USPS - America's Second Best Idea

I'm taking a break from writing about current news, and I'm not quite ready to write about education again just yet, so this is a weird meandering train of thought for this blog.  It won't be connected to any of the things I normally write about.  It's just a conversation I've been having with myself while out walking.  To be fair, you are reading a blog called "On the Rabbit Trail," so you should expect this occasionally.  So, here is the rabbit trail I have been on this week.

Filmmaker Ken Burns rightly called the National Park System "America's Best Idea."  I completely agree.  I love our country's national parks on a level that might not be normal.    It got me wondering about what America's second best idea might be.  It's bound to be something mundane because it can't compare to the glory of the National Parks system, so you might question my choice (which is fine because these are just my musings anyway), but here it is.  America's second best idea is the United States Postal Service.

It's easy to criticize the post office.  The lines are long.  The people behind the counter are often not friendly.  And of course, in the 1990s, the phrase "going postal" had some pretty terrible connotations.  People also like to use the price of stamps as an indicator that we are being ripped off.  After all, we can all remember when the price of stamps was less than it is now.  A first-class stamp was 13 cents the year I was born, but my first memory of the price of a stamp was when I was 9, and it went from 20 to 22 cents.  They are now 55 cents.  (In a minute, I'm going to make a case for how good a deal that is.)  You may or may not love your mail carrier, so I get why they are an easy target.  When you interact with something every single day, you are going to grow accustomed to it doing things normally, and the errors and flaws will really stand out.

But let's talk about some facts and history.  The postal service dates all the way back to 1775, with Ben Franklin at its head, but since America was not yet a country, it wasn't an official department until 1792.  While we think of it as part of the federal government, it was made an independent agency in 1970 and was required to self-fund, so they don't get any of your tax dollars, and 2006, they were required to prepay health benefits and retirees and had their pricing capped by Congress, a double blow to their budget, which had to that point been mostly balanced.  The USPS employs over half a million people, who have been deemed essential during the pandemic, especially as most of us are doing more online ordering than ever before.  They are exposed to and trusted with more people's stuff than almost any other profession.  In small towns, the post office is a community gathering place, and your mailman is likely a friend or neighbor.  They are obligated to deliver the mail to the remotest of areas, places FedEx, Amazon, and UPS often won't deliver to because it is so unprofitable; so the mail service takes it the rest of the way.  They deliver over a billion prescriptions, many of which are temperature and time-sensitive and must be handled carefully.  This service we mostly ignore and sometimes gripe about is obviously more important than we realize and can't just be replaced by email as has been suggested by some short-sighted people.  Later today, I will be sending a couple of hundred photos to be printed, and they will be delivered to me by mail.  These physical products cannot be sent to me in an email.

During the quarantine, I need to walk outside every day, both for exercise and for mental health and vitamin D.  On school days, I needed a destination that wasn't terribly far and where I wouldn't have to interact with people closely; so I chose the post office.  I wrote notes to my students each day during my office hours and then walked to the post office (a 20-minute walk from my house), where I could simply put the letters in the slot and be back out the door before it had even closed.  Those walks were important to me, but if I were a person who couldn't get to the post office, there is a box in front of my house that is visited by a postal worker six days a week.  I only have to go as far as the end of my driveway to get these letters picked up and sent all over the country.  

As promised, I want to explain why the 55 cent stamp we complain about is the best deal around.  If the postal service didn't exist, and I wanted to get a birthday card, valentine, or letter to someone, I would have to seek out someone who might be willing to take it from my hands to the recipient.  If the recipient was relatively close, I might be able to accomplish that with the goodwill of one friend who was willing to do me a favor.  Let's say, however, I wanted to get it to someone in California.  I might be able to string together favors from friends and friends of friends (or I might not).  For sure, I wouldn't be able to say to someone, "If I give you 55 cents, will you come to pick this card up from my house and deliver it to my friend's house in California in a few days?"  You aren't going to get that deal from anyone other than the USPS.  When the price of gas goes up, they have to drive the same number of miles.  When cold and flu season arrives (to say nothing of the pandemic), they still have to put their hands in the box of every person on their route, handling items that have been licked by strangers.  As Newman so succinctly told Jerry on Seinfeld, "The mail never stops."  Their work is important and goes unnoticed when they are doing it well.  Don't let their ubiquity make them anonymous to you.

Thanks for reading.  Now, go buy some stamps.