Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stop the postman from delivering your mail. Unfortunately, the bill for such high-end customer service is officially out of control.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story for the week of May 30, focusing on the United States Postal Service, created a lot of discussion on the topic, but the crisis in our post office has been a long time coming. The easy culprit is the internet; email has certainly been one of the biggest factors in the decline in first class mail over the past couple decades.

But this alone would not have been enough to send the Postal Service into oblivion. Many other first-world countries have postal services that are stable, and some even thrive. Bloomberg’s report uncovers a number of other factors, from USPS workers’ inflated pensions to post office locations in unprofitable areas, which are dragging the Post Office into the red – almost $15 billion into the red.

Part of the problem is that the USPS occupies a strange middle ground between a public service and a profitable business. The USPS as it exists today came into being as a result of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which made it a semi-independent, corporation-like agency. However, as one of the few government agencies specifically mentioned in the Constitution, the Postal Service still occupies a special place in American life and politics, granted importance that may very well exceed the actual demand for its services. » Read more: The Postal Service’s Gloomy Twilight