The problem is if too many people opt out then the junk mail business model fails because advertisers won't advertise. It's not the loss revenue from a few houses they case about its the number of addresses the junk mailers can ship to.
Then let the post office charge enough to replace the advertising revenue.
I also suspect your wrong in saying that advertisers will completely give up if the number of deliverable boxes shrink. I mean, sure, they will want to pay proportionally less, but I suspect post office revenue from advertisers would decline smoothly with the rise in revenue from the paid opt-outs, assuming you got the price right.
My understanding is that fourth-class "to resident" mail is usually targeted at the most price sensitive customers; people for whom clipping coupons is often a good use of time. Exactly the people who are unlikely to pay money to sort their mailbox.
Most of the higher-end mail, like those goddamn pre-approval notices from AmEx, are lovingly personalized, and ship out 'pre-sorted first class' or something. I'm only talking about opting out of the fourth class "penny saver" type junk.
You might be surprised to learn this but third class mail (junk mail) generates more revenue than first class mail. Not only that but first class mail is decreasing revenues each year.
That being said, the problem is that third class mail is a lot more revenue than most people realize. For example $5/mth is not enough to cover the loss revenues. In fact I would suspect that $20-$50/mth is not enough. Think how much mail you get on a daily basis, multiplied by x amount times 30 days. You're probably looking at closer to $100/mth...
>That being said, the problem is that third class mail is a lot more revenue than most people realize. For example $5/mth is not enough to cover the loss revenues. In fact I would suspect that $20-$50/mth is not enough. Think how much mail you get on a daily basis, multiplied by x amount times 30 days. You're probably looking at closer to $100/mth...
I find that hard to believe.
Think about it for a moment. How much do you think the coupon vendors actually make per customer? Even (or maybe even especially) the type of person who clips coupons isn't going to spend that kind of money on discount toilet paper and 'invest in mail-order gold' scams or whatever is being flogged. The people targeted by that garbage don't have a lot of money to begin with.
$1,200 per year per postal customer would indicate that postal spam results in nearly an order of magnitude more revenue per user than google, who makes on the order of $130/user/year.
Yeah, I doubt very much that the post office is getting $1,200 per year in advertising revenue per user.
