Alaska Bypass Mail

HOOPER BAY, AK - MAY 14: The airline landing strip hosts a small airplane in Hooper Bay, AK, on May 14, 2014. There are no roads that go to Hooper Bay, so people and goods must arrive by air or by boat. Hooper Bay is a small bush village in western Alaska on the coast. It's made up of a few hundred small wooden cabins, most of which do not have running water, and most people who live there are Alaska Natives of the Yupik tribe. There is a K-12 school in town. Many people travel about 60 miles to hunt in the tradition of a subsistence lifestyle, but many must supplement that by shopping at the AC store, or by ordering food from Mailbox Groceries, Amazon or other online retailers. The Washington Post via Getty Images followed a pallet of groceries from Anchorage to Hooper Bay, AK. The 1,366 pound pallet, which was mostly soda, cost the postal service $484.56, which they paid to the airliners. Alaska's Bypass Mail program was established by the state's former senator Ted Stevens in the early 1980s. The program requires the Postal Service to subsidize the cost of shipping freight, including groceries and other household goods, to rural villages in Alaska's bush. Through this program, retailers spend about half as much to ship goods to these areas than they would if the items were shipped using private freight rates. But the goods bypass the post office completely and are shipped by private airliners, hence the name "Bypass." In 2011, the Postal Service's inspector general issued a report saying the Bypass Mail program is a "broken" system. Now, Republican congressman Darrell Issa, from California, has created a bill in an effort to change the program to, as he says, make it more efficient. (Photo by Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post via Getty Images)