how to save the U.S. postal service

[mellowtigger]

Our postal service borders on insolvency, even though they are sitting on a proverbial gold mine.  I keep telling people that data is valuable, but the postal service seems not to listen to me.  They have two services that they could sell cheaply and still earn great quantities of money.

1. Address verification
2. Address geocoding

Plenty of third-party companies charge a lot of money for these services.  Technically, there are also free services available (like Google, Yahoo, and others), but their free access is encumbered by usage restrictions in their license.  I've investigated several of them for the non-profit organization where I work, and we were prohibited from using all of these services either by their licensing or their fees.

The USPS would need to invest in a programming interface to their valuable database.  Afterwards, though, if they charged only a small fee, they could still rake in lots of cash.  They could compete with all of the 3rd-party offerings, and they could outperform on both cost and legal restrictions.