When you get home from work today, you will open your mailbox, but you’re probably not looking forward to it quite as much as you used to. If you are like most Americans, you do receive Christmas cards and, from time to time, important letters and subscription magazines. But increasingly, you just find endless junk mail: catalogues; credit card offers, solicitations for donations, sweepstakes and offers to switch your television service or your car insurance or your homeowners’ insurance.

People aren’t using the U.S. Postal Service the way they used to. In 2005, the volume of junk mail surpassed the volume of First Class mail for the first time in USPS history. In 2010, First Class mail volume hit its lowest level since 1986. Fewer individual postcards were mailed in 2010 than in 1926, when the Postal Service first began tracking the number. Both junk and regular mail are now declining in volume (see chart), and as a result the Postal Service lost $3.2 billion in the first quarter of 2012 and finds itself $13 billion in the red. Despite a 26 percent reduction in the number of postal employees since 2000, USPS is losing $25 million each day.