By Carl Weiss
As far back as the 19th century, when the telegraph
came into vogue, people have been looking for a better way to deliver
information and goods more efficiently than the US Postal Service. Today's
wired world has created a myriad of electronic delivery systems that do
everything from rendering payment, to delivering messages and even packages at
the click of a mouse. In today’s blog, I intend to delve into a number of
innovative, cost effective delivery options to the USPS, as well as the
possibility that in the near future the post office could very well be as dead
as the dodo bird.
They
Don’t Call it Snail Mail for Nothing
The US Postal Service can
trace its roots back to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. That’s when Ben Franklin, a prominent
Philadelphia printer, was appointed as the country’s first Postmaster
General. Since that momentous occasion,
the USPS staff has mushroomed to 717,254 federal employees, making it one of
the nation’s largest employers. In 2014,
the USPS generated $67.8 billion in revenues.
That sounds impressive until you realize that it represented a $5.5
billion operating loss. This seems odd
when you consider the USPS operates a virtual monopoly when it comes to
delivering letters. Stranger still is
the fact that the post office has downsized considerably during the past few
years, closing a number of offices as well as reducing the hours they are
open. Of course, the USPS is and always
has been a bureaucracy. That explains a
lot.
The real problem with the
Post Office is that unlike the 19th and first half of the 20th
century where it had little if any competition, by the latter part of the 20th
century when package and overnight delivery was privatized, the days of the
Post Office monopoly was over. But the USPS was still alive and kicking, if at
a snail’s pace. (They don’t call it snail mail for nothing.) Sure, since the late 1800’s people could use
the telegraph and telegram to send messages quickly. But when one considered the fact that Western
Union charged by the word, the telegram was more like Twitter than traditional correspondence. Short copy was the norm. Then came the Internet.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Postage
By the mid 1990’s, digital technology
such as fax and email began to slowly but surely erode the postal service’s
hegemony. Why wait days to deliver the
message when anyone with a phone and a modem could send pages replete with
photos across the telephone wires in minutes.
(Today we can do this in seconds, but remember how slow dialup
connections once were.)
Suddenly you didn’t need to
pay for postage to send letters, flyers and ad copy across town or around the
world. (Spam was born.) All it took was
type, point and click. Add to this the
fact that within the past few years, most businesses and banks have adopted
electronic payment systems that allow customers to remit payment at the click
of a mouse and it makes the USPS seem a lot like its predecessor, the Pony
Express.
Yet the Post Office still
plods on. A number of tech companies such as Netflix still rely on the USPS to
ship their products, as do a myriad of other advertisers, many of which we
regard as junk mail. However, as competition
grows and technology makes much of what the USPS does seem redundant, will
there come a time when the public, not to mention the federal government
decides it’s time to put the Postal Service out of its misery? A quote from Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
"Since the 2006 all-time peak mail volume,[5] after which Congress passed the Postal
Accountability and Enhancement Act,[6] (which mandated $5.5 billion per year to be paid into an
account to fully prefund employee retirement health benefits, a requirement
exceeding that of other government and private organizations [7]), revenue dropped sharply due to
recession-influenced[8] declining mail volume,[9] prompting the postal service to look to other sources of
revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.[10] The USPS lost US$5.5 billion in fiscal 2014, and its revenue
was US$67.8 billion."
Whoa Nelly! I can hear those
telegraph operators of yesteryear crying the blues. Not only have private shipping concerns such
as UPS and FedEx continued to chip away at USPS market share, but other major
players such as Amazon want in on the action. (Can you say same-day drone delivery?) Being that neither timeliness nor
cost-effectiveness has never been one of the Post Office’s priorities, as
innovative companies continue to reel in more and more of the fish that USPS
once had all to itself, at what point will the feds declare it time to abandon
ship?
In a blog on Fox News, Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos stated that,
“Amazon delivery drones are still years away, but someday they
will be as common as seeing a mail truck. Bezos told the Telegraph in London
that the biggest hurdle Prime Air has to clear isn’t related to technology, but
regulators.”
Of course, with other
bureaucrats such as the FAA, running interference for the Post Office, they
might be able to delay the inevitable for a time. And since the US Postal Service has never
been one to innovate since Ben Franklin stepped down from office, far from
looking for new sources of revenue, it will face an ever shrinking customer
base. Combined with bureaucratic bloat
and an unwillingness to face the fiscal realities of running a business, the
sheer cost of running a dysfunctional shipping conglomerate will inevitably
spell disaster. (Or, they can simply print an adhesive
strip on the back of a $1 bill.) As with
other bygone technologies, the question is not whether the Post Office can
survive change, but when will it be time to Fire the Postman?
In this article I have discussed the US Postal Service and how this massive governmental bureaucracy is not only losing money, it is losing ground as a mail deliver system. The massive losses are causing the public and congress to rethink the USPS's role and whether it should be privatized.
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Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio.
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