The United States Postal Service is a big, slow, bureaucratic mess. It will never compete with the likes of FedEx or UPS. In its defense, the USPS is the only delivery service that has to go to every single address in the country every day (the others only go to addresses where they have pickups or deliveries). Imagine driving 90 miles to a house in the middle of Montana just to find out they have no outgoing mail, then turning around and driving 90 miles back. Somehow, in spite of this, they have managed to keep their less-than-stellar service affordable.
The only logical reason I can think of to keep them going is the handwritten letter and card. I have dresser drawers full of them, scrapbooks full of them and I actually get excited when something comes in the mail with my address that someone has taken the time to write, because I know what is inside is likely special. Will future generations have dresser drawers and scrapbooks full of emails and tweets from grandparents, friends and loved ones? No. Email simply doesn’t lend itself to becoming an heirloom – it’s not personal.
CBS Sunday Morning‘s Ben Stein did a commentary on the Postal Service last week that is worth the minute or so it takes to watch. Watch it … and appreciate what we can still do for less than a dollar (if we’ll just take the time to do it).
Related: My mail woman, who has been my mail woman for years, is evil. If any of you remember the movie from the late 1980s called Funny Farm, with Chevy Chase, you’ll remember his ongoing war with his crazy mailman. Throughout the movie, Chevy repeatedly runs down the street chasing the mailman with a baseball bat.
When I pay extra money for expedited delivery of something, she leaves that little slip in my mailbox that says “I tried to deliver your package, but there was no one home. You can claim your package at the Post Office” … even when I’m home to see her put the slip in my mailbox without ever pulling in the driveway. I am certain that Ben Franklin, the founding father of the United States Postal Service, would grab a bat and join me in the chase if he could. You might say he’d “go postal.”
