Sunday, February 01, 2009
Cut mail delivery, and plan to get rid of it entirely
The mail has become a far vaster and more wasteful wasteland than television ever has been. Apart from occasional cards around major holidays and bills from the few businesses that have not figured out how to take payment online (mostly small time professionals like doctors and local lawyers), we get nothing in the mail but junk. The United States Postal Service has become a giant conduit for paper that nobody in their right mind should want. By weight, easily 80%, probably more, of the contents of our mail box goes straight to the recycling bin. The mail is a waste of fuel, paper, and taxpayer money, and it allows the continuation of outmoded business practices that we should have shot in the head years ago.
It will therefore not surprise you that I absolutely support the Postmaster General's proposal to cut mail delivery to five days per week. It should be combined with a long-term plan, ten years at least, to wind down the United States Postal Service and put an end to ordinary mail delivery. That should be particularly easy if the stimulus pork roast bill gets signed into law with the money to make the intertubes accessible to poor people. If that is going to be anything other than a subsidy to the telecom and tech industries, we need to get some cost synergies out of the deal. Get the net built, and then tell people that the USPS will be gone by 2025 at the latest, sooner if possible. If you believe that you will live that long and do not yet handle your financial transactions and other important matters online, you have plenty of time to adjust.
9 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Sun Feb 01, 11:09:00 AM:
WOAH!!! Hold the phone here!!!
The US Government, in all it's majesty, can't even make the transition from analogue to digital television without issuing "credits" to purchase a simple A-D coverter that anybody who owns a TV should be able to afford.
Meanwhile, the technological "expertise" to actually hook up the A-D converter seems to be above the heads of many of the fine educational products of our No-Child-Left-Behind generation.
Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, the utter chaos that would result from dropping the analogue mail service by 2025.
We sould get to buy everybody a computer, train them to use it...securely, fix it when it breaks down, upgrade it, maintain the software (something that apparently Google can't even do reliably), maintain the router, make the power grid reliable...etc., etc., etc...ad infinitum.
It would be worse than Medicare, Social Security and "Stimulus" all rolled into one hugh debacle.
Maybe by 2125...if we're lucky!!!
By 
, at
Sun Feb 01, 11:38:00 AM:
I don't pay bills electronically. I asked my banker if there was a typo on the bill, and a $350 bill became $35K, would he pay it? He said yup. He said that's why he doesn't like paying electronically and doesn't encourage people to use it. And what's to stop a company on the verge of going belly up doing just that? Have seen theft by deception before from firms about to go under. You want to give strangers a blank check to your checking account, that's fine. Way too risky for an old codger like me. 5 day mail delivery? No problem with that. USPS is still the cheapest way to send many packages. I have no problems with their service on packages.
By Cas, at
Sun Feb 01, 02:18:00 PM:
There is no way that we are going to be able to justify eliminating home mail delivery completely in 10 years. I completely agree that we should cut the cost & expense of 6-day a week delivery; every other day would suffice for me. But some things will still require a "paper trail" that can only come through the mail...
By , at
Sun Feb 01, 03:09:00 PM:
Re Cas: I agree with that. Cut the delivery staff in half. Have them work two routes on alternating days.
By , at
Sun Feb 01, 08:08:00 PM:
Tigerhawk, my late father, God bless his soul, found his PC and dial-up connection to be a Godsend during his declining years. Something to intrigue and frustrate him, link up with old buddies by email, and have fun learning Quicken and online bill paying. It took his mind off his physical disabilities and kept him engaged with the world.
When he died, poor Mother was terrified of the computer and not really understanding of all her late husband had moved from mail to online bill paying. Lucky local son got to reverse engineer everything.
Some payments were automatic bank debits, others required logging in and authorizing a transfer. Do you think those user names and passwords were well organized and easy to find? Guess again.
For months we had payments exiting bank accounts with no documentation, and threatened cutoff of services from providers we could not contact to arrange payment because there was no correspondence or paper bills with any kind of contact information.
It took eight months to make contact with credit card companies, utilities, and other creditors to get bills switched back to US mail so Mother could know what was up, and we caught a few bogus bank debits that we had to get the state Attorney General office involved to get refunds.
It is easy to lose track of the fact that many, many people in this country are not prime candidates for switching all transactions to the online world.
Dan
By , at
Sun Feb 01, 09:25:00 PM:
why not just raise the cost of sending junk mail?
By TourPro, at
Mon Feb 02, 07:19:00 AM:
The ever increasing cost is raising the price of Junk Mail. That's why we have electronic SPAM. I hate to think of what would happen if the analog system went away, but I'm willing to risk it.
I only use mail for catalogs.
How about every verified US citizen - born or naturalized - being assigned official USA email address? This would be for all official communiques, taxing, democracy (voting, polling, politics 2.0), etc. Of course, everything would forward to Gmail.
By Unknown, at
Mon Feb 02, 05:55:00 PM:
What about items that can't be sent electronically? Just rely on Fed-Ex and other free-market solutions?
A postal service is one of the oldest civilisational institutions.
Seems a bit hasty to do away with it quite yet (at least until we have our matter teleportation devices working).
"The ever increasing cost is raising the price of Junk Mail. That's why we have electronic SPAM."
I think that the email spam would exist anyway, given that it's effectively free to send thousands or millions of emails, meaning that even a 0.01% response rate (or lower) would still generate a profit.
By , at
Mon Feb 02, 08:35:00 PM:
Magazines. Most of my mail is junk or magazines. I subscribe to about 7 magazines (would be more if I had the $$$), and no, websites are not the same.
I like my magazines, and I like getting them for a whole lot less through the mail than at the newsstand.
