Will You Miss The Mail If It Goes Away? Take The Poll And Let Us Know

In 1980, I got a job at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a secretary. The place was fairly standard as far as equipment went – there were IBM Selectrics that we used to type letters and memos on. But there were a few monitors around, connected to boxes. These were computers. They were mysterious and a little scary.

The computers were mostly for the scientists, who did scientist things with them. But my boss (who would later become my second wife) showed me this very cool thing you could do with these computers; if you called up a certain program, you could send an electronic message to someone else. That is, as long as that someone else also had a computer and the same program. But if they did, they would get that message in a matter of seconds.

She called it “email.”

I was immediately hooked. We must have wasted dozens of hours sending little messages back and forth. Oh sure, there were official emails to official people, too, but from the beginning, email has been the platform for sending all kinds of messages to all kinds of people. Including messages that used to get written by hand or typed, put into an envelope, and sent off in the mail.

And therein is the issue today: thanks to the dominance today of email, and online bill pay, and the like, the U.S. Postal Service has announced plans to reduce service. First class mail will no longer be routinely delivered by the next day; instead, it will now take two to three days to get a first class letter.

Does this pose a problem for you? Before you answer, as I would, that it doesn’t, because you do most or all of your correspondence and bill paying on line, think about it. Netflix is great, because I get my movies right away. I like to count on the postal service getting my letters and bills and cards to the right place in a timely fashion. And I like getting mail on Saturday.

These things are likely to stop happening. Plans are being drawn up now to close distribution centers around the country, and that will slow the mail down.

Is this the beginning of the end for one of the oldest institutions in America (Benjamin Franklin was the first U.S. Postmaster)? Will Americans really be ok with the reduction in service, or will they rise up and demand that the venerable institution continue its mission?

What do you think?