Amazon is the world's biggest online retailer to which it successfully competes against traditional retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, and others. One fundamental difference between traditional brick and mortar retailers and Amazon is that typically if you want goods from brick and mortar retailers you are going to have to drive to their store and pick up the goods that you desire, whereas with Amazon, they will bring the goods that you want directly to your door.
Amazon wants to be all things to all people and recognizes that the one black mark against ordering items online is that people, in general, once they order the goods--want their goods in their hands almost immediately. Because Amazon is in the customer satisfaction and retention business they do truly go out of their way to try to provide the degree of service that places a smile on their customer's faces. Amazon uses the big boys such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service (UPS) to provide packages to customers, but also will utilize smaller outfits such as LaserShip, DHL, OnTrac, amongst others, including their own Amazon trucks.
Not too surprisingly, given the massive footprint that Amazon represents, Amazon appears to be a perfect match for the government-owned United States Parcel Service (USPS), as they already have a requirement to deliver mail to residents Monday through Saturday. Amazon is well aware of this requirement and has increased their business with the USPS substantially over the last few years, including utilizing USPS to make Sunday deliveries. While a Sunday delivery from a USPS truck is definitely a benefit for both Amazon as well as the customer, there is the fundamental problem that Sunday is the only day of the week that the USPS is not required to actually deliver mail and goods.
In order for the USPS to demonstrate their flexibility and to compete against other entities, they created a new type of employee, designated the City Carrier Assistant that makes a substantially lower wage than normal postal employees, which definitely makes it easier to compete against outfits such as Fed Express and UPS. Further, to their goals of being competitive, the USPS set up a contract specifically between USPS and Amazon, that is to say, that the pricing that Amazon gets from USPS for its delivery services is not going to be the pricing that is available for the general public or any other company, instead it's a whole new deal.
The one thing that can be stated with a certainty, is that if the USPS is taking away business from companies such as Fed Express and UPS, that specifically are run in a manner in which their shareholders demand profitability and instead this business has been sacrificed over and to the USPS, it begs the question, as to how good the negotiated deal is for Amazon or the USPS. It doesn't take a genius to understand that Amazon is very, very good at just about everything it does, whereas the USPS runs massive yearly billion dollar deficits. This means, that there should be, a carefully done audit specifically of this contract with Amazon, to determine as to whether or not the terms of such are profitable for the USPS, and if not, to make changes accordingly. While the USPS might be frightened that Amazon will leave them if they ask for or demand "more" or require changes in substance, the bottom line is that Amazon needs the USPS, or they wouldn’t have come a knocking in the first place.