The USPS provides the lowest cost option for mailing letters and circulars. Since the advent of the Internet with the attendant increase in email traffic at the expense of physical letters (aka "snail-mail"), circulars (aka "junk mail") have become the majority of mailed items carried by the USPS.

Trying to better compete with the likes of FedEx and UPS, the USPS has introduced in recent years a variety of services such as Priority Mail, and flat-rate envelopes and shipping-packs. In general, USPS solutions are lower in cost than commercial services. However, they do not guarantee timely delivery, and tracking comes at added expense, at which point the service may no longer be price-competitive.

As long as people need to ship physical items (e.g. some folks do not have access to email or e-Commerce), and timeliness is not a primary driver, the USPS provides a useful service.

To better compete with commercial services, the USPS could concentrate on several areas:

1. Guaranteed time of delivery at lower cost than UPS or FedEx.
2. Tracking of all parcels included in price.
3. Improve efficiency to allow price-competitiveness (after all, if the mailman already comes by each house every day, the added cost to include a parcel or envelope should be minimal, so increasing the volume will reduce cost per item).

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