Could your mailman soon be obsolete?

By Mandi Gosling
May 12th, 2011
Section: Opinions - Question of the Day

The U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday more than $2.5 billion in losses for the first three months of this year. The financial woes of the agency are adding up despite cutting 130,000 jobs over the past three years. USPS officials said the agency soon would be forced to default on loan payments due the federal government unless Congress approves proposed changes to mail service and retirement benefits for postal workers.

The culprit, of course, is email. Just from January to March, clicking send helped eliminate more than one billion pieces of first class mail. Authorities also attribute the losses to the lack of direct mail marketing because of the slow economy. High gas prices are also taking their toll on our struggling national mail service.

To bring it back to financial solvency, USPS officials want to eliminate Saturday delivery service, which they say could save more than $3 billion a year. They also want permission to not pay the more than $5 billion in health care benefits it owes annually to a fund for future retirees.

If we relied on private delivery companies like FedEx and UPS to pick up difference, could we do away with the national postal service altogether at some point in the future?

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  • Jason

     All the new rules they come up with to justify their job.  Lets make the carriers drive 5 miles to deliver a letter that was missorted in the mail.  That dental appointment reminder cant wait until tomarrow.  Following us around waiting for us to make a mistake.  Checking through our cases everyday.  Just micromanaged to death cause they have nothing to do. 

  • 20 yr carrier

    the postal service is ran by people with there heads up their butts.the waste of money is ridiculus.to many chiefs .

  • http://www.wrapmail.com wrapman

    In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one
    should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send
    from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has
    developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.

    The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all
    businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails
    can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and
    cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research.

    WrapMail can also be used to create personal email stationary
    based on their social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace) hobbies,
    interests etc for anyone’s personal email.

    Wrapmail is available for free at
    http://www.wrapmail.com
    and wrapped emails arrive with no red x!

  • http://www.rugsinternational.net Rugs

    The Postmaster General said this is the first round of cuts
    and the rest should be completed by March 2012.

    “My use of the U.S. mail is set considerably from where
    it was modify honorable quintet life ago, but you definitely cut 70 proportion
    of the communication out in the last 20 years,” said John Recznik