Let me follow-up on my piece yesterday regarding our failure to create a paperless work environment. I just took a brief walk out my front door to open my mailbox and see what the postman had delivered. Let’s see – there is something called “The Flyer” that claims to contain the best local values – a 32 page advertisement that I would never look at, don’t need and always throw in the garbage. A waste of a good tree. Too bad I don’t own a bird in a cage. Next item is a large glossy advertisement telling me all about Verizon Fios. Don’t care – garbage. If I wanted to switch cable companies, I would have researched my best available options online.
There are “Hot” car deals from yet another annoying car dealership. Coupons from Harbor Tools – known for their junk from China. I say buy USA – Craftsman. Another advertisement asking me to “lock in” a price for one year with Direct TV and another large color piece of wasted paper offering to save me $25 on any 4 tire purchase. Don’t need any of it. There is a post card from someplace called the Learning Connection “We produce results!” – voted #1 best tutoring service 6 years in a row. It’s addressed to my wife – a teacher. Finally a letter – actually a form letter that could have been sent to my son via e-mail – it would have received more attention that way. It didn’t look “real”. Nothing for me. Yesterday’s “mail” was similar. This is what the US Postal Service does with 218,000 vehicles – the largest vehicle fleet in the world – and 583,908 workers – working 6 days a week, year round except on Federal (not taken off by normal workers) holiday’s.
Today, it was reported in The Wall St. Journal “Postal officials say the agency, an independent arm of the federal government that is supported mostly by postal fees, has no choice but to downsize as people increasingly click on their computers to communicate and pay bills rather than drop letters in the mailbox. Despite cutting $12 billion in labor costs over the past four years, the postal service expects to face a deficit of between $8 billion and $9 billion in fiscal year 2011, and recently maxed out its $15 billion line of credit with the federal government.”
Based on what I see in the mail, 99% of it is utterly unnecessary – the other 1% can be e-mailed. Parcels and packages can be shipped by FEDEX or UPS. My wife and I have our power bill automatically paid on line every month, yet, the utility still feels the need to stuff an envelope with a statement and pages of dumb suggestions how to save energy and reduce our bill. I don’t know anyone that reads it. In the garbage it goes. State Farm, our insurance company loves to mail us more stuff that we never read. All we need is our car insurance card and we can print that out. Since we’ve been customers of State Farm for over 20 years, all that information should be imbedded on/in our driver licenses. All that data is already on-line with the department of motor vehicles for the State. No paper is really necessary.
Receiving a greeting or Christmas card is quite nice every once in a while, but there are hundreds of services that will e-mail you a nice on-line “card” with music playing and a “celebrity” telling you how special you are, for about the same price as a “real” card with the postage. On-line, you get instant service, so you can sent it right now. You can’t do that with the post office. Groupon and other coupon services sends me whatever coupons I need to my phone. Many times, when I go to the supermarket, the coupon is POP or point of purchase. I might try a different mustard because there is a $.25 cents off coupon next to it attached to the shelf. No need for the post office.
I’m racking my brain here. Why do we need the post office? The answer is we don’t. Racing doesn’t need NASCAR, to go to Mars we don’t need NASA, truck drivers don’t need the ATA and the post office is a concept whose time has long since passed. It’s just another bureaucratic excuse that stands in the way of our society going paperless.
PS/ WSJ’s Jennifer Levitz reports the U.S. Postal Service is expected to announce that nearly 3,700 post offices, mostly in small towns, will be shuttered as first-class mail business has dropped by 28% since 2007. The link to the piece is here USPO/WSJ/LOTR
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