It’s been a while since I thought about the history of mail delivery. That any letter ever reached its destination was miraculous in previous centuries, but they did. Generally it was many weeks or months.
The Pony Express changed all that.
From St. Joseph, MO to Sacramento, CA a letter took only 10 days. The first ride was taken on April 2, 1860 and a short 18 months later, it closed down on October 26, 1861, only two days after the transcontinental telegraph lines were established. Then messages could be flashed across the country in a matter of minutes.
Why is this of any relevance? The United States Postal Service is the Pony Express of the 21st century. Faced with a monumental loss of more than 16 billion dollars in 2012 they have improved dramatically in 2013. The predicted loss is for 2013 is less than five billion dollars, not exactly chump change, but still remarkable. Unfortunately, that kind of reduction is unlikely to be sustainable and it’s important to think about the changes that may be in the offing. They are certain to be more earth-shaking than the stabling of the ponies in 1861
Think about our home delivery service from USPS. In the last month, I received about 30 pieces of first class mail; the vast majority was Christmas cards or notices from utility services that my monthly utility fee had been automatically debited from my bank account. That being said, my mailbox was stuffed with advertisements and catalogs from companies from which I had never ordered a single item.
The business plan for catalogue delivery does not require a mastery of economics; the company knows to the penny how much it costs to produce and deliver their product to my mailbox and then match that expense against the revenue produced by catalog sales. It must work, or they wouldn’t keep flooding the mail system with an untold amount of advertising.
Of the countless pages many of us received most never made it into the house but were contributed to the trash, preferably the recycling, container. During the same month, the amount of electronically transmitted correspondence we received was huge. Granted, a lot of it was unsolicited and quickly deleted, but the expense of sending and receiving it was negligible to the individual.
The convenience of shopping online is astounding. In less than a minute one can make a purchase, have it gift wrapped, shipped to the other side of the world and never leave your keyboard. But that’s another issue for the big box retailers and not related to the postal service. It does segue into what is the likely demise of the USPS as it now exists.
Why would anyone choose to send a document by first class mail when even huge files can be sent electronically in less than a minute? The personal letter has a degree of individual attention not found in the blinking icon of email. Another problem with electronic data is security; we certainly have had a wakeup call about data theft and surveillance. There will always be risk but we don’t hear much about train robberies, stage coach or Pony Express theft these days. Security of data transmission will always be a target for the criminally inclined, and it will not stop the torrent of cyber traffic.
Parcel delivery has been taken over by FedEx, UPS, and a host of smaller companies. The USPS has made an effort to keep up, but it’s not likely they will be able to compete.
It seems probable that home delivery will soon be a relic giving way to central stations where mail can be picked up. The impact this will have on direct mail advertising is incalculable but the cost savings will be huge. The loss of jobs by loyal postal workers will be hard to imagine. There are currently over 500,000 career employees, down by 250,000 in the last decade. How to deal with them fairly cannot be overlooked. The only major statistic in the postal service that has increased in the last decade is online revenue and that’s still a tiny percentage of total revenue.
You recall the furor last spring over the discontinuation of Saturday delivery; the idea was quickly discarded. We haven’t heard the last of changes that will happen. We might want to stock up on Anytime Stamps. They will be collector’s items sooner than one might think. Just imagine what a Pony Express saddle would fetch on eBay.
Hayden Hollingsworth
