Post Office Sells New Board Game

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
Post Office Sells New Board Game

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The U.S. Postal Service is falling apart. It will, however, let you buy its new board game at Target. The board game costs $34.99 and is another example of the absurdity of how badly managed USPS is.
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Target sells the game online. Its official name is USPS: The Great American Mail Race. Players get to race around the country and deliver as many packages as they can. They can use planes, trains and the USPS Rocket Ship. It appears that people can even deliver mail while on horseback. The players can drop off packages in some tiny towns. Unfortunately, the USPS really has offices in these places.
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The board game should be played by two to four people. It is meant to be played by people 10 years old or older. People should not let children near the game. They can choke on its smaller pieces.

USPS is close to a game in real life. It operates 34,000 offices, which is far too many. Some are in towns with as few as 3,000 people, which is a sign of why it cannot be a viable operation.

USPS also has over 600,000 full-time employees, many of whom deliver the mail. One reason there are so many is the inefficiency of delivering mail six days a week.
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People do not need to get mail six times a day. Many Americans get more junk mail than they do real letters or bills. Letters have been largely replaced by email. And email can have file attachments that are often an alternative to package delivery. Mail delivery could be cut to two or three days a week. That would allow a cut in workers and help the environment by reducing emissions from its trucks.
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USPS management never mentions closing offices or laying off tens of thousands of workers. It never talks about reducing the number of days it delivers mail. Perhaps its executives are too busy creating games.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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