Logistics is Dying; or - Dude, Where's my Mail? llms.txt

In March 1860, William H. Russell established the Overland Express Route, colloquially called the Pony Express, to carry express mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California; an area with no colonialist settlements between. Russell failed repeatedly to get funding from the Senate Post Office for the project, as most considered year-round transportation between the two areas impossible due to extreme weather conditions, but Russell forged ahead on his own for two reasons:

1. Because he thought he could prove otherwise.
2. Because an express route was needed.

Riders for the express service were recruited rapidly; waystations between the two points were established, and old ones readied, in the span of three months. By April 3rd of the same year, Russell’s riders connected Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California, with riders covering an average of 75 to 100 miles daily.

This legend endures, in spite of the service ending only eighteen months later after the transcontinental telegraph line was established—and with Russell’s company deeply in debt—because it worked, and was an incredible feat. At its fastest, a message (Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address) was carried between St. Joseph and Sacramento in only 7 days and 17 hours.

With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days.

Two days. In 165 years.

The Circulatory System of Civilization

Logistics is a hard business to be in, on account of the variables that can affect your services. Weather delays, lack of available labour, crime, and transportation issues have plagued the industry since Roman couriers travelled on foot between cities. It is the nature of the business to occasionally have delays, but anyone who works closely alongside, or relies on, logistics companies as part of their business will tell you that these delays have become a lot more common.

The cursus publicus—Rome’s state-run courier and transportation service—was the circulatory system of the empire. Established by Augustus around 20 BCE, the network of relay stations stretched across 80,000 kilometers of roads, with waystations spaced every 20 to 30 miles where couriers could swap exhausted horses for fresh ones. Messages could travel hundreds of miles in days. The system functioned so well that it outlasted the Western Empire itself, surviving in diminished form into the Byzantine period.

When the cursus publicus declined, it was a leading indicator of something terminal. As the empire fractured in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the system came under increasing pressure—inflation ate into budgets, barbarian incursions destroyed stations, and local elites resisted providing resources. The mail stopped working. Then the empire stopped working. Cause and effect blur, but the correlation is instructive: a state that cannot move information cannot coordinate anything else.

I am not suggesting that FedEx losing your package means America is falling. But the state of a nation’s logistics infrastructure tells you something about its institutional health that GDP figures cannot.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (And They’re Getting Worse)

In 2022, the USPS delivered about 93.6% of first-class mail on time. By 2024, that number had dropped to around 81%—a steady decline over three years. The average delivery time for a first-class letter went from 2.96 days in 2022 to 3.76 days in 2024. That’s almost a full day added to every letter.

In October 2021, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan deliberately downgraded service standards, promising that lower expectations would enable the USPS to hit 95% on-time delivery. The Postal Regulatory Commission warned at the time that this target wasn’t reliably achievable. They were right. Performance has gotten worse, not better.

Georgia saw its on-time delivery rate for 3-5 day mail drop from 80% to 56% after a new regional distribution center opened in Atlanta—a 24-point collapse. At its worst, the Atlanta facility was delivering only 20% of mail on time. Hundreds of trucks backed up at the facility. Nine passports for students heading to Ghana on an educational trip were stuck in the mail for over a month, forcing emergency reissuances; one student couldn’t get a new passport in time and missed the trip entirely. A Veterans Affairs Medical Center reported that 870 at-home colon cancer screening tests took so long to arrive that they were medically invalid—some taking months to be delivered.

The USPS’s response to missing its targets has been to lower its targets. The FY 2025 performance goals were revised downward after the agency failed to meet the previous year’s benchmarks. Defining success by what you can achieve rather than what you should achieve.

Meanwhile, the agency reported $9.5 billion in losses for fiscal year 2024. Prices keep rising—Priority Mail and Ground Advantage rates increased again in January 2025—while service gets slower and less reliable.

North of the Border, Same Story

If you think America’s postal woes are the product of a uniquely villainous Postmaster General, Canada offers a useful control group.

Canada Post has no Louis DeJoy. It has a Crown corporation with a mandate to serve all Canadians, urban and rural, and to stand on its own financially. It has all the theoretical advantages of public infrastructure without the profit motive. And it has lost more than $5 billion since 2018.

In 2024 alone, Canada Post recorded an $841 million loss before tax—its seventh consecutive annual loss. The second quarter of 2025 was the corporation’s worst quarter ever, losing $407 million. The government announced $1.034 billion in emergency funding to prevent insolvency in mid-2025, but that money doesn’t solve anything structural. It just keeps the lights on.

Canada Post is now losing approximately $10 million per day.

The underlying dynamics are the same as in the United States: letter mail volumes have collapsed from 5.5 billion in 2006 to 2 billion in 2024, while the number of delivery addresses has grown by nearly a third. Fewer letters to more addresses means higher costs per delivery and declining revenue. Parcel volumes—which should have been the growth opportunity—have declined too, eaten by private competitors who can cherry-pick profitable routes.

The result is a postal system that requires billion-dollar bailouts to survive, while simultaneously providing service that drives customers to the competitors who are killing it. In late 2024, Canada Post workers went on a 32-day national strike during peak holiday season—the worst possible timing. The government eventually ordered them back to work, but the damage was done. Many customers who switched to other carriers during the strike haven’t come back.

There’s no individual villain here. No DeJoy dismantling sorting machines for political theatre. Just a system that has been allowed to decay until it cannot perform its basic function.

The Private Sector Solves Nothing

A Descartes study found that 73% of consumers experienced a delivery failure in a three-month period—not a delay, a failure. Packages that never arrived. Packages left in the wrong place. Packages marked delivered that weren’t.

The “customer not available” notification is perhaps the most instructive symptom. You’ve experienced it: you’re home, you’ve been home all day, you’ve been actively listening for the doorbell. Your phone buzzes. “Delivery exception—customer not home.” No knock. No ring. No door tag. Just a lie, logged into a system.

The driver is incentivized to mark deliveries as attempted rather than actually attempt them—clearing the route faster, hitting metrics. The company is incentivized to make complaints difficult to file and expensive to resolve. The customer has no recourse. Everyone knows this is happening. It continues anyway.

FedEx reviews are littered with variations of the same story: “We waited for 4 hours today because it was going to be delivered by 12. We have a small place. If someone is at the door we’d know. And once again my current phone beeps. Oh look we got an email. Just like last time. Telling us nobody was home.”

GPS exists. Doorbell cameras exist. Photo confirmation of delivery attempts exists. Solving this would be trivial. But lying is cheaper than climbing stairs.

The Sisyphean Condition

Sisyphus was the first logistician. He rolls his boulder up the hill; it rolls back down. He rolls it up again. Moving anything over any distance has a million variables, and any setback has your boulder rolling right back to the bottom. There is space to acknowledge that logistics is hard while also observing that we routinely accomplish it anyway.

Or we used to.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a C- in 2021. The freight trucking industry has seen a 7.6% decrease in asset-based carriers since 2022, with smaller carriers getting squeezed out entirely. The logistics sector has been in a quiet recession for two years, characterized by excess capacity, low rates, and an exodus of providers who can no longer make the math work.

And yet—global logistics is an $11 trillion industry in 2025, up from $9 trillion in 2023. The money is there. The demand is there. What’s missing is the will to make the basic thing work.

What Russell Understood

William Russell went bankrupt. His company failed eighteen months after it started. By conventional business metrics, the Pony Express was a disaster.

But it worked. For eighteen months, riders crossed 1,900 miles of terrain that the Senate Post Office had declared impassable. They did it because someone believed it needed to be done and then actually did it.

Modern logistics companies succeed financially while failing at the task. Stock prices go up. Service goes down. The quarterly report looks great. Your package is in a warehouse two states away marked “delivered.”

Russell failed financially but succeeded at the actual task. FedEx succeeds financially while failing at the task. Which is the real failure?

Mail not working is a symptom of something larger—a preference for metrics over outcomes, for cost-cutting over capability, for whatever can be measured over what actually matters. When the cursus publicus declined, the Romans didn’t forget how to ride horses. The institutions that maintained the roads, funded the waystations, and recruited the couriers had hollowed out. The infrastructure was still there. The commitment wasn’t.

We have planes, trains, and automobiles. We have GPS and real-time tracking and AI-optimized routing. We have every technological advantage over Russell’s riders on their exhausted horses.

We’ve gained two days in 165 years. The boulder keeps rolling back down the hill.