Change Is Bad / It's all your fault / PHYSICAL POSTCARD from eepy! / UK Guardian article about US Postal Service

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Okay, well, all this about hand-cancelling ...

In the USA, the postal services we've grown up with seem likely soon to be Fond, Nostalgic, Norman Rockwell Memories of a vanished past.

Any mailbox that isn't eating enough envelopes and postcards a day will soon be rippped out of the pavement and is never coming back. Any Post Office that doesn't do whizbang daily business ditto.

I shall particularly weep when the Leeds, Massachusetts post office is turned into a soft-serve ice cream stand. What I loved about it -- never a crowd, and always a clerk to provide local gossip and any imaginable service I could invent -- is precisely its Death Knell.

And it's all our fault. When is the last time you wrote a physical piece of mail, put a (kosher) stamp on it, and dropped it into a mailbox?

When's the last time you entrusted an IMPORTANT piece of mail to the US Postal Service? Last year, using the US Postal Service for some important business nearly cost me a staggering sum of money. Fortunately I got a second chance and went with FedEx.

No. You reached out and touched that someone with e-mail. And by pressing SEND, extincted the Post Office at the same time. Just like ordering the Whale Sushi or the Chilean Sea Bass.

Now see what you've done.

(Actually EEPY just sent me a postcard!!! You can TOUCH it! You can tack it to the wall or store it in a shoebox for decades to come! The Postal Person delivered it to my mailbox! Contact eepy for the subject and occasion of the card, but it features a photograph of her superhandsome black cat Sam Dustball!)

This season is an unhappy watershed moment for the US Postal Service, an agency which seems to have been invented by Benjamin Franklin late in the 18th Century. Read it and weep.

Me, I'm racing to New Hampshire to ride the wood-burning steam engine train to the summit of Mount Washington while it still exists. It's right up the highway from where The Old Man of the Mountain used to be, with a promise that it had always been there, and would remain there forever.

As my wife is wont to say:

Change Is Bad.

Bob / jameskpolka / Elmer Elevator

(and other aliases)

=============

The Guardian (UK newspaper)
Monday 10 August 2009

US Postal Service
faces storm of protest
over cutbacks

The USPS seeks to close almost 700 offices and cut deliveries to tackle $7bn loss, in a crisis matching the Royal Mail's troubles

by Andrew Clark in New York

Postal Service Considers Closing 1000 Post Offices Due To Financial Crisis

[photo]
Customers wait at the Bernal Heights Station post office, San Francisco, one of almost 700 being considered for closure.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The US Postal Service is facing staunch opposition over plans to shut hundreds of offices as the problems faced by Royal Mail are matched across the Atlantic.

The USPS is also planning to scrap Saturday deliveries as it runs up losses of more than $7,000,000,000 (£4,200,000,000) in one of the worst financial crises in its 234-year history.

The recession and the emergence of electronic commerce has prompted a dive in lucrative marketing-driven junk mail, causing a 9.3% drop in the number of items handled by the service during 2008.

America's postmaster general, John Potter, has asked Congress for permission to reduce the statutory requirement of six weekly delivery days to five. Last week, the service published a list of almost 700 smaller post offices at risk of closure.

The branches under threat are predominantly in urban areas and are considered a relatively short distance from other neighbourhood post offices. But the measure has caused consternation among politicians, unions and customers.

"The Postal Service cannot expect to gain more business, which it desperately needs, if it is reducing service," said Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine.

William Burris, the president of the American Postal Workers' Union, described the potential shutdowns as "acts of surrender – when the outcome of the battle is still in doubt."

The service, which can trace its origins back to the appointment of Benjamin Franklin as the country's first postmaster general in 1775, lost $2,400,000,000 in the three months to June as the number of letters and parcels in the mail fell by 7,000,000,000 to 41,000,000,000 items.

Proposed cost reductions of $6,000,000,000 include early retirement programmes, a freeze on executive salaries, cuts to travel budgets and a proposal to restructure a retirement healthcare fund for workers which requires funding of between $5,400,000,000 and $5,800,000,000 annually. But even with these savings, the USPS expects to lose more than $7,000,000,000 bn this fiscal year.

Potter told a Congressional committee that the USPS, which is government-owned but has required no subsidy in recent years, was reaching a "breaking point."

Critics say that Congress's insistence on minimum service levels is a relatively recent phenomenon. As recently as the 1950s, many Americans were obliged to collect their mail from post offices, rather than receiving daily deliveries, and the mandatory requirement for a six-day service began in the 1970s.

"The government has cut subsidies but hasn't given the Postal Service's administrators a free hand in pricing," said Richard John, an expert in the USPS's history at Columbia University. "They're put in an impossible position."

Towns and cities across the US are abuzz with dismay at the prospect of closures. In the Texas city of Arlington, near Dallas, local customer David Scott told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that closing his local downtown branch would "stink", adding: "It's convenient to be able to come and do your business downtown. A shame to take that away."

In New York, congressman Anthony Weiner attacked the USPS for releasing information in "dribs and drabs": "It's no wonder that they have been losing business. If their intention was to raise alarms, what they've really done is raise questions about their management."

- 30 -

* Letters for publication should be sent to:

letters@guardian.co.uk

About this article

US Postal Service faces protest over cutbacks
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 14.38 BST on Monday 10 August 2009. It was last updated at 15.15 BST on Monday 10 August 2009.

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