RSSFriday B.S.: Mail Goes Nowhere
Mar 19
Politics and Nation Comments Off
I’m not the only person to think that it’s time to blow up the United States Postal Service and privatize mail delivery. If you google USPS for news stories, there are thousands of reports and reactions to the proposals being made by the Postmaster General to fix the Postal Service. It laudable that he is trying but it belies the fact that the postal system just doesn’t work.
The United States Postal Service is hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars and service sucks. That’s the bottom line. What new technology that could streamline service has been applied in a slipshod and ineffective manner. Post offices are miserable places to be for the employees and the customers. And by unit, the number of mailed items is expected to decrease by 1 billion units over the next ten years because of the increase of electronic communication.
It’s true that some of the USPS problem is mired in the politics of its control -- simply put, any changes would have to be approved by Congress. It prevents the Postal Service from acting like a private company by making smart business decisions in a timely manner. Instead, we have the legislature bickering over proposals ranging from cutting down service to 5 days a week to closing post office locations.
The simple fix is to blow it up and let mail delivery be a completely privatized system. It’s not that farfetched. Although UPS and FedEx (the market leaders) currently don’t offer services anywhere close to the price of first class mail, there is no doubt both companies would eagerly find a way to get into the market in an affordable way if they were invited. And both companies have a proven efficiency for package delivery that is seemingly beyond the United States Postal Service.
It’s not going to happen, at least not in the immediate future, no matter how much sense it might make or money it might save taxpayers. In the end, the reason the post office will persist is because of the romantic tradition of mail delivery.
But all you have to do is wait in a long line at the post office and you know something isn’t right. The employees are the undead. Their enthusiasm as been sucked out of them by poor business practices, layoffs, long hours and a litany of upsells they are required to mention (express mail, tracking, stamps, etc.) It is such a caustic environment, I can’t understand why we allow it to persist.
I, for one, would like to see the Postmaster General be able to carte blance implement all of his improvements and see if they work. How can you argue that service would be impacted negatively when it’s already gored to the point of death? If his suggestions save taxpayer dollars without diluting the intention of the Postal Service, I can’t see a downside.
Amazingly, no matter how much we all agree the system is broken, there is so much resistance to fixing it. The entire discussion leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and from what I’ve read, I’m not the only one.
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Andrew Marx is a long time writer on SmartReMarxcom and recently published a new work of fiction Accidents Happen. You can contact him on twitter or leave a comment below.
