United States Postal Service tries to compete with Google using fear

No. They charge the same amount to send those two letters. It does not cost the same amount, however. Regular physical mail delivery at current prices is unsustainable. Period.

They would still be in decline, but they actually run an operating profit right now. If/as mail volume further declines they can cut & consolidate facilities to a point where they can still be reasonably profitable.

Any time I go to the post office (which now is maybe once every year or two), the employees are extremely disgruntled, not happy that you're there, and not very interested in helping you get what you need done

We all have anecdotes. My business uses USPS for shipping packages worldwide and I am a very happy customer of their services. I go to various Post Offices (01139, 06096, 01095, and 01803 among others, depending on my schedule and travel) 6 days a week to collect mail and ship packages. At this point the workers all know me very well, so it may be that my experiences are atypical, but I find them all to be extremely hardworking, friendly and willing to go the extra mile for me - for example, I mailed a letter once and didn't put enough postage on it. One of the postal workers put on the extra postage and left a note in my PO box asking me to reimburse her when I got a chance.

But again, these are just anecdotes.

However, even when I visit Post Offices I don't normally go to, I'm still largely happy with the services. The only complaint is that sometimes when a Post Office is very busy, I've had employees be curt with me, but in those circumstances I can understand why.

They have "tracking" that doesn't actually track - it simply tells you the package has left the origin and arrived at the destination - nothing in between.

Wholeheartedly agreed. They need to do better here.

Mail is consistently lost, delivered to the wrong address, or opened before delivery (by who knows)

I've shipped something like 2000 packages in the last 3 years to all 50 states and over 40 countries. I've had a grand total of two packages lost (and I'm pretty sure that only one of those two packages was actually lost and the other one was just a customer who wanted a free second item).

I was absolutely amazed at how many advertising campaigns are based on fear. I had completely forgotten about LifeLock, Life Insurance, Home Security Systems, Health Insurance, Car Alarms ... etc. etc.

Seeing ads that say "Buy this or else..." completely shocked me.

It appears to be quite the norm these days.

There is a lot of confusion out there from people who aren't sure what is and isn't safe to open. The knowledge that we take for granted -- .jpg is safe, .vbs is not -- is completely alien to most computer users.

And then there are the scams. And yeah, people still fall for those, too: "But it said it came from my friend! I just thought they had gone on a vacation in France!"

We often get calls from people along the lines of, "I just received this message [..], is it safe to click on it?"

So in the real world, the marketing behind this ad is pretty sound.

On the other hand, we get deliveries all the time and USPS is by far our least favorite. Roughly half of items shipped by USPS are misdelivered at least once before they finally make it to us, if they arrive at all.