For years, the USPS had complained that it was supposed to operate like a business even though it had to submit every proposed rate increase to the Postal Rate Commission for approval, a process that would drag on for more than a year. The USPS couldn’t offer discounts to the large companies, as UPS and FedEx did.
In 2006 the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, allowing the USPS to raise its rates without the commission’s approval and negotiate special deals for packages. But the new law strictly limited the USPS’s mission to “the delivery of letters, printed matter, or mailable packages.” In other words, the postal service was now legally forbidden to sell neckties in post offices, buy a check processing company, or create an e-mail service.
The law also required the USPS to make annual payments of more than $5 billion a year for the next decade to build a fund to pay for the health care of its future retirees. For some former postal service executives, it was a surreal moment. Essentially, Congress was making the postal service pay in advance for costs it wouldn’t have to cover for decades. But the Internet had finally made the future of the USPS uncertain, so the elected officials wanted to make sure there was money in the bank no matter what.
The collapse of the global economy in 2008 did not spare the postal service, which lost more than a fifth of its volume in four years. The great migration to electronic bill paying finally occurred as businesses tried to save money in the recession, which also ravaged the junk mail industry. It seemed as if everybody in the mailing business was in pain. Hallmark shuttered greeting card plants and shed employees. Shares of Pitney Bowes, the postage-meter manufacturer, plunged.
Three decades after E-COM’s demise, the USPS is still trying to create futuristic mail services, although it’s doing so cautiously because of funding constraints and the age-old fear of outside opposition. There’s a USPS app that allows people to see what’s on the way and when it should arrive. But unlike some European mail users, Americans won’t be able to use the app to decline delivery of catalogs and pizza parlor circulars. Another service developed by the USPS would allow users to order a single bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer online and have it delivered. The only problem? It can’t offer alcohol delivery without the approval of Congress.
The debate in Washington, meanwhile, focuses more on cutting services than the future of the mail. The USPS looks just like other pre-digital behemoths that came too late to the Internet. But if anything, perhaps the post office’s biggest blunder was trying to embrace electronic mail too soon.
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