Postal Letter

If the rise of Netflix is bolstering the use of the Postal Service, why is the price of stamps the same?

So many items sent a day must be doing something major to contribute to the postal service, yet stamp prices remain the same and are likely to rise.

Public Comments

1. No. Netflix amounts to a few million pieces of mail each year in comparison to 177 Billion pieces of mail moved in 2009. And Netflix anticipates that mailers will decline starting in 2012, as people shift more and more to electronic content delivery. I myself have just started experimenting with Netflix content delivery to my PC and also my TV via my Playstation 3.
2. Netflix is a a drop in the ocean, not a drop in the bucket. I deliver a suburban route of 540 stops, and I probably average 5 Netflix a day, 30 pieces in a 6 day week out of an average daily/weekly letter volume of 1,800+/11,000. That's only going to drop as more people are moving to streaming content. There was a news story just a few days ago about Netlix drastically cutting back on buying new DVD releases and spending most of its content budget on material for online viewing. I'll hardly notice the drop off.