Junk Mail Funds the USPS

It's Saturday, August 8th. Every time I check my mail, and I'm not exaggerating here, I stand next to the recycling bin and sort through the stack right there because about 90 percent of it is going straight into the trash. Credit card offers from JPMorgan Chase with these elaborate, glossy mailers that clearly cost real money to produce. Promotional stuff from companies I've never interacted with. Catalogs I didn't sign up for. Every now and then there's an actual bill that I wish I could get paperless but somehow it still shows up, and maybe once a month there's something I actually need. The rest goes in the bin without me opening it. I've always assumed junk mail was a dying relic that would eventually disappear as everything moves digital. Turns out it's the opposite: junk mail is the single biggest thing keeping the entire US Postal Service alive, and if it went away tomorrow, the mail system most Americans depend on would collapse. The US Postal Service delivered about 108 billion pieces of mail in fiscal year 2025. More than half of that, 56.8 billion pieces, was marketing mail, which is the polite term for what you and I call junk mail. Those credit card offers, those catalogs, those "Current Resident" flyers from the pizza place down the street, all of that generated $15.7 billion in revenue for USPS last year. The average American household receives roughly 454 pieces of marketing mail per year, which works out to about nine per week landing in your mailbox whether you want them or not.

Meanwhile, the kind of mail most people think of as "real mail," letters, bills, personal correspondence, first-class mail, has been in freefall. First-class mail volume dropped 50 percent between 2008 and 2023, from 92 billion pieces down to 46 billion, because email, online bill pay, and digital communication replaced almost everything that used to require a stamp. The mail that people actually want to receive is disappearing. The mail that people throw away without opening is growing as a share of the total. And USPS depends on both to fund an operation that delivers to over 160 million addresses six days a week.

Here's the part that surprised me: USPS hasn't relied on taxpayer funding for its operations since the early 1980s. It's essentially self-funded through postage and services, which means the revenue from those JPMorgan Chase mailers you throw away is directly subsidizing the cost of delivering your Amazon packages and your grandmother's birthday card. Without marketing mail revenue, the math doesn't work. I used to think companies that sent junk mail were just wasting money on an outdated strategy that nobody responds to. The data says otherwise and the numbers aren't even close.

Direct mail has a response rate between 5 and 15 percent depending on the type of list and the quality of the targeting, with mail sent to existing customers performing significantly better than mail sent to cold prospects. Email marketing, by comparison, has an average response rate of around 1 percent. Direct mail has a higher response rate than email, social media, and paid search, which is counterintuitive in 2026 but makes sense when you think about why: your email inbox is flooded with hundreds of promotional messages that are easy to ignore, delete, or filter. A physical piece of mail occupies space. You have to touch it, look at it, and make a decision about it, even if that decision is to throw it away. That physical interaction creates more engagement than a subject line you scroll past on your phone.

The JPMorgan Chase credit card mailers that I throw away without opening cost the company real money to design, print, and send, probably somewhere between $1 and $3 per piece depending on how elaborate they are. But if Chase sends a million mailers and even 5 percent of recipients respond, that's 50,000 new credit card accounts, each of which generates interchange fees, interest revenue, and annual fees that dwarf the cost of the mailing campaign. The 95 percent of us who throw them away are a budgeted cost of doing business, not a failure of the strategy. They're not sending those mailers hoping everyone responds. They're sending them knowing that most people won't, because the small percentage who do makes the whole operation profitable.

About half of all marketing mail gets thrown away without being opened, which means roughly 3.8 million tons of junk mail ends up in landfills every year. That's the environmental cost of a marketing channel that refuses to die because it works better than the digital alternatives, and the waste is baked into the business model: the mailer that reaches 454 households knowing that 227 of them will throw it away unopened is still worth sending because of the 20 or 30 who respond. The reason USPS can't just drop the junk mail and focus on packages, which is where the growth is, comes down to something called the universal service obligation. USPS is legally required to deliver mail to every address in the United States, six days a week, at uniform prices regardless of how remote or expensive that delivery is. A stamp costs the same whether you're mailing a letter from Manhattan to Brooklyn or from Anchorage to a cabin 200 miles from the nearest paved road. That uniformity is the deal the Postal Service made with the country, and it's the reason FedEx and UPS aren't substitutes for USPS even though they deliver packages faster.

FedEx and UPS are private companies that choose where to operate based on profitability. They concentrate on urban and suburban routes where the volume justifies the cost and charge premium rates for rural deliveries, if they serve those areas at all. Both FedEx and UPS regularly hand off rural last-mile deliveries to USPS because it's cheaper for them to let the Postal Service cover the unprofitable routes than to drive their own trucks out there. You might order something that ships FedEx and gets delivered by a USPS carrier because FedEx doesn't want to drive the last 30 miles to your house.

USPS serves roughly 40 million rural delivery points that private carriers either won't serve or won't serve at comparable prices. If marketing mail revenue disappeared and USPS couldn't sustain its current operation, those 40 million addresses wouldn't simply shift to FedEx or UPS. They'd either pay significantly more for delivery or lose reliable mail service entirely. The junk mail that you and I throw away without looking at it is what funds the trucks that drive to addresses no private company considers worth the trip. Your trash is someone else's lifeline, and the whole system runs on the willingness of JPMorgan Chase and every other company that sends direct mail to keep paying USPS to deliver things that most people will never read. I'm still going to stand next to the recycling bin every time I check my mail and throw away 90 percent of it without opening it, and apparently so is every other American, and the system is designed for exactly that. The junk mail funds the operation, the operation delivers to 160 million addresses including 40 million that no private company will touch, and the whole thing runs without taxpayer money because JPMorgan Chase keeps paying to send me credit card offers I'll never look at. It's the most counterintuitive business model I've come across: a service kept alive by the thing its customers hate most.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.