Moves by the US Congress and a new research paper seek to bring the United States Parcel Service into the 21st Century.
Nearly eight decades after the era of Prohibition, the USPS is still barred from delivering alcoholic beverages. A new White Paper from the Office of the Inspector General, called Small Business Exports, suggests that this legal foible is costing the service millions of dollars a year as businesses seeking to export ‘consumable alcohol’ use other businesses for their deliveries worldwide.
A new Act is passing through Congress that may change this. The US Postal Innovation Act is designed to liberalise the laws that came into force in the early 1900’s and give the USPS a greater reach, potentially tapping into the multi billion dollar alcohol exports market.
This is part of a general drive to enable the USPS to help US SMEs to trade globally. Another thing the White Paper suggests is modernising the way the USPS deals with Customers. This would be an online service that would be a one stop shop for all business that SMEs have with the USPS. This would enable domestic and international customers to access the international network run by the USPS and generate much needed revenues for the Federally owned company.
