USPS Chief Doesn't View U.S Taxpayers as Customers: Report

The slow and steady failure of the United States Postal Service may in some part be attributed to the fact that agency apparently doesn't view American taxpayers as customers, according to a report from Inside Sources.

United States Postal Service carrier Brandon Liverman delivers mail Thursday February 7, 2013 in LaPorte, Indiana (AP)

“You disrupt my service and we will never work with you," Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe reportedly told Outbox founders Evan Baehr and Will Davis during a meeting in Washington, D.C. “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers — about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”

The two entrepreneurs were shocked when they heard that. They thought they had been called to the nation's capital to discuss a possible partnership with the United States government.

Outbox, an online service that was designed to allow customers to digitize their mail and unsubscribe from junk mail, eventually closed its doors in 2014 after the cost of dealing with the USPS' mountains of spam mail become financially unfeasible.

When pressed for comment on what appears to be a rather unbelievable statement from the Postmaster General, the USPS would only say it would “continue to monitor market activities to ensure protection of our brand and the value and security of the mail."

The Inside Sources report, if accurate, suggests obviously that the USPS viewed Outbox as a serious threat to the federal agency’s already fledgling operations.

"Outbox’s prime service was to help unsubscribe customers from spam mail, and they unsubscribed customers from over 1 million senders of mail," Inside Sources reported. "Outbox scanned over 1.5 million pages, and when requested, re-delivered over 250,000 requested mail packages."

This apparently posed a problem for the USPS.

"For longer than we would be willing to tolerate, we would lose money for each additional customer we gained," the tech startup’s founders wrote on their blog. "Despite the massive interest in our company, we learned that the product we built did not find fit in the market we targeted."

"You may think government organizations are completely, insanely backwards; you are wrong—they are worse," the message added.

Read the full report here.

(H/T: Washington Examiner)

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