The Internet has altered many aspects of our American lives in recent years, and now it appears that big changes are on the horizon at the Post Office because of it. The U.S. Postal Service has just asked Congress for permission to stop delivering mail on Saturdays, and few expect the reduction in the services they provide to stop there.
For decades the post office served as a hub for correspondence and package delivery in virtually every neighborhood in America, and for much of that time they were a de facto monopoly in regards to those services. But the rise of UPS and FedEx in recent years cut drastically into their package delivery business, leaving them more or less relegated to delivering the mail. And then along came the World Wide Web…
The proliferation of email, instant messaging and online bill payment have cut deep into the Postal Service’s core business of “snail mail” delivery, resulting in staggering losses that the American taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see many of America’s small rural post offices eventually shut down and mail delivery nationwide cut even further (perhaps back to just 3 or 4 days per week). Such a move would potentially allow the Postal Service to continue serving virtually every household in the country while cutting their workforce by a huge margin.
The last couple of decades have brought changes to our American way of life that few of us could have even imagined just 30 years ago. Some of those changes were for the better, but some were not. And I predict that we’re going to see a lot more changes in the decades to come.
I totally agree with you…