I know a little bit about the United States Postal Service. You see, my father was a mailman. He worked for the USPS for 32 years before he retired, walking a mail route with a leather satchel full of letters, small packages and Montgomery Ward catalogs slung over his shoulder.
When he first started, he worked as a clerk inside the
building, and at the end of his career he drove a vehicle, but most of the time
he walked. He delivered mail to different parts of the city over that period of
time, using his accrued seniority to bid into the better routes when they came
available, but I seem to recall him telling me once that he walked 11 miles a
day. I can’t begin to guess how many miles he walked during 32 years.
Today our mailman drives a Jeep. I see him nearly every day
when I’m walking my dog. He drives up to a house, stops, turns off the motor
and carries mail up to a mailbox on the front porch. He comes back, starts the
vehicle, drives to the next house, stops, turns off the motor and carries mail
up to that house.
He does that for every house on my street. Wash, rinse,
repeat.
Now before you get the wrong idea, I don’t live up a holler
or out in the sticks or down some winding country road. Houses in my
neighborhood are fairly close together, like 50 to 100 feet or so…whatever the
typical frontage would be. In the time it takes the mailman to stop and start
and stop and start and deliver mail to a handful of houses, I can walk the dog
to one end of the street and back, stopping for her to do what dogs do when
they go for a walk.
So how much do you suppose it costs the Postal Service to
buy, maintain and insure just one Jeep vehicle, fill it with gasoline every day or
so and keep it supplied with oil, tires, tire chains for winter and everything
else you need to run a car? Multiply that times the number of mail routes in
the United States and the 227,896 vehicles the Postal Service says it operates and
you have billions and billions of dollars. The cost of fuel alone is more than $1.1
billion a year.
Now compare that to what it used to cost to operate my
father when he carried the mail. I think he got new shoes every year, a small uniform
allowance and probably a rain poncho and a plastic cover for his hat.
Let’s recap…shoes, a couple pairs of pants, some shirts and
a poncho versus specially-built vehicles with the steering wheel on the right-hand
side, plus gasoline, oil, tires, insurance, maintenance, depreciation and replacement
cost after a few years. The Postal Service could save billions of dollars if it
would just put the mailman (or woman) back on his or her feet. Is it any wonder
they’re losing money?
And despite what you hear from our faux-president Donald
Trump, none of that is caused by the Postal Service delivering packages for
Amazon.com.
Here, courtesy of PolitiFact, are some actual facts, not the alternative facts that Trump and his
mouthpiece Sarah Sanders like to throw around:
“The
Postal Service reported a net loss of $2.7 billion for 2017. It has lost $65.1
billion since 2007. Much of the red ink is attributed to a 2006 law mandating
that USPS pre-fund future retirees’ health benefits.
“First-class
mail, the USPS’ biggest source of revenue, also continued to shrink, seeing a
$1.87 billion revenue loss in fiscal year 2017.
“Package
delivery, however, was one of the few bright spots in its latest financial
statement. In 2017, parcels brought in $19.5 billion, or 28 percent of USPS’
annual revenue. At $2.1 billion, packages contributed the largest revenue
increase. Deals with private shippers like Amazon accounted for $7 billion of
the $19.5 billion in revenue.”
Here’s another fact from Wikipedia: The volume of first-class mail
delivered by the Postal Service peaked in 2001 before it started to decline. Volume
dropped by 29% from 1998 to 2008, primarily due to the increasing use of email
and the internet for correspondence and business transactions. In addition,
companies such as FedEx and United Parcel Service increasingly compete with the
USPS by making nationwide deliveries of urgent letters and packages.
The lower volume of mail means the Postal Service takes in
less revenue while still meeting its commitment to deliver every piece of mail to
every single address in America once every day for six days every week.
Finally, there’s the quality of delivery services which in
my mind has suffered in recent years. I’ve always found it funny that UPS can
ship packages basically around the world overnight, but it can take from three
to five days for a birthday card to reach me from my daughter who lives 40
minutes away, or that my mother’s mail routinely was delivered to the wrong
street even though she reported this time and time again. The only thing the
two streets had in common was that both names started with the same letter.
Still, despite its troubles and faults, the Postal Service
delivers more mail to more addresses in a larger geographical area than any
other post in the world. Its web site says it delivers to more than 153 million addresses in
every state, city and town in the country. "Everyone living in the United States
and its territories has access to postal products and services and pays the
same for a First-Class postage stamp regardless of where they live."
Considering that, I guess we should be happy we get any mail
at all.
* * *
For what it’s worth, here are some other interesting statistics
from the USPS web site:
* Operating revenue was $71.4 billion in 2016.
* 153.9 billion pieces of mail were processed and delivered.
* 47% of the world’s mail volume was handled by the Postal Service.
* The USPS has 508,908 career employees and operates 227,896 vehicles, making it one of the largest civilian fleets in the world.
* There are 156.1 million total delivery points nationwide.
* The total amount of tax dollars spent operating the Postal
Service = $0.
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