There is a long article in the Washington Post Business section today about the challenges facing the US Postal Service as mail usage drops.
The structural problems facing the Postal Service are monumental. Despite a tiny uptick last year, first-class mail volume is slowly but steadily eroding as people pay more bills online, send Evites instead of printed invitations and shoot off e-mails rather than write letters. The agency also is facing massive and escalating personnel costs, especially for health care, even as it has embraced automation and reduced staffing needs. And finally, there is the federal government’s attempt to change the structure of Postal Service regulation, an effort that postal officials regard as riddled with problems and with favors to private industry.
Unmentioned is the biggest problem that the USPS faces, the fact that, since it faces no competition in the delivery of first-class mail, it has no real incentive to reform that aspect of its business, which is one of the major things leading people to move to non-mail alternatives like electronic bill paying and email. As long as that monoply remains in place, the USPS will, as fellow blogger Brad Warbiany learned in December, continue to a customer service disaster area. Why care about your customers when they’ve got no place else to go ?
And customers are responding by utilizing other alternatives:
About two years ago, first-class mail fell below the 50 percent threshold of mail volume for the first time. It now accounts for about 46 percent of all mail, while direct-mail marketing items represent 49 percent. The rest is packages.
And as for those packages:
The package-delivery business is so dominated by UPS and FedEx that the Postal Service now partners with these private carriers along parts of the delivery chain. The theory is that it’s cost-effective for both if only one delivery person has to walk up to a house. There are even FedEx boxes in some post offices.
If that isn’t an admission by USPS that FedEx and UPS are better at delivering packages, on time, then I don’t know what is.
Of course, this being the Washington Post, we have the mandatory paragraph waxing oh-ever-so-eloquently about what a great place the Post Office is:
And this is when people start thinking about the third Postal Service — the one that delivers possibility six days a week — a letter from an old friend, a tax refund or an acceptance from the admissions office. This is the post office that brings us the letter carriers we admire, who avoid dogs and leave footprints in pristine snow. It gives the tiniest towns their own proud postmarks. It’s the post office that found you even when the address under your name was so incredibly incorrect it was laughable.
This is the Postal Service that no one wants to lose.
Personally, I’d be fine to lose this romantic vision of the friendly mailman if it means that we’ll end up with an institution that responds to competition and cares about its customers.
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