SWCAMBORNE

I send postcards.  Both electronic and actual.  In this day of email, Facebook and Twitter I think that the Post Office (USPS) is a charming but expensive anachronism.  It will be a financial burden to our children and to their children and there is very little we can do about it. Click here to see how many times I’ve written about the problem of the Post Office’s failed business model.

But today I want to tell you about an opportunity.  Look at these two pictures.  The first is what every corner and intersection in rural America used to look like:

The second is what they are starting to look like now:

This makes perfect sense for the USPS it is much more efficient to deliver mail to the combined boxes.  But you ask: Where is the entrepreneurial  opportunity?  The answer is easy: Be the person who buys or just retrieves all of the old battered rural mailboxes, becomes an expert in mailboxes and sells them and knowledge about them on places like eBay.  Mailboxes are going to be a great collectible and you can be in it early.  Will it work? The doors of old urban PO boxes are already a collectible.

Going back to the Post Offices problem for another rant:  The USPS should admit that their business model has changed and that they are in end game.  They should raise the price of First Class Mail (currently $0.46) to a dollar and all of their other prices proportionally.  Additionally they should drop to once a week delivery of all mail that is not paid priority.  These changes would finance the orderly shut down of the service and the financing of the employees pensions and benefits.  All other changes are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Unfortunately it won’t happen because the Congress is an extremely conservative body and opposes all change.

Facebook Privacy vs US Postal Service Privacy

The USPS delivers junk mail (spam)

They come to your house every day.

They will sell your name and address to anyone.

If you move they stalk you and “forward” mail

So why are we so worried about Facebook’s privacy and we accept as normal the US Postal Service’s existing invasion of our privacy?

Postal rates go up January 22 and the post office is being pretty quiet about it.  Perhaps so that you don’t go out and stock up on forever stamps.  Perhaps because nobody mails anything anymore so people don’t care.  Details on the USPS web site

Highlights of the new single-piece First-Class Mail pricing, effective Jan. 22, 2012, include:

Letters (1 oz.) – 1-cent increase to 45 cents

Letters additional ounces – unchanged at 20 cents

Postcards – 3-cent increase to 32 cents

Letters to Canada or Mexico (1 oz.) – 5-cent increase to 85 cents.

Letters to other international destinations – 7-cent increase to $1.05

This is not going to solve the post offices deficit problem.  Part of their agreement with the Federal Govt is that in exchange for the first class mail monopoly they cannot increase prices more than inflation and they can’t cut service.  Of course this formula won’t work as the volume shrinks because of email and the internet. Governments resistance to new technologies and the changes that they cause tend to exacerbate the problems.  Please let old things die or change.  Unfortunately:

The USPS is the Amtrak of our children’s generation.

This is a Public Service announcement:

Postage rates in the USA go up on May 11, 2009

Click here to go to the USPS site for details

First class postage is going up two cents to 44 cents and a domestic postcard is going up a penny.  The killer for me is that overseas postcards are now 98 cents each.

But all of the rate increases in the world won’t save the postal service.

Read my old post on why the Post Office is doomed.

It is not because they are doing a bad job.  It is because technology has changed.  The USPS will be the Amtrac of our childrens generation.

A young admirer with a postcard

Postcards are the lp record of the future

they will vanish in his lifetime

The record player is dead and it’s replacement the CD is dying because the IPod is a better delivery system.  We adjusted to the low-cost high value technology.  And we will adjust to the end of regular mail delivery.  The countries that do it the fastest will gain a slight competitive advantage.

The postal service is in trouble.  I’ve written about it before. The internet and email have critically wounded their revenue stream.  The USPS will be the Amtrak of our children’s generation.  But they are trying to survive and this photo shows an example of there willingness to experiment:

A mobile post office on a downtown streeet in Los Angeles.  Good Idea!  But it won’t stop the decrease in mail.  Eventually there will be so little volume that even the media and the politicians will notice.  But you will be able to say “I knew that.” because you read it here first.

The USPS (United States Post Office) is giving away free cards with postage.

http://www.poweroftheletter.com/

At the site click on the free card link.  I love free postcards and this is almost as good.

postcards in Bisbee

The free cards are a joint marketing effort of the USPS and HBO to promote a miniseries on John Adams.

The USPS’s idea is to get people to regain the habit of sending cards and letters.  But there is a major problem.  Fifty years ago a postcard was the least expensive, fastest and most convenient way that you could let someone in another town know what was going on.  Now it is fifth on the list in terms of price and convenience.  Now Phones, Fax, Email and Text Messaging are all cheaper, faster and easier.

The personal letter and the postcard are doomed. 

I say this as a person who sends about 150 postcards a month.  I honor the nostalgia of the postcard and wish that we could keep them alive, but they are as doomed as quill pens and velum scrolls.  No amount of effort can keep the first class letter a big part of the post office and without it the post office is doomed.  It will become in the next fifty years another Amtrak.  An expensive anachronism that is to out of date to save and to powerful to kill.  It will become for a future generation the poster-child for all that is wrong with government run programs.

In the meantime  go to the link above get a free card and send it to me.

Before our trip to Santa Fe we heard an advertisement by the USPS (formerly the Post Office) about how you could go online and forward your mail. No muss no fuss. So we tried it and we have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that everybody at the post office was really helpful. All of the staff were friendly and genuinely cared about our mail.

The bad news is that the system for forwarding mail is archaic, slow and failed miserably.

On about September 25 we put in a forwarding notice at our local post office. It turns out that it couldn’t be done online. We asked that the mail be forwarded to our address in Santa Fe for all of October. On the first of October Pete our local mail carrier stopped delivering to our house. It was more than a week before any of the mail started arriving in Santa Fe and a week after that before we started to get any of it. The second weeks delay was a result of our not having the key to the USPS mail delivery box at our rental house. After that we got some first class mail but not all of it and none of our magazines.

About mid October we decided to cancel the forwarding order and have our house sitter vet the mail and forward the important stuff. Every attempt we made failed. We failed at the Santa Fe Post Office and at the Pasadena Post Office. We filled out three forms and even got an acknowledgement. But the mail kept going into postal purgatory.
A few days after we got home we talked to Pete, our carrier. Yes he had two tubs of mail for us and he would bring it tomorrow. And he did.

My conclusion is that the people at the post office are very good at their jobs and they care a lot about the mail but the systems aren’t very good. The postal workers know this so they build alternative back door solutions to get the mail delivered.

My recommendation is that you get to know your carrier and be sure to communicate directly with them and don’t believe the ads.

There is confusion about the term: “free postcard.”

Free in this context means given to you but might included a requirement to have patronized the giver. Many hotels for instance give free postcards but they are in the rooms so they have an implied caveat “free postcard with the purchase of a room.” These are still free by our definition.

But what is a postcard? For the purposes of this blog a postcard must be:

1. Within the size parameters stipulated by the USPS. So that it can be sent at the postcard rate.
Postcard Rate Dimensions:
- Minimum: 3-1/2 inches high by 5 inches long by 0.007 inch thick.
- Maximum: 4-1/4 inches high by 6 inches long by 0.016 inch thick.

This one is to large:

This one is just right:

2. And have a writable area on the back left that is at least 25% of the message side of the reverse.

3. And be available for more than just a moment.

So most of the Art exhibit opening cards fail tests two and three.  An advertising card could easily qualify and here is a picture of one that does:

Even Libertarians have rules.

Having said all that I’ll repeat postcards are an excellent anachronism for staying in touch, for giving a little bit of pleasure and for promoting a product or service.  If they also meet the above rules it is even more excellent.

Wouldn’t you like to get this postcard.  You would know the person who sent it had fun acquiring it and if you ever got to Chicago you might be tempted to give O’Tooles a try.