Going Postal

The United States Postal Service, having lost $3.8 billion in 2009 and seeing its volume down to 177 billion mail pieces and dropping, is planning to make various spending cuts to counter a growing budget deficit. The USPS is in trouble, and Postmaster General John Potter knows it. More and more people are turning to electronic mail and bill payments in place of first-class mail, and the recession has taken a toll on the Postal Service's business. Potter has proposed numerous reform ideas, including ending Saturday delivery, closing branch offices, offering more postal products in businesses such as Office Depot, raising rates yet again, and restructuring health benefits for retiree health benefits to mirror the way other government agencies pay out such benefits, along with addressing overpayments to the Postal Service Civil Service Retirement System pension fund.

Potter has tried to handle mounting costs before, but he's been rebuffed by Congress, who has the authority to allow or reject the Postmaster General's ideas. This time, he's hoping that the agency's problems - supported by independent research - will lead to what could be the most sweeping reform of the post office since 1970, when the current organizational structure was devised and the post office was taken out of direct control of the President and weaned off tax subsidies. One idea of Potter's is to have the Postal Service permitted to evaluate and introduce more new products consistent with its mission of universal communications, allowing it to compete more effectively by responding to customer needs. The only problem is that the Postal Service is in such sorry shape, it can't afford to try such ideas, like marketing cellular phones, as other countries's postal systems have done. Privatization is a non-starter for the time being as well, given the mess its finances are in. The United States is, as with everything else, behind the rest of the industrialized world in reforming its postal system to adapt to changing times.

Potter will hopefully be able to make the needed changes he can make, as well as get congressional approval this time for other reforms.

So far there's no threat of layoffs, with the Postal Service preferring to cut its workforce through retirements. Because the Postal Service pays well, my mother wanted me to get a job there. I resisted, thinking that I could succeed in a different line of work. Of course, that didn't work out so well. But I'm still not sure I would have wanted to work for the post office, what with all the horrific postal massacres - one in New Jersey happening in a branch office I had occasionally patronized - that have occurred.

Incidentally, the 44-cent first-class postage rate is still a bargain in a country as geographically large and as heavily populated as ours.