By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
The legendary Benjamin Franklin was America’s first postmaster general and it’s too bad we can’t bring him back to fix what has happened to his once-proud creation.
By the way, I’m reading good reviews about the streaming movie “Franklin” starring Michael Douglas. It focuses on Franklin’s role as our ambassador to France and how he persuaded the French to help us beat the Brits to become a sovereign nation.
But back to the USPS, which aptly rhymes with “mess”.
Thanks to good reporting by AARP Magazine, I’m telling you about five more disasters coming our way from those bureaucrats who run what used to be the best postal service in the world.
First, stamp prices are going up and up. A first-class stamp increased to 68 cents in January and is jumping to 73 cents on July 14. Some of us can remember when first class cost a nickel and a postcard was a penny.
In this time when no one trusts anyone else, the USPS is going to require us to prove who we are if we want to forward a piece of mail. And if you are moving your residence, they want the form at least 90 days in advance.
I’m giddy about the four new stamp designs coming out this year. I’m sure folks will clamor to buy sheets honoring Dungeons and Dragons, former UCLA coach John Wooden, summer carnivals, and artist-photographer Ansel Adams.
The USPS predicted it would lose $4.5 billion in fiscal 2023 but actually reported a net loss of $6.5 billion, but this year they’re estimating the red ink figure will only be $6.3 billion. And total mail and package volume is projected to be 107.2 billion pieces, down only 7.7 percent year over last year.
And the nutty policy of trying to compete with UPS and FedEx in package delivery should result in higher volume, no doubt due to that snappy new name, USPS Ground Advantage, said to be cheaper and faster than UPS and FedEx. Hah!
So, what do you do when you’re drowning in red ink, you spend hundreds of millions more on “Delivering for America”, by consolidating 19,000 delivery centers into new, larger and more centrally located sorting and delivery centers. Wow, six of them are already up and running.
But the biggest farce of all is the assurance from USPS that no local post offices will be closed or services reduced. Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com.
