The US Postal Service says it’s once again on the brink of bankruptcy and needs help. Next year, USPS plans to ask for bids from other deliver services, including Amazon, FedEx and UPS, so those companies can pay and use the tried and true “Last Mile Infrastructure” the postal service alrea dy has in place. “Last Mile” refers to the critical final steps to get a package to its recipient. It’s a system the agency has spent more than 200 years perfecting. But now, Postal officials say the agency will run out of cash by mid-2027 if it can’t find new revenue and shift some of the ways it does business. It comes as the agency is already facing growing competition from private shipping services including UPS, FedEx and Amazon. “My relatives and some order online. They do it by the postal because it’s cheaper, smaller packages. but most of it either by Amazon or UPS,” said Juan Duran, a San Jose resident. Robert Chapman Wood, a professor of Strategic Management at San Jose State says the threat of postal service bankruptcy is real. “We just saw an Amazon delivery truck go by. That’s competition for the post office. They get less package revenue than they used to. UPS and FedEx are addressing the ‘small package’ market much more than they used to, so that’s competition and it’s hard,” Wood said. In an effort to increase revenue and address competition, the US Postal Service now plans to offer up its ‘last mile’ services to essentially its competitors under a plan dubbed “Delivering For America.” The USPS says more details will be revealed later but it intends to ask those competing companies for bids to form partnerships, arguing not only would it create more revenue for the agency, but also cut expenses for those competitors trying to create their own last mile delivery pipelines. The partnership could help during peak delivery seasons and ease the challenge of getting to rural, hard-to-reach areas, where the USPS is already well established. “It often happens that in order for an industry to restructure the ‘older people’ have to do some sort of relationship with the new players,” Wood said. ...read more read less