It would have been easy to miss. Buried deep within Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to company shareholders — a glowing, energetic 5,000-word essay released in April — was a foreshadowing of the company’s keen interest in capitalizing on the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

Postal service workers and those who value public mail delivery ought to take this threat seriously: The company, which started out 30 years ago selling books online, has an insatiable appetite for capturing and squeezing profits out of any part of economic life that it can monetize. Today, with Donald Trump angling to dismantle and privatize USPS, Amazon executives have their privatization dance partner, and they are salivating at this potential prize. As Jassy’s letter suggests, the company is taking steps to put itself first in line when Trump puts our U.S. Postal Service on the auction block.

Jassy’s letter spotlights the continued meteoric rise of Amazon — 11 percent revenue growth in just the last year to $638 billion, itself a 75-fold increase over two decades ago; staggering 2024 profits of $69 billion, an increase of 86 percent over 2023’s record take. Jassy, of course, fails to mention that this corporate largesse comes at the expense of the more than 2 million warehouse workers and the drivers responsible for moving Amazon’s 6 billion packages annually, who endure low pay and job precarity while experiencing staggering injury rates. As Amazon air cargo worker Josh Crowell told Truthout, “Amazon made $20 billion in profits last peak season while we get nothing but mandatory overtime and a Panera dinner box.”

But buried in Jassy’s letter below the astonishing profit data, and also following his declaration about the company’s enormous investment in AI, is this:

As some other companies are abandoning small-town customers due to cost to serve, we’re going the other way — we’re investing to serve our rural customers even better. We’ve already expanded Same-Day and Overnight Delivery to dozens of smaller cities and towns across the U.S., with more coming. This expansion will provide even faster Amazon delivery speeds for many millions of customers, particularly in less densely populated areas, enabling us to deliver over a billion packages each year to customers living in 13,000 zip codes spanning 1.2 million square miles.

In........

© Truthout