"The Association for
Postal Commerce"
The following is a postal perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito for publication in Direct magazine.
Ever heard of the legend of Superman? Of course, everyone has. Ask anyone who has ever read a Superman comic book, and they probably can tell you how Superman was sent to Earth by devoted, scientist parents who predicted a planetary cataclysm that was pooh-poohed by the eminent gray-hairs of the planet Krypton. Well, as the story goes, Superman's father, Jor-El, was right on the money with this prediction of Krypton's demise, and sent his infant son hurtling earthward in a rocket that saved him from an untimely end.
At the last postal oversight hearing, the General Accounting Office (GAO) shared a piece of information that have had the gray-hairs of the pre- and post-reorganization postal community in a snit. GAO recounted the findings of a study that had been conducted for the U.S. Postal Service by the very same team that has been studying and predicting the course of mail volumes over these many years. These volume predictions, over time, have proven to be 99.1% accurate, which is quite a track record.
GAO told the House postal oversight committee that "an era was coming to an end." The days of annual increases in First-Class Mail volume, which had always been taken as a given by postal afficionados, was about to come to an end. First-Class Mail volume, it said, would reach its zenith in the year 2002, but absolute First-Class Mail volume would decline at an annual rate of three percent for every year thereafter. By any thinking person's reckoning, that was an historic prediction--a real "blockbuster."
GAO noted that the cause of this sea-change was the increasingly competitive in which the Postal Service was going to have to find its way. The long-predicted impact of electronic communication technology upon the most vital core of the Postal Service's mail business, the congressional watchdog said, was about to manifested.
Such a prediction, however, has apparently been more than some people can bear. The first impulse of the House postal subcommittee's minority was to question GAO regarding the validity of its future mail volume numbers. This, quite understandably, has also been the knee-jerk reaction of the elders of the Washington postal subculture. "Puh-lease!! An end to the postal world as we've always known it? That's really too much to bear."
I'm sure GAO knows all too well how Jor-El must have felt when he predicted the demise of the planet Krypton. Despite the disbelief, the pooh-poohing does not change the reality that a crisis is in the making.
The same is true of the Postal Service. Sure, a fiscal cataclysm is more than some people can bear, let alone imagine. Nonetheless, the realities of today's electronic communications marketplace will overwhelm the Postal Service as we know it today unless more sober minds lead the way.