The Postal Service

The Postal Service

The other day I heard the news that the USPS is planning to shut down over 3600 post offices due to the ever growing budget short fall. In fact, the USPS really has had the worse of it, losing around 8 billion dollars every year. Really pretty sad and scary when you think about it. Even worse when you realize that it has been as far back as Nixon that they cut all the tax payer funding from the post services.

At least this would be a good time to pick up some stock in either FedEx or UPS, because I see nothing but good things to come for both of those carriers when they'll be able to cover areas that no longer have a post office presence other than buying stamps from the local walmart.

You can see the list of the post offices in California that are being targeted to close HERE

With this news I have no problem in just throwing it out there that if you go to a post office and fill out a change of address form, they'll give you a moving packet with coupons for best buy and Lowes as well as other shit. It's pretty much the back scratching of corporations to the post office. But it does make you wonder. Why yes, I lost my home to foreclosure and I'm moving to an apartment - Better call the geek squad.

Over all, this change really will only effect the rural areas so who really gives a fuck if those people don't get their light and phone bills on time and services are cut off for them, right?

I do have one thing to register a complaint about. It's this notion that the internet killed the post office. That for some reason people stopped using stamps to send a letter the moment they got the ability to send an e-mail. You might as well blame the phone for killing the written letter. I know for certain that the amount of hand written letters before e-mail was low. But even now I still write just as much stamped letters as before.

Yeah, you pay your bills online now, stealing those postal stamp sells from the post office. But on the flip side, you have e-commerce that all use a higher costing rate for packages that you order online. E-bay, Amazon and e-commerce as a whole are all there to make up for the lack of a 32 cent stamp. So you really can't blame e-mail for the downfall of the post office. You can blame the post office for its own incompetence.

Take for example the lack of quality in their work. I don't get mail on at least 2 days of the week that I normally should. This is not because I don't have mail, but it's because the postal worker felt the need to cut down their route by just kicking the can down the road a day or two. This may save them some time, but it also means that I can't rely on the post office for prompt delivery and I turn to someone else.

It seems that they want to make this a cross the board change as they have suggested that post offices will probably cut off Saturday postal service. Way to limit yourself some more and make sure folks don't depend on you.

I can't say I'm surprised that the post office gets such a bad rep. They're doing it to themselves.