President Donald Trump slammed the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon on Friday morning, calling for the mail service to raise the prices of its shipments from the retailer to help increase profits.
“Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” he wrote.
Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017
Trump has had an ongoing feud with Amazon for months, mainly using Twitter to gripe about the company. Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, another frequent target of the president’s on social media.
The president’s assertion that the postal service is losing money is correct—it has lost money for more than a decade. However, his idea that the U.S. Postal Service should charge Amazon more money for delivering packages as a way to make up the losses shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the agency is losing money.
As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, most of the money loss from the postal service is due to pension and health care costs.
Amazon uses the Post Office to complete the “last mile” of deliveries, according to Bloomberg, and while the specifics of the deal the Post Office has with Amazon is unknown (the U.S. Postal Service is an independent agency) it is believed Amazon pays the agency $2 per package, according to an estimate.