Back in 1965 first class postage was $0.03 (3 cents!) for one ounce. We also had two deliveries — to the house or business — each week day, plus one on Saturday. You could send a letter in the morning and get an answer back by the afternoon post.
So, we say inflation and more people and more packages being sent now, and email has virtually eliminated the letter, and … and… But here’s the catch to that: 3 cents in 1965 is only 29 cents in 2023 money, but first class postage is now 63 cents, for far less service than we used to get for that 3 cents.
(By the way, 63 cents today is 7 cents in 1965 money. People would have lynched the post office if it had ever charged that much for first class postage! Back then at least. As was demonstrated in [approx] 1968 when postage when to a nickle, and the national outrage made the 6 o’clock news as lead story. Today, we just go with it. Who’s more silly here?)
The post office has been in trouble for decades, really ever since the fax machine was invented. They have utterly failed to innovate, to keep up with the times and the opportunities. All this tech *should* have made the post office’s job so much simpler and many times more efficient.
This suggests mismanagment. At the least.
Technology should have improved the Post Office’s efficiency beyond counting, many times over. It hasn’t. Baring additional data, I would say some one needs to be fired, replaced, or retrained…
The entire post office system is in serious trouble now, too. Though in part that’s the work of a recent former president who didn’t want mail-in ballots to actually get mailed in and properly counted. So he dismantled part of the post office (what ever his reasons, however justifiable in his viewpoint, that was still a major crime against the nation). The postal workers and management tree should have refused those orders. No question about it — that directive (to take the sorting machines and litterally dump them in them in the street) should have been refused. Obeying such stupid and self-serving orders makes all those who followed them complicit to the crime. And it was a crime. The dismantling of one of the most important services the nation has.
Criminal. But this is only the latest nail in the post office’s coffin. The crisis has been building up for decades, since the Fax Machine, if not before.
If the Post Office fails the United States as a whole will grind to a halt. Believe it or not.
Why isn’t this of National Attention? And National Focus to fix? It’s not complicated. It’s really now.
Fix it! Or get out of the way for some one who can. UPS and FedEx are vastly more efficient now than the USPS… and that’s a shame and tragedy.
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