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Weird Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 2:35 pm

Dear USPS, We’ll Miss Saturday Delivery, But Mostly We’re Sorry the Internet is Killing You Slowly

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Look, we’re all in favor of progress here at Geekosystem. We’re scientifically inclined folk who believe that most technological development is, ultimately, for the good, and to be celebrated. That doesn’t mean immune to nostalgia. For instance, we’re going to miss the United States Postal Service, which continued it’s death throes today, announcing that it would cancel mail delivery on Saturdays. While this doesn’t come as a surprise — USPS has been warning for some time that steps like this one were in the offing — we’re just going to miss the post office being a thing, which it won’t be in, at this rate… I dunno, five years seems like a good over/under. We’re in mourning, and also taking all bets.

There was a time that every a stamped envelope was the way every letter was sent, every bill was paid, and every advertisement for penis-enlarging pills was delivered to homes across our fine nation. In those days, we needed post offices pretty much all over the damn place, because otherwise nobody would ever know how Aunt Dottie’s health was or pay Con Ed or send away for penis-enlarging pills, which back in those days really worked.*

Unfortunately, that time was about a trillion years ago. Now, advertisements for wang enhancers go to our spam folder, Con Ed and Netflix siphon their monthly due directly out of our bank accounts,  and  Aunt Dottie won’t shut up about her goiter on Facebook, meaning that unless you need to send a package to someone, there is very little compelling reason to use the post office. Oh, and also if you need to send a package, there is almost no chance you’re using the post office, so there’s that.

This makes me sad. I’m the product of a childhood spent waiting four to six weeks for delivery of collectibles earned with cereal box tops or birthday cards from far flung relatives, of swinging open mailboxes looking for new issues of Ranger Rick and later The Nation, and yes, of none too proud moments intercepting less than stellar report cards. I realize that this is all fairly standard issue nostalgia, but it’s mine, and it’s genuine, and I own it, as nostalgia is the hard won right of anyone who finds that they, too, are becoming old.

That’s not too say that things shouldn’t change. Of course they should. We live in a world that needs a post office less and less. Billing has moved nearly entirely online, as has banking. Letter writing has been replaced by Facebook messaging, and UPS and Fed Ex dominate the world of package delivery, and the best response USPS seems to be able to manage is to raise the price of stamps again. It’s the world we’ve built for ourselves, because it’s more efficient and convenient by a sight. But accepting a thing going away doesn’t mean you have to like it, and replacing it with something better shouldn’t keep you from being sad to watch it go.

And go it will. Domestic mail and shipping are continuing a steady decline. Physical mail is increasingly dominated by junk ads that have kept the Service limping along thus far. And cancelling Saturday service — for letters, as packages will still be delivered, confusingly — won’t be enough to save the Postal Service — not in the way we think of it by the way. What that means for how we get our mail — especially for customers in hard to get to rural areas, where routes are likely to face more cutes in an effort to trim budgets — remains to be seen. But it won’t be the post office we grew up with. That’s the way that things should work, and it’s also kind of a bummer.

In closing, I offer a modest proposal — write a letter to somebody today. Not an email? An honest to goodness physical letter, written in ink, on a piece of paper we had to kill a bazillion tress to make. The person you reach out to will appreciate it. Your local post office will appreciate it. Heck, you might even find something to appreciate about it.

Just don’t expect it to arrive on a Saturday.

(via WSJ)

Relevant to your interests

*Nope, not really.

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  • volcrush

    see no problem of them cutting down to 3 day a week except for priority mail.

  • Enthusiast

    I had to fax some paperwork recently and the line was busy every time I tried to send it, so I decided to mail it. I had to dig out my envelopes and stamps which were in the same boxes in the garage that they were in since we moved. I peeled the second stamp in my pack of Forever stamps that I bought in 2003 and sent that puppy off knowing that in 4 days, they’d get the paperwork that would have taken less than a second to transmit via email if they weren’t so antiquated that they needed actual paper documents.

    The postal service stopped being relevant about a decade ago. Nostalgia isn’t worth the $16,000,000,000 they lost last year.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1509070894 Heather Anderson

    You have pretty much summed up exactly how I feel. Nostalgia sucks sometimes.

  • Jack Bond

    I say good riddance. The sooner we chop off the tumor that is the USPS, the sooner UPS and FedEx can return the USPS share of the economy to the private sector.

  • Nikki

    Man, I send snail mail all the time. I think it’s fun.

  • Paul Johnson

    They’d actually less expensive than the US Highway System in terms of cost (we are talking infrastructure, and constitutionally required infrastructure at that, when we’re talking Postal Service, after all) if the Republicans hadn’t required the Postal Service to save for pensions of Postal Service employees that haven’t even been born yet. Seriously, that’s the big cost: The GOP is trying to kill the benefits of doing some seriously back-breaking, time-sensitive work, by requiring the Postal Service to save up money in advance for the benefits and retirements packages for every employee they currently or will have for the next 75 years.

    I worked briefly for the USPS doing route delivery from a distribution center to roughly 15% of the post offices in my state. Approximately 500 miles, plus loading and unloading. Ever move using a Ryder truck by yourself without help? Multiply that by about 12, and do it every day, and you get an idea of what people like me have done for generations to get the mail through. It’s hard, dirty, thankless work that would probably get compensated better in the private sector, and yet most of my comrades at the postal service would show up every day, without fail, with a smile and a can-do attitude.

    The internet is not killing the postal service. Until every online store starts building out their own nationwide infrastructure to deliver stuff you order to you themselves, the Internet is no threat to the Postal Service. Politicians saying that we shouldn’t be compensating the hardest working constitutionally-required government employees better than we compensate a high-school dropout at McDonald’s are the real enemy.

  • Paul Johnson

    Good luck getting enough state legislatures on board to amend the US Constitution to do that. The USPS is constitutionally required.

  • Paul Johnson

    Ever order something online?

  • http://twitter.com/kaitzi K G

    I don’t care that the USPS is going out of business. In the last three years, EVERY interaction I’ve had with them has been terrible. In the last year, I’ve only done business with them because another party demanded it. If that hadn’t been the case I would have avoided it altogether. If the USPS and money orders weren’t present, maybe the other party would have allowed faxes, emails, and direct fund deposits….

    The USPS stands for something amazing. But the way it’s being run right now? It’s shit, and I don’t care it’s going under.