Neither rain nor snow nor dark of night – we have all heard that about our beloved Post Office.  But, and it is a big BUT, times and circumstances have changed.  The Post Office continues to see a decline in mail volume and everything we can see suggests that this trend will continue.  Earlier this year the Post Office recognizing this trend proposed closing about 250 sorting operations and over 3,000 small post offices and stopping Saturday deliver.  What happened?  Congress said no to these options and is working on an option to give the Post Office some $34 billion to keep operating inefficiently.  WOW how about that for cutting unnecessary federal spending?

As I think about this one question comes to mind, why are we only considering cutting Saturday deliver and why are we doing six day per week residential delivery? During the summer when we are in Minnesota we get our mail once a week. The Arizona Post Office accumulates our mail and each Wednesday sends a Priority Mail package to us in Minnesota.  This is a premium service, meaning that we pay for it, offered by the Post Office as an alternative to standard forwarding or providing change-of-address notices for our periodicals and other mail twice a year.  What we have found is that getting our mail once a week works just fine.  So if once a week can work maybe we could look at only delivering residential mail two or three times a week.  Just think about it either way it would be possible to cut something like half or more of the post office staff!  Let’s face it we, at least most of us, have migrated a lot of our correspondence from the “Snail Mail” to some form of electronic delivery resulting in the above mentioned decline in mail volume.  In all probability the volume of mail will continue to drop for the foreseeable future.  Now if your volume is dropping you only have a couple of options.  Either raise the price such that you cover your costs or cut your expenses.  In this case raising the price would in all probability exacerbate the decline in mail volume and chasing that would be a death spiral – that is if you were a regular business.

Now I understand that cutting the staff is not the top of the list for the postal unions – they vehemently  objected to the rather minor cuts in the earlier reference proposal – but as the Post Office is a labor intensive operation that is the best, and probably the only way, to make  a substantive impact on costs. But back to my point – why can’t we move to maybe twice a week residential mail delivery? Probably not something that could be accomplished in one step but why not start with something?  Maybe we start with four days a week and reduce to three in a couple of years and then to two in a couple more years.  In any event we should do something except provide more funding to allow a failed business model to continue. Any other ideas out there – let me know.