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A few weeks ago, Postmaster General John Potter (no relation to Colonel) revealed that the U.S. Post Office was thinking about eliminating Saturday delivery of mail, or, in the case of most Americans, Netflix and junk mail. Most Americans think that cutting back delivery days would be fine, according to a Rasmussen Poll, in which 50% also said they'd prefer cutting days to funding budget shortfalls with tax dollars.
The post office, according to Potter, projects a ten-year shortfall of $238 billion, apparently because most people keep those unwatched Netflix DVDs instead of mailing them back in a timely fashion in order to get new DVDs that will be unwatched too. So much for the idea that impatient movie fans will save old fashioned mail delivery. That leaves junk mail as the number-one delivery item and, even so, nearly 13 percent or 25 billion fewer items were delivered last year.
Any proposal to cut delivery days will have to be approved by Congress. Which should take, oh, about three years, a reconciliation vote and four staged tea-party protests complete with an effigy of Ben Franklin. Campaign 2012 is shaping up nicely: candidates will cite Mayan predictions of the End of World, evidence that World of Warcraft harms kids and arguments that mail delivery shouldn't be run by the government. Health insurance companies will lobby for direct mail taxpayer subsidies --how else will they market to citizens with mandated coverage?
Potter estimates that cutting Saturday deliveries would save about $40 million a year. The postal workers, I mean the post office workers union, is opposed to Saturday cutbacks. The last time there was a cutback in delivery days was 1913, when Sunday deliveries were stopped. That same year, Western Union figured out how to transmit eight messages simultaneously over a single telegraph wire (four in each direction). In 1957, Saturday was eliminated from delivery service, but after a one-day trial and much public outcry, Congress changed its mind. Back then Congress knew how to enact legislation quickly. They actually read the bills they voted on.
Meanwhile more Americans will be texting, Tiger may be still be sexting and email volume will go down by 13 percent as spammers switch to Twitter. Globally, more people have mobile phone service today than fixed-line phone service, and accordingly by the end of the year more people will access email and the Internet via mobile phones than anywhere else. Your access to information is truly mobile. But most Americans still need Saturday mail so that they can receive credit card offers six days a week.
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