Going Postal...or Postal Gone?

One of America's enduring institutions -- however great or flawed you feel it may be -- is the U.S. Postal Service.

For more than two centuries, our system of moving mail around has served the country well. From the Great Postmaster, Ben Franklin, to the Pony Express, mail delivery has been an important part of our lives and history.

But, as the song says, "The times they are a changin'."

Past tense: they've changed.

Unfortunately, the postal system hasn't been able to keep up. Private delivery services (like UPS and FedEx), new technologies (the web/email), and skyrocketing employment costs have made the USPS a major money hole. Each year, the postal folks post their losses...which are in the billions.

The service's unsustainable course was the subject of Congressional testimony this week and the outlook is bleak. Current plans for trying to save the system include ending Saturday deliveries, closing post offices and laying off -- perhaps -- more than 100,000 workers.

Even the White House is mulling over ways to try and save the USPS.

Megan McArdle, editor at The Atlantic, points out that the USPS, the White House and others with good intentions might very well be hamstrung in their efforts by Congress: “Congress has given the Post Office two incompatible mandates. It is to make money like a business . . . but it is not to have any of the freedom that businesses have to, say, close branch offices, cut its delivery area, or change delivery schedules. This is, to put it mildly, lunatic.”

It's not "mildly lunatic." It's straight up crazy.

The prediction here: the USPS will be trimmed (service, employees and more) but the federal government will provide a bailout. Let's face it, as much as we love the efficiency and speed of companies like UPS and FedEx, we do love our relatively cheaper and fairly reliable snail mail. And as many from one particular political party in Washington, D.C., know, adding any additional numbers to the current unemployment situation mean fewer votes.

Putting their stamp on it...

The U.S. Postal Service is an easy target -- and an especially tempting target for proponents of the small-government, free market approach to basic services.

Time and time again, the USPS comes under fire for everything from its predictable billion-dollar deficits, to the ground it's losing to new communications technologies, to the market share it's lost to competitors in the private sector.

It also regularly takes hits for mistakes (like the one above) that serve to make jokes easier to write and eyebrows easier to raise.

According to the New York Times, "The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas."

Time to call in an expert?

"You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free," the NYT story goes on to say. "Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week. The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty 'forever' stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists."

So, I wonder how the USPS will rectify this error?

“'We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,' said Roy Betts, a spokesman, in the NYT story. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is 're-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.'”

Yes, go with that...