As someone that ships 25-30 packages a week on average, rate changes like this can affect my bottom line significantly so I try to keep abreast of them and also try to find out the why behind them. Here's what I have been able to piece together over the past year or so regarding the USPS rates.
It starts with the 2020 COVID-related shipping fiasco that hit all of the carriers, but which hit the USPS the hardest. Remember that? Loooong shipping delays and a lot of lost packages that climaxed with the 2020 Christmas rush. This was due to extremely high absenteeism at the sorting facilities. I put up a fairly lengthy post in a thread about it at the time, explaining how the USPS's insanely liberal HR policies caused this much more than the virus did so I won't go into it now.
Well, once they finally got a handle on the absenteeism issue, they realized that they had been bleeding money due to paying all of the employees for months of "I might have COVID" leave plus paying for tons of low efficiency temp workers to do the job. So, they instituted a significant rate increase - not just to recoup their losses, but according to the USPS much of the money was to go into modernizing and increasing the efficiency at the sorting facilities. The general intent was to more fully automate the sorting, thus removing a lot of humans from the process, and in turn hopefully avoiding the impact of mass absenteeism when the next pandemic happens.
This updating and upgrading started in 2021, and is an ongoing project at present, and it is causing some delays and package losses as the sorting centers are disrupted for the addition of new equipment. Nothing like the 2020 delays and losses, though, thankfully. However, it turns out that the new equipment they are swapping in cannot handle some package sizes very well, so those sizes need to be sorted using "other means," possibly hand sorting in some cases. Enter the new surcharges: Anything over 22" long is a $4.00 surcharge, anything over 30" is $15.00 surcharge, and anything 2 cubic feet or larger is a $15.00 surcharge. Also, these surcharges are additive so that for example if you have a carton that is 31" long and more than 2 cubic feet in volume you will be paying a $30.00 surcharge even if the package weighs just a couple pounds.
I haven't been able to find out whether the USPS is doing this to cover the additional costs of hand sorting, or if they are trying to drive shippers of these size classes to the other carriers because those sizes are losers for the USPS with the new equipment. As you can imagine, nobody with the authority to speak officially for the USPS wants to answer this question because either way they go, the USPS looks bad.
In any event, these surcharges have made UPS and FedEx Ground the much less expensive alternatives for packages in these size classes now. It remains to be seen whether UPS and FedEx will continue with their current rates on these sizes, or realizing that their competition is charging a lot more, will raise their rates just because they can. Gotta love a free market economy. (Actually, I do, when it is truly free from government interference.)
