People honestly have no idea how big the Postal Service is, or how vast and irreplaceable its infrastructure. Could FedEx and UPS do what USPS does? The answer is no. They couldn't. They can't. https://twitter.com/ojblanchard1/status/1294928911789428736

They've already said they can't do it because it's, you know, illegal. But even if they wanted to, they don't have the capacity. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-ups-fedex-exclusive/exclusive-ups-fedex-warn-they-cannot-carry-ballots-like-u-s-postal-service-idUSKCN25B00I

Just to give you a sense of the scale of this, there are as many Post Offices—stand-alone, staffed, actual-building Post Offices—in the US as there are FedEx drop box locations.

And of course the Post Offices are frequently out in the middle of nowhere, while the FedEx drop-boxes generally ... aren't.

There are a bit more than 30,000 FedEx dropoff locations in the US. How many does USPS have? MILLIONS. (They're called mailboxes, and just about every single-family home in the country has one.)

Wherever you are, however far you are from anyone else, the Post Office will come to your house and bring you your mail, and pick up what you send out. Even if your nearest FedEx location is a hundred miles away, your nearest postal worker is as far as the end of your driveway.

There's a reason Tester and Manchin have been out front on the USPS crisis—they represent Montana and West Virginia. the Post Office is a matter of life and death in states like that.

Off to conduct a mailbox census of my neighborhood. Catch you later. https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1294774494985441281

One addendum to the above thread—I shouldn't quite have said "wherever you are" a few tweets up. USPS is required by law to deliver to nearly every household in the US, but there are a few exceptions, as someone who lives in extremely rural New Mexico just pointed out to me.

(Still, USPS delivers to far more homes than any private shipping service, and in fact delivers a lot of last-mile stuff that FedEx and UPS are contracted to deliver but choose not to.)

I did the mailbox census, by the way. Checked on a dozen boxes, all there. Got close enough to about half of them to see if they were locked, as some people have been reporting elsewhere. None were.

But yes, if you're just discovering this thread and want to do something simple and easy to help save the USPS (and to help your community at the same time), go check up on the mailboxes in your neighborhood. Thread here: https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1294774494985441281