The news story du jour has been the news that the US Postal Service is ending Saturday Mail Delivery-- this came as no surprise to anyone as I think the country has been waiting an announcement about this for what seems like four years now and it does precisely nothing to address the underlying problems of the Post Office itself. Not even The Royal Mail is wholly goverment-run anymore. The Germans privitized parts of theirs and that's how we ended up with DHL (something I didn't know until recently) yet the good old USPS just keeps lurching along from crisis to crisis trying to figure out what to do next- and I used to wonder why- until I read this article.
Turns out that the Post Office is overseen by the most competent body of fair minded sensible people in the United States today. Yes, I'm talking about Congress- and no, I couldn't write that last sentence with a straight face. Hahahahahaha! I'm not going to blame Congress for all the problems- things like email, social media and text messaging means that people just don't write letters like they used too and one of these days Amazon will figure out same day delivery and everything will just implode as we all bow down before our new Corporate Overlord Jeff Bezos and take our rightful places in the Amazon Distribution Centers of the Future.
In short, the modern world is not being nice to the Postal Service. It's bleeding a whopping $36 million a day- that's $25,000 per minute. That's insane. Ending Saturday delivery seems prudent, wise and all round step in the direction of fiscal sanity- and guess what? It's subject to Congressional approval. I can see this ending well for the Post Office already.
The other mind-blowingly weird thing about the Post Office is that they have to pre-fund all the costs for their future retirees. (Read about that glorious burden here.) Guess who saddled them with that? Go on, guess. If you guessed Congress- you'd be entirely correct!
Do I know what the future holds for the Post Office? No, I don't but I don't think it's good either. You could argue that maybe as snail mail finally dies off, you could focus on pacakage delivery but there are already a half dozen companies doing a better job than the Post Office in that business. You could say, just privtize it, trim the fight and get down and dirty with DHL, UPS and FedEx and start fighting it out. Great idea- but there are hefty pension obligations imposed by Congress that no private investor is going to want to deal with- which would undoubtedly stick the taxpayers with a hefty bill. Something no politician is going to want to do either.
But you've got to start somewhere and ending Saturday delivery seems like a decent enough place to start. I'm not at all upset about this- I was more upset when they first started raising stamp prices- but even that I've come to accept as inevitable.
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