out, Amazon can be shifting rapidly to assemble political help for buying the postal service. Issues weren’t all the time easy between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. In Trump’s first time period, Amazon sued the government after dropping a $10 billion cloud computing contract, and Bezos at one level known as Trump a “risk to democracy.” Trump, for his half, mocked the manager, calling him “Jeff Bozo.”
However on Inauguration Day 2025, Bezos was there, within the billionaires’ part, honoring Trump’s return to the White Home. He had spent months beforehand cozying as much as Trump — notably spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Submit, which he owns. Bezos’s pandering seems to be paying off. “He’s 100%. He’s been nice,” Trump said of Bezos in an April interview.
Unions and different postal service advocates have been sounding the alarm on postal service privatization for a while. “It’s a horrible concept for everybody that we serve,” National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian L. Renfroe said earlier this yr. With privatization, “Supply can be pushed by revenue margins, and personal firms will solely go to the place they will make a revenue. Sections of our inhabitants might lose mail service fully. Costs would rise in line with regardless of the firm calls for for their very own revenue,” the American Postal Workers Union has noted.
Definitely, Bezos and Jassy perceive that too, which is why they’re angling, each politically and thru infrastructure build-out, to profit from the privatization of what ought to stay a common public service.
Within the face of Trump’s threats, we’ll by no means capitulate.
At this second, we’re witnessing a terrifying array of anti-democratic techniques to silence political opposition, enhance surveillance and broaden authoritarian attain.
Truthout is interesting on your help as Trump and his sycophants crack down on political speech. Nonprofits like Truthout might be caught in Trump’s crosshairs as he assaults dissenting teams with dangerous religion lawsuits and focused harassment of journalists.
As properly, these assaults come at a time when unbiased journalism is most wanted. The correct-wing company takeover of media has left dependable retailers few and much between, with even fewer offering their work without charge to the reader. Who will likely be there to carry the fascists to account, if not media like Truthout?
We ask on your help as we doggedly pursue justice by way of our reporting. Truthout is funded overwhelmingly by readers such as you. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or month-to-month donation right this moment.
Source link