
We’re told that the U.S. Postal Service is taking another step down the road to extinction: not only will they raise the price of a first-class stamp to 45 cents, they’ll no longer even try to deliver first-class mail in a timely way.
But never fear: all that junk mail they chuff into your mailbox for you to haul straight to the recycling bin will get to you on time!
{sigh} I’d like to say this is a real loss to America. And over time, the slow degradation of the USPS certainly has been a loss. I can remember when I used to wait with bated breath for the postman to show up. Now I just groan every afternoon at the prospect of having to retrieve and throw out another big wad of trash.
Does anybody other than junk mailers still do business with the USPS on purpose? I have only one client who persists in sending hard-copy checks. Not that I don’t appreciate the payment ( 🙂 ), but it’s a a bit of a nuisance, forcing me to waste time either scanning the check to e-deposit it or traipsing across the city to drop it off at the credit union.
Granted, I still get paper statements from the credit union, AMEX, and MasterCard. But none of those is necessary. I check my credit union statements online a lot more often than once a month, and if the credit-card issuers sent me statements by e-mail, I would bestir myself to hassle with their online sites to check charges. Truth to tell, there’s really no need to have that data printed out and mailed to me.
Now, I do love getting The Economist, Sunset, and The New York Review of Books in the mail. There are some circumstances in which little glowing letters on a screen just do not substitute for the real thing. But…as a practical matter, these days I get most of my news online. You’ll note that today’s news flash came from Bloomberg’s website, which I read three hours before the Times showed up with the same story on the front page of its business section.
The big, genuine regret here will be the loss of our postal carriers. Having these cheerful and friendly workers tooling through the neighborhood adds to the quality of our lives, at least in big cities…it’s one of the few pleasant traditions that have survived the gritty dystopianism we’ve seen over the past 50 years. Me, I haven’t been inside a post office in years—the service is so slow and the overworked staff are so unhappy, I’ll pay a little more to ship a package through UPS or FedEx. But when the day comes for the postal service to close down, I sure will miss the mail carriers.
Image: Rosarinagazo. The Postal Carrier, sculpture by Erminio Blotta y Pedro Cresta, Palacio de Correos, Rosario, Argentina. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.



