Trump's fight against Amazon is looking bleak as a major USPS partner ditches the postal office for the e-commerce behemoth
- USPS lost a big partner this week when Stamps.com terminated their long-standing exclusive arrangement with the postal service.
- In the call where he announced the end of the partnership, Stamps.com CEO Ken McBride lauded Amazon's delivery network.
- It's a major loss for President Donald Trump's long-standing feud against Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Among other sentiments, Trump has accused Amazon of swindling the USPS.
The long-standing e-commerce partner of the US Postal Service dumped the post office this week.
Stamps.com CEO Ken McBride is instead going all in on FedEx, UPS, regional delivery services, Uber Delivery, and others. But Amazon takes the cake when it comes to innovation in shipping during the e-commerce era, McBride told investors on a call Thursday evening.
"Amazon has an amazing network they built worldwide despite only having 27 going to 40 planes," McBride said. "And they built it in the last few years and they've built it with e-commerce in mind and a lot of the other carriers have networks that are much older."
It's hardly the first time Amazon, which filed as a transportation company earlier this month, has flare-ups with the USPS. Last year, President Donald Trump railed for months against Amazon's use of USPS for delivering parcels. He argued that Amazon was cleaning up by shipping goods with the post office's low costs.
"Amazon has the money to pay the fair rate at the post office, which would be much more than they're paying right now," Trump told reporters last year. Trump has often made public his distaste with Amazon.
Indeed, the USPS lost $3.9 billion in fiscal year 2018, according to a December 4 report from the Task Force on the United States Postal System. Its cumulative losses are nearing $70 billion.
That's hardly because of Amazon, though. A larger contributor to the post office's woes is a 2006 law passed under President George W. Bush surrounding prefunding retirement benefits. That law required the USPS to determine how much it would spend on pension over the next 75 years and quickly build up a fund to cover all of it.
According to USPS' Inspector General, the new requirement to prefund retiree benefits accounted for $54.8 billion of the agency's $62.4 billion loss incurred between 2007 and 2016.
Still, Stamps.com ending its exclusive partnership with USPS is likely to be a major loss. As the post office's e-commerce partner, Stamps.com generated $586.9 million in revenue in 2018, an uptick of 25% from 2017.
Whatever the cause of the post office's financial woes, the move from Stamps.com to end its partnership with the postal office is a clear warning shot against the anti-Amazon battle Trump is waging - and Trump's war against its founder Jeff Bezos (who he sometimes calls "Jeff Bozo").