Save the U.S. Postal Service!

Last week we were studying bureaucracies in my American government course. We discuss the various types of bureaucratic organizations, including government corporations. There's really not that many, but the United States Postal Service is certainly the most prominent. As I usually do, I stop while discussing the Post Office to see how students like it. Do they mail letters? Do the ship packages? And if they do, how do they like the service? Of course, the Post Office is on the way out --- or at least, the Post Office that we grew up with, the one that guaranteed mail delivery whether rain, sleet or snow. I hardly check the mail anymore, except to get magazines and academic journals. And some of the household bills still come by mail, and we need to check for those. Other than that, it's mostly junk.

In any case, I looked for a recent article during one of my classes the other day, and didn't really see anything. It was mostly local news stories about communities struggling to keep open their local branches. But it turns out the New York Times has a new article on the Post Office, and perhaps I can use it in class, picking up where we left off last week. See, "The Junking of the Postal Service":

A FEW weeks ago a petition appeared next to the mailboxes in my building’s lobby in Upper Manhattan. It read: “Save Saturday Delivery! ... Save the U.S. Postal Service!” Over the next 24 hours signatures poured onto the sheet of paper.

I will not say whether I signed. But I will tell you what arrived in my mailbox that Saturday: two credit card offers; a Linen Source catalog for someone who used to live in my apartment; a notice of a sale on running shoes; some coupons for 10 percent off on pizza delivery; three promotional letters about colleges; and a bank letter about changing terms on my son’s high-school checking account for 2012.

As junk mail multiplies and the United States Postal Service struggles for financial survival, experts are increasingly asking the question, do Americans need Saturday mail delivery ... or daily mail delivery ... or a state-run postal service at all? Should mail be a guaranteed government service — like primary education — because it is essential to our well-being? Or has this once hallowed institution, like pay phones, outlived its utility?

Continue reading.

There is a case for continuing the Postal Service, but it'll be drastically changed from earlier eras.