Pushing Through the Envelope
With global capitalism, everybody’s got to get a piece of the action — including the South African Post Office Ltd., which now seems engaged in a crash course of modernization.
That updating includes the postal service promoting direct mail — something most major postal services around the world rely on to make money but don’t go so far as to advertise. The South African Post Office prints a postmark on letters passing through its system that reads: “Direct Mail — Your Salesman in an Envelope.”
This may seem quaint by U.S. standards, but keep in mind that the South African Post Office has been completely involved in mundane activities like trying to assign a postal address to each South African household — something difficult in a country with lots of remote regions. This is part of an arrangement it’s had with a New Zealand Post/Royal Mail consortium for the past year and a half that is helping to expedite the modernization process.
Commendably, the South African Post Office, which used to serve the apartheid regime, now says it has a policy to use small black-owned businesses as suppliers whenever it can.
