Earlier today I was listening to a speech in which the disastrous impact of email on the US Postal Service was discussed. The only solution the post office has been able to come up with is to keep raising the price of stamps, which keeps driving more and more business away from “snail mail” and into electronic alternatives.
The USPS recently ended the third quarter with a $5.2 billion loss, and last month the USPS defaulted on a $5.5 billion mandated retiree benefit payment. In the USPS’ third quarter, which ran from April 1 to June 30, the postal service lost $2.1 billion more than the same period last year. USPS leaders are awaiting congressional approval so that they can change their business model.
Something creative needs to be done if the post office is to remain viable—but this is probably asking too much of government. The best they’ve been able to figure is to increase the amount of junk mail they deliver. Yet this has little to do with meeting our needs.
Anyway, postal customers will always figure out more-creative ways to game the system or avoid it altogether.
Years ago when I was in my “Forrest Gump” road trip phase, I found myself in a rural post office somewhere in Ohio, where there was a tattered news clipping displayed beneath the thick glass of the counter. It was the story of a man in the Pacific Northwest who needed to ship a pallet of bricks to Alaska. After he’d done his research, he figured out the cheapest way to get the job done was to individually wrap the bricks in paper and mail each one via parcel post.
I’ve always loved that story. But here’s one that’s even crazier.
After parcel post was first introduced around the turn of the last century, at least two children were sent through the mail. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city mail carriers to their destinations. After hearing of these instances, the Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children through the mail.
Go figure.
۞
Groove of the Day
Listen to Lee Cass & the cast of The Most Happy Fella performing “Oh, There’s the Postman”
Just in the last two months five different mailed bills of mine have not reached my house, and now both the power and cable TV companies are mad that I haven’t paid one bill each to them since July. After I told them that the most-likely cause was the postal workers possibly losing their pensions and a possible postal worker flu or work slowdown going on, both companies wanted to get me signed-up for email billing, which might be better for me if my loss rate on first-class mail continues to be 20% or higher.
Just so that you know, a postal worker flu and lots of lost first-class mail isn’t going to help your cause, if anything, it is going to make it much more likely that the postal service will be forced to default after revenue continues to drop-off. I have seen the same thing happen plenty of times in other businesses, such as at trucking companies, food warehouses, and many other industrial companies that eventually went under or had to make lots of layoffs to stay in business, so if you postal workers want to keep your jobs, service levels are going to have to improve, or your employer is going to lose a lot more customers than have been lost already.
I was union before. UAW in Ohio and Teamsters in Colorado, and in both places, eventually the union workers lost their jobs. In Ohio the company got bought-out and the plant was then closed, and in Colorado the company was bought-out by a non-union company, and in an “At-Will” State, the new employer was able to fire all of the union members, one by one, for no reason at all, just as the law is written. I’m not at all in-favor of what has happened to our ability to organize and vote in unison to protect ourselves from unscrupulous employers and from dangerous workplaces, but right now is in my opinion not a good time to see how many customers that can be lost at the Postal Service and still stay in business.
The Postal Service had hoped that Congress would help stanch the losses, as it did in 2011 when it deferred the payment. But the House has taken no action. The Senate passed a measure that provided incentives to retire to about 100,000 postal workers, or 18 percent of its employees, and allowed the post office to recoup more than $11 billion it overpaid into an employee pension fund.