Herodotus wrote of the Persian mail service that “as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.” If it was dangerous work, it was also important. And one suspects, not without its share of danger and adventure.
The romance of the mails continued into the New World. Pony express riders, many teenage boys, road a “1,900 mile route [which] roughly followed the Oregon Trail, and California Trail to Fort Bridger in Wyoming and then the Mormon Trail (known as the Hastings Cutoff) to Salt Lake City, Utah. From there it roughly followed the Central Nevada Route to Carson City, Nevada before passing over the Sierras into Sacramento, California.” All to deliver a letter.
Their 20th century descendants of the pony express riders were the mail pilots. Charles Lindbergh was perhaps the most famous real one, while Mickey Mouse the best known fictional flier. In the pre-Internet age the idea of sending a few hundred pages of messages across the Atlantic in less than a day seemed stupendous achievement. And the only way to do it was by air.
And there was only one way to see if it could be done. Try.
Lindbergh’s solo across the Atlantic was in part an attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of sending letters across an ocean. For 27 hours after he had taken off from New York, no one knew where Lindberg’s plane was, nor even whether he was alive. To add to the drama, the young pilot’s mother, Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh, sat waiting in her Detroit home “awaiting word of her son’s victory or death” as the press camped on her doorstep.
Paris was in breathless suspense as the hour of his estimated arrival neared. When word came that the Spirit of St. Louis had been sighted over England people rushed out to read the news on the ticker boards at the Place de l’Opera, and with hardly a pause those with the means of transportation headed direct for the airfield there to be held spellbound by what 21st century man no longer feels thrilled by: the bare contest between a human being and pitiless nature.
Fifteen thousand others gravitated toward the Ĺ toile, filling the city block that surrounded a hotel because they assumed Lindbergh would be spending the night there. Many too impatient to stand around in town suddenly decided to witness the arrival. Students from the Sorbonne jammed into buses and subways. Thousands more grabbed whatever conveyance remained available, until more than ten thousand cars filled the roads between the city and Le Bourget. Before long, 150,000 people had gathered at the airfield.
A little before ten o’clock, the excited crowd at Le Bourget heard an approaching engine and fell silent. A plane burst through the clouds and landed; but it turned out to be the London Express. Minutes later, as a cool wind blew the stars into view, another roar ripped the air, this time a plane from Strasbourg. Red and gold and green rockets flared overhead, while acetylene searchlights scanned the dark sky. The crowd became restless standing in the chill. Then, “suddenly unmistakeably the sound of an aeroplane … and then to our left a white flash against the black night … and another flash (like a shark darting through water),” recalled Harry Crosby– the American expatriate publisher–who was among the enthusiastic on- lookers. “Then nothing. No sound. Suspense. And again a sound, this time somewhere off towards the right. And is it some belated plane or is it Lindbergh? Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field–C’est lui Lindbergh.
Today the mails routinely fly the oceans, but they are fighting a more modern form of menace. Bankruptcy. While the challenges of weather, distance and bushwhackers lurking in ambush were met, no one has yet found a way to escape the clutches of arithmetic. The US Postal Service announced it can no longer continue to meet its pension obligations while delivering the mails — at least without being allowed to cut back services or a new infusion of subsidy money from the government.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahue warns he can’t make a congressionally-mandated $5.5 billion health-care-benefits payment for future retirees that’s due at the month’s end, and says the USPS faces total insolvency a year from now — perhaps even sooner. When the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, the post office may have as little as a week’s worth of cash on hand — about $1 billion.
And that’s the good news.
Its annual deficit is now $9.2 billion, its revenues are plummeting and its labor costs — some 80 percent of its expenses — are far higher than those of competitors like FedEx and UPS. Benefits are generous and featherbedding — paying workers not to work — is rampant.
Under longstanding labor agreements, the USPS is forbidden from layoffs or worker reassignment due to low mail volume. Instead, it must have workers sit idle on “standby time” — which cost it nearly $31 million in 2009.
Low volume is a big part of the problem. The amount of mail the Post Office handles is down 22 percent in the past five years (with e-mail free and instantaneous, who couldn’t see that coming?) and the outlook for first-class mail is grim.
It’s not that the Postal Service isn’t trying to save itself. It’s pushing to end Saturday delivery, close 3,700 post offices and fire up to 120,000 workers (about a fifth of its workforce), even though layoffs are expressly prohibited under current labor contracts.
So it looks like the USPS is a goner. All that may be left of it is its pension footprint, the lingering smile of the fiscal Cheshire Cat. In its own way the saga of the Post Office embodies both the finest traditions of change and illustrates its dangers. Just as the post-horses of the Persian Empire gave way first to the iron horse and later to delivery by air, so now messages are being delivered over the wire. The means change. But the essence of the task often remains.
The USPS made the mistake of believing that its business was delivering letters and satisfying the unions. That was wrong. It forgot that its real business was linking the hearths of men. That unmet need was provided by social networking entreprenuers, email providers and the cell phone industry. Linking the men is the core business. The pony express rider, the mail pilot and the network administrator know that. The rest is merely detail.
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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The USPS made some feeble attempts to privatize but had in the offing, carried its government shop baggage along with it. I for one will be sad to see it go but admit that it has become a hypocritical anachronism. The post office has been staffed by a growing and bloated bureaucracy that mirrors any government institution its make up. What is hypocritical to me is the sheer waste of moving hectares of forrest pulp from house to house in the form of unsolicited “junk” mail. I meant to capture a years worth of junk mail as a personal project but it looks like the mother nature of markets has finished my project for me.
From a comment at Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg site:
Limit the USPS to letters only. Everything else goes Brown or FEDEX. Charge $2.50 per letter. The USPS fiscal problem will fix itself.
Thoughts on this?
The USPS suffers from the worst of both worlds: it’s a private enterprise, but its every move is subject to government approval, which is why it can’t close useless offices or halt Saturday delivery. A truly private business can quickly take whatever steps necessary to offset falling revenue.
As for no layoffs and paying extraneous people not to work — well, the automakers had the same nasty thing going for years with its infamous “jobs banks.”
It took Ch. 11 for GM and Chrysler to get out from under the dead weight of its union contracts. The USPS should follow suit.
One of my early jobs was in the mailroom of a bank’s data processing center. All of the other people in the mailroom were retired USPS. I hated the job (boring as sin) and worked as hard and fast as I could to sort the mail and be done with it. About two weeks after I started, I was approached by the other members of the “team” and told in no uncertain terms to “slow it down, or they’ll think we’re done too soon and lay somebody off.”
It told me all I needed to know about the USPS and its upcoming problems.
The last time I bought or used standard postage stamps was in 2001 (34cent denomination). I still have many left from that purchase, with little prospect of using them any time soon. The only reason I’ve needed to use them in that entire interim is to mail various documents letters and queries to the government. All other transactions are handled electronically, or through FedEx and UPS. When I need to use them I simply slap two on the envelope. It would cost more for then gasoline to make one trip to the PO to purchase the smaller stamps – and since they now have raised the rate nearly annually since 2001, it makes little sense to buy those make-up stamps as there’s a moving target which is impossible to hit.
So here we’ve got one dinosaur quasi-governmental institution which mainly seems to be required in order to communicate with our dinosauric actual government…. Preposterous.
I once heard it said that those who know, do, those that don’t, teach…
Now I can add to that “teach, or work for the government.”. One might say “what abunch of incompetent sheisters and thieves!” but that would be wrong given, as for incompetence… After all, our government has bilked us of trillions while leaving their actual intended jobs totally unattended. The level of criminality, cynicism, and malfeasance in the US government is unmatched in human history. Our government has allowed 20-30 million illegals to invade, they and the media vilify anyone who objects, and they hold the power of law over us to keep us down and wield their soft and not so soft redistributive tyranny over us… I think civil war is brewing.
On the web page of every Railroad Technical and Historical Society chapter in the U.S. (each chapter representing a different corporation from the pre-merger railroads), there is a statement to the effect that they do not have employee records and cannot assist with questions about Railroad Retirement Board payments.
The husks of long-dead corporations, once both glamorous and feared, boiled down to a check in the mail fifty years on. The legacy of industrial America.
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
A rock ‘n roll reminiscence of the postal service, almost half a century old– The King in 1962:
Return to sender, return to sender
I gave a letter to the post man, he put it his sack.
Bright and early next morning, he brought my letter back.
She wrote upon it:
Return to sender, address unknown.
No such number, no such zone.
We had a quarrel, a lovers’ spat,
I’d write “I’m sorry” but my letter keeps coming back.
So when I dropped it in the mailbox, I sent it “Special D”
Bright and early next morning, it came right back to me.
She wrote upon it:
Return to sender, address unknown.
No such person, no such zone.
This time I’m gonna take it myself
And put it right in her hand
And if it comes back the very next day
Then I’ll understand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z54-QHEZN6E
The USPS is a QUANGO. That’s a Quasi Non-Governmental Organization. Ditto Canada Post. The quasi part means it is controlled by the Government. Why should the Government control mail deliveries?
No reason whatsoever.
Why should the Government control – in wretchard’s phrase – “linking the hearths of men”?
No reason whatsoever.
“Linking the hearths of men” is a task for men and women, incorporated as private enterprises that are governed by the rule of law. As the technological specifics of hearth linking change, then so will those private enterprises.
The USPS and Canada Post are dinosaurs. Just let mail delivery by State functionaries die and disappear.
USPS, AMtrash, Fannie Mae, and all those other QUANGOS will have more company if the Obama economic trend were allowed to continue. GM and Chrysler are now quasi-governmental organizations, and GE seems to want to become one. One big corporation after another plus all of Wall Street want government guarantees, and even the stock market acts under the assumption that how the economy goes is determined by sneezes and farts from government, rather than the creative chaos of goods and services. To Soros and Buffet, collossal governments are money-making opportunities. The fact that for every act of collusion and federal largesse there is a steep price to pay (just ask all those banks the DOJ is now suing because they faithfully followed political directives, or Boeing for wanting the SC plant!) doesn’t seem to stop this “private sector” from feeding at the taxpayer trough.
In previous threads here at BC it’s even been pointed out that some small-time entrepreneurs want government guarantees for purchase of a baseline amount of their products! The infection is so deep that you wonder if anyone even understands what “free markets” and “free enterprise” really are.
THE PONY EXPRESS
He saddled up, this teenaged boy
Five-six or less, a jockey’s weight
Ahead lay nineteen hundred miles
Important letters not be late
The pouch secured, he mounted up
Then off into the wild he’d go
To Sacramento, ten days out
From station home in St. Joe, Mo
Across the trackless western plain
Through Injun country all the while
Through Kansas and Nebraska too
He changed tired horses with a smile
He ran from Cheyenne and the Utes
Vast buffalo herds in his way
He paid no heed to danger for
He had to ride more miles that day
Fort Laramie, Fort Bridger next
Then Salt Lake City, a brief stop
A bite to eat a bit of rest
Then on a horse again he’d hop
Across the empty plain he rode
Distant Comanches raiding north
Nevada desert, sand and scrub
It matters not, the mail goes forth
The High Sierras, bitter cold
Snow and wind, he faltered not
Then California, and on time
Delivered promptly, on the dot
To Sacramento he did ride
To where I live, a pleasant view
To Occupant, the letter read
I send it back, there’s postage due
“Why should the Government control mail deliveries? ”
There was a time it all made sense like the Rural Electrification Act once upon a time. But no bureaucracy knows what to do when the sun sets.
“The infection is so deep that you wonder if anyone even understands what “free markets” and “free enterprise” really are.”
It is little wonder when the guv screws the pooch then jumps in to solve all of the problems by trying a new tack. Gee, capitalism is fragile and subject to government mismanagement, we’ll throw that out altogether and make our own economy… yeah, that will work. Show me da muny.
To me, it seems like all these politicians are willing to blow any amount of public money if they can receive less than one percent of that amount back in contributions. Consider the franking privilege. Congresscritters can send unlimited first class mail for free. They will never give that up, and they will spend unlimited money and credit from the public fisc to maintain it.
A prime example of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
First step, all that bulk-rate trashcan filler pays first class rates. That either lowers mail volume, increases revenue, or some combination thereof. Second step, post office boxes at the post office.
“Why should the Government control mail deliveries? ”
Our supposedly libertarian founders considered mail delivery to be a primary federal government function. It worked fine as a full-fledged federal entity. Not endorsing re-federalizing it, just saying that for its time it worked fine.
Hey my last message didn’t post and it didn’t have any profanity nor even a link, wassup with that? Post office don’t lose no messages, hardly.
Interestingly enough in the Confederate States of America the post office was a separate self-funded entity in a way that was not done in the USA until the 1960′s.
My Mom points out that in the 1930′s normal in-town mail delivery was TWICE A DAY.
The Internet has changed many aspects of our lives and unsurprisingly, the federal government is the slowest to adjust. If it had been a private enterprise, one that had to answer to investors, it would have already been cutting costs or making changes. Nostalgia is not a sufficient reason to prop up the USPS. It has outlived its usefulness and needs to rest with the Dodos.
“Lucky Lindy” and “Wrong-way Corrigan”. Those were the days.
I saw a framed photo recently, actually hanging incongruously on my wife’s maternity room wall (in a Central Euro country, yet) of a biplane with people playing tennis on the top wing. (The players were crouching and a small net was fastened in the center of the wing.) It was a B/W photo, of course, taken from above and a bit forward and to the port of the biplane. Below it spread out small buildings and fields–no way to know where they barnstorming. The caption (in English) read something like “Wing-Walkers Circa 1925″.
Those were the days.
Was the human race simply different then? Or was it just us?
Somehow I felt when I saw it, “We were Americans, then.”
What are the odds of the Feds actually just letting the Post Office go bankrupt and close? Certainly Obama will demand money to save it. He’ll paint the Repubs as heartless troglodytes for wanting to close the Post Office, etc.
This could prove interesting.
An Préachán
e-mail doesn’t even have an envelope, let alone a brown paper wrapper. In fact, e-mail follows an unknown route leaving a trace if not a copy on countless servers around the world. And guess who it is that can silence servers whenever he wishes?
“Night Mail” – W. H. Auden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0
19. MSO
Very true regarding electronic mail, but just one more argument for multiple private companies delivering paper mail and parcels. Harder for government to shut them down, especially if a government-owned mail service doesn’t exist.
Try PGP encryption and Mozilla Thunderbird, useful in some circumstances.
One of my favorite vintage movies is Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings about flying the mail over the Andes, no mean feat in the 30′s.
And then, of course, there was Pony Express starring Charleton Heston as Bill Cody. Cody was a small man suitable for riding the Pony Express. Heston, on the other hand, was not and was ludicrous as a Pony Express rider.
#18 An Preachan – would this video be a current form of barnstorming??? Incidentally, the flying suit used was first made and used in the 1930′s…..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/04/jeb-corliss-professional-wingsuit-flyer_n_948516.html
“Try PGP encryption and Mozilla Thunderbird, useful in some circumstances”
What’s that old song?
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone.”
Article one section 8 of the constitution directs the government “To establish Post Offices and post Roads”. I’d rather the NLRB, EPA, Dept. Of Ed. etc, would fade away.
#9 DR:
“One big corporation after another plus all of Wall Street want government guarantees, and even the stock market acts under the assumption that how the economy goes is determined by sneezes and farts from government, rather than the creative chaos of goods and services….The fact that for every act of collusion and federal largesse there is a steep price to pay (just ask all those banks the DOJ is now suing because they faithfully followed political directives, or Boeing for wanting the SC plant!) doesn’t seem to stop this “private sector” from feeding at the taxpayer trough. In previous threads here at BC it’s even been pointed out that some small-time entrepreneurs want government guarantees for purchase of a baseline amount of their products! The infection is so deep that you wonder if anyone even understands what “free markets” and “free enterprise” really are.”
Take the king’s shilling, do the king’s bidding.
I submit that this desire for, dare I say worship at the altar of the false god of, perfect income stream security is not a top down thing but rather a bottom up one. The leaders of government and businesses from farming to autos to regulatory compliance companies are simply reflecting decades of the population at large having an entitlement mentality and using unions and the welfare state and a bloated and vicious government regulatory apparatus to satisfy that hunger and assuage the anxiety of thinking about a potential for income to not simply show up every week, month, or whatever.
Once Americans made the transition from believing that it was not a primary function of government to make sure everyone got what they wanted to believing that it was, this point became inevitable. Remove the ancient and wise proscription against envy and tell the population that nobody should have an economic end result very much different from anyone else regardless of their skill level or work ethic, and we arrive here, public union employee and rent-seeking CEO alike.
Only years of deprivation and the understanding that government cannot guarantee everyone a pony can reset the mentality to where it ought to be for tens or hundreds of millions of people. Human nature.
There is a legitimate interest for the government to maintain a physical, as opposed to electronic, communication system for its own purposes. Classified material can be sent by Registered Mail. Those postal workers we think so highly of all have security clearances to handle classified packages.
We are told that we need a unified government owned postal service because if it was privatized then the cost of a First Class letter to your Grandma who lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon would be $20. Now Granny should stop trespassing on that National Park and subsidizing her should be the job of her family or the citizens of her state. Given that the rural areas tend to be more Red than the supposedly cheaper to service urban centers it might seem damned decent of the Democrats to go to all that trouble just to make sure that all those rustic bitter clingers get to keep their NRA subscriptions up to date.
“Mickey Mouse the best known fictional flier”
Nope. That would be Snoopy and his world-famous Sopwith Camel.
I have not talked to a mailman who believes the USPS will ever go out of business. Every UPS and FedEx driver I have spoken too dismisses them as goners. They wouldn’t be bothered to hold a discussion about something that is so obvious to them.
@16 RWE:
The CSA constitution also required each post office, after a short grace period, to be financially self-sufficient.
Some other ways in which Dixie’s constitution was better than its US counterpart:
* The president had line-item veto authority.
* The president was limited to a single 6-year term.
* Congress could not spend money on its own initiative unless 2/3 of both houses agreed. The only funds they could appropriate by simple majority vote were those specifically requested by the president or a member of his cabinet.
* Congress could not award more money to a federal contractor than what was originally allowed. (No cost overruns permitted.)
* All federal laws had to pertain to a single subject.
* Federal spending on “internal improvements” was prohibited.
* Protective tariffs were prohibited.
* A “rogue” federal official whose jurisdiction did not cross state lines could be impeached by 2/3 of both houses of that state’s legislature. (The federal Senate still had to convict, and still by a 2/3 vote.)
* A convention to consider amendments could be called by any three state legislatures.
If you have worked for the federal government one thing you notice is that everyone has the same pick of healthcare plans and retirement systems. Except USPS, they pay much less for their health insurance and get a more generous retirement than everybody else.
You all can connect the dots.
Watching a re-run of Antiques Roadshow the other day, when a lady brought in an original black and white and very dramatic litho called “The Race.” IIRC, from the 1920s – sorry don’t remember the artist’s name.
Showed a beautiful black horse at full gallup in the foreground and a sleek locomotive belching smoke in the background. The appraiser waxed on about how the artist was rebelling against “automation.” Never discussed, or even noted, was the third element of the painting: wires draped over tall poles parallel to the track.
Bury the USPS at Promintory Point, UT. Simultaneous connection the rails and the wires ended the magnificent efforts of the Pony Express, at around 9 months.
Speed and capacity are still the buggaboos of the USPS, priced by the ounce for service measured in furlongs-per-fortenight.
FAX – voicemail – internet – email – messaging – micro-payments – Facebook-like apps, were all offered to USPS first. Frequently a decade before private enterprise made such available. At the time conventional wisdom was that only the USPS could scale. How could brown and/or FedEx exist if the USPS understood the business they’re in, and were allowed to compete as a publically-owned corporation.
Imagine empowering the USPS to compete in the “bits” marketspace as well as the delivery of “atoms.” For example, envision permitting USPS to be the video distributor to the worldwide Web. Publically-held, under new management and pricing, with different incentives, of course. Exploit the resource, or it falls into disuse.
Remember Fred Smith’s business plan for FedEx was marked “C” by his prof at HBS, who commented that “no one would pay $15 to send a letter” – circa 1976. Upper-management at USPS believed that assessment. Many “internet” pioneers spent countless hours in the mid-80s explaining what was coming and how the service could/should/must react to remain viable and vital and viral.
Consultant: The time differential between 1st class and other classes of delivery is artificial and induces unnecessary cost, if it causes any package to miss a truck already headed there.
Management: But, but, the postal patron might get all their second class mail in one day! Been there, done that.
Strider #30:
I have always found it interesting – and telling – that the preamble to the Confederate Constitution included a specific reference to the importance of state’s rights.
Public Servant:
Back in the mid-70′s when I worked at a government installation that had a large number of government civilian workers I used to get to read the Federal Employees News Digest. And I was struck by how for months on end every issue had a new article on how the USPS worker’s pay and benefits were being increased.
You know, it used to be common for branch post offices to be located in small stores and run as a sideline to dry cleaning, shoe repair, pharmacies, and the like. Why could we not do that again and also make all UPS, FEDEX, Office Depot, Staples, and Walmart locations part of USPS outlets?
geoff@32: At the time conventional wisdom was that only the USPS could scale.
Conventional Wisdom is proposing the same point about solar and algae (and wind and geothermal and biofuel and desalination.) If I were to go way back for the single most blatant example in modern history of miscalculation, aside from Tom Selleck passing up the Indiana Jones role, it would be IBM showing a young Bill Gates the door.
(Some more history of corporate vision, IBM “Think” style, here.)
I toured a local historical house a while back. It’s an old farmhouse from the original founding of the small cow-town I live in. In the parlor is a piece of furninture with a bunch of slots with a faded sign painted over the top saying “Post Office.” The house had been the small community’s Post Office for several years. I’ve seen other places where the General Store or the local hotel had a small corner where a Post Office window was located. I imagine in most of them, they were staffed by the clerk on duty and the establishement was probably paid a small fee as rent. No doubt many small businesses thought it was a nice bit of advertising too boot.
Now every two-bit wide spot in the road has a separate building for a post office. Meanwhile, Starbucks – which has it’s own coffee shops where there is enough business to support them – has small kiosks and carts in shopping malls, supermarkets, and hotel lobbies.
Mandating a physical presence in a community doesn’t mean the USPS needs it’s own palace and staff. It could do just as well with a rented corner and borrowed clerk. All that space and all those handlers are mostly needed for the subsidized junk mail. And the subsidized Union workers. As the Wisconsin hissyfit showed us, the purpleshirts need lots of space.
JMH #35:
My Mom ran one of those little post offices for a while back in the early 1950′s, located right on US1. It was different in that it was a dedicated post office but was a contracted-out operation rather than government owned, housed in a building that also had a shoe repair shop and in which we lived in the upstairs apartment.
The strangest thing had been the almost complete elimination of automated untended postal sites and even the stamp-selling machines that used to be in the post office lobbies. And I recall that in the 60′s and 70′s there were unmanned kiosks in a couple of shopping centers I know of (one in SC and one in OK) where you could mail things, buy stamps and even weigh and drop off packages; they all disappeared by 1980. I wonder why? They seemed to disappear about the time the post office worker’s pay and benefits went up so remarkably. But the stamp machines and self-service scales in our local post offices disappeared on went inoperative just a couple of years ago.
I’m no fan of the USPS, and I’d certainly not try to argue for more public funding, but one small point:
They’re running an annual deficit of $9,600,000,000. The estimated cost of this big scandal of paying idled employees is $31,000,000.
I don’t normally do math, so excuse me if I’ve messed this up, but doesn’t this mean that this Big Scandal is causing 0.3% of the deficit? Less than one-third of one percent of it? Heck, when a local 7-11 store manager doesn’t quickly send employees home from scheduled shifts when business slows down, it costs them far more of their labor budget than this supposed outrage.
Yet this is what got the headlines across the business pages these past few weeks.