U.S. Without the P.S.? Unthinkable! (Wanna Bet?)
In the days of Augustus, none but a scant few visionaries could imagine a world without the Roman Empire. Yet despite the soothsayers’ inability to convince others of such a possibility, this indeed came to pass.
Today, there are those who can’t envision an America without the U.S. Postal Service. Want to lay odds on this one?
Simply because something has never been doesn’t mean it could never be. In fact, there’s more than ample information these days that presages the demise of the postal service.
For the last two postal accounting periods (each about four weeks long), USPS data shows a pattern of virtually zero growth in first class mail volume and barely more than 3% annual growth in Standard A (advertising) mail volume. For an organization that’s still some 800,000 people strong, with a payroll that grows as the work force bursts at the seams, the prospect of no growth in mail volume is a recipe for disaster.
Even so, there’s still a belief within the postal service that the collapse of the USPS is no more likely than, well…the fall of communism. (Oh dear! That’s already happened too!) Letter carriers, postal clerks and mail handlers aplenty think that all this talk of the loss of mail to the Internet is just a ruse by postal management or wild-eyed idealogues to put the screws to postal workers.
Of course, the people who should know better haven’t been doing much to make sure their constituents are better informed. The leadership of several postal employee organizations (labor and management alike) have done something less than a sterling job of explaining the realities of a changing technological and communications marketplace to their dues-paying members. Instead, they continue to pander to the sloganeering of yesteryear: “More! More!”
But hey, why listen to me? I’m just a harbinger of a time of uncertainty and trouble that can be dismissed just as easily as the prediction of the fall of Rome.
