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The taxpayer won’t be alone in facing unwelcome news, however. The subsidized shipping changed buying habits, spawning an unrealistic expectation of free shipping that today permeates internet shopping. This “unsustainable pricing,” Citi believes, is doomed to fail.

How unsustainable is it? Citi calculates that the U.S. Post Office’s (USPS) “average parcel rates would need to increase ~50 per cent initially to break even.” To cover its losses on parcel delivery, the post office has been gouging its first-class mail customers, where it has a monopoly, and defaulting on payments to its retirees’ health benefits fund. With the Trump administration now in power, government patience toward an USPS that hasn’t made a profit in over a decade is likely to end, forcing it to abandon its below-market pricing of parcel delivery and giving private competitors a payday of US$15 billion to US$19 billion in extra business. None of this comes as a surprise to FedEx or UPS, who in recent years have been aggressively expanding their capacity investments to capture the business freed up when the postal parcel business inevitably crashes.

Apart from the USPS, the biggest loser when all this comes to pass will be its biggest customer, Amazon, which relies on USPS for 40 per cent of its deliveries. If USPS loses all its subsidies and immediately introduces market-based pricing of parcel delivery, Citi sees the potential for a dramatic hit to Amazon’s profitability, at least in the short term — in the worst case, Amazon’s “North America CSOI (consolidated segment operating income) would be cut by 44-49 per cent and overall CSOI would fall by 19-23 per cent.” CSOI, an accounting term used in the internet world, is Amazon’s chief metric for assessing profit.