USPS

Hi Everyone,

For a couple of years now I have been reading and hearing about how unprofitable the United States Postal Service has become. Because the USPS does not receive any taxpayer assistance, the USPS must be run like any other business. Being profitable is of the utmost importance or so you would think.

The decrease in USPS revenues is not a unforeseen occurrence. More and more people are paying bills on line. Less and less people actually write letters to friends etc. And when was the last time that you ordered something from a company that was delivered to you via the USPS? I can't remember any company using the USPS instead of UPS or FedEx or even the old DHL. So with at least those problems facing the USPS, you would think that they must be running it as efficiently as possible? Yea right! Due to the fact the we do not go to our local post office very often any more, I was surprised at what I found missing from ours.

For as long as I can remember, post offices always had at least 2 mail slots in which to mail your letters and bills etc. There was always a slot for out-of-town mail and one for in-town mail. Well lo and behold, when I visited my post office, the slot for in-town mail was permanently, covered over. All mail, both in-town and out-of-town mail went onto the one slot. When our daughter recently mailed some thank you notes, including some local ones, one of the local notes was returned due to an incorrect address. What surprised me was that the USPS postmark was from a city over 30 miles away. What? That meant that the locally addressed mail that she mailed from our local post office was driven 30 miles away, sorted at some USPS sorting location and driven back another 30 miles. Let me think about that one for a moment........ I know that no one really uses snail mail for many things, but just bear with me for a second; in order to mail say an invitation to a friend in the same town that we live in, it has to travel 60 miles instead of 2-3 miles. Can someone please tell me where the common sense is in doing it the USPS way? Oh yea, there is no common sense involved here. I just don't get why the USPS doesn't see the problem. To me the no brainer, common sense solution is to bring back the 2 mail slots. But I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Til next week.

Peter