TURNING A POSTAL CROSSROAD INTO A DEAD-END

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito, which was prepared for Direct magazine. The opinions expressed are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Association for Postal Commerce.

I've said this so many times, even I'm tired of saying it. "The Postal Service is at a crossroads." The postal Governors know it. The House postal subcommittee chairman knows it. Senior postal management knows it. Then why do others within the postal bureaucracy continue to erect barriers to dissuade mailers from investing any further confidence in a rules-bound bureaucracy that seems hell-bent on bringing the Postal Service to its knees?

Here's a case in point. The last thing a struggling Postal Service needs is to raise rates to levels that convince even casual observers that it has no intention of ever operating within the bounds of general price inflation. Instead of a redux of 1997's relatively modest postal rate increases, the Postal Service's postal rate architects propose raising price-sensitive commercial mail at rates that are double and triple inflation.

Here's another. At a time when the Postal Service should be bending over backwards to meet businesses' changing needs by rationally applying mail eligibility rules, the Postal Service's mail classification gurus rigidly adhere to an interpretation of postal rules that engender for the Postal Service the kind of affection usually reserved for the tax-man. To make matters worse, rather than putting the development of new, value-enhanced mail products on a fast track, everything's been put on hold until the present postal rate case is put to bed.

The Postal Service is at a crossroads alright, but why does it persist in erecting barriers of its own making that, in the long-run, will serve only to guarantee that the crossroad turns into a dead-end? Where's the creativity? Where's the awareness and sensitivity to the needs of a changing market? Where's even the slightest evidence of any entrepreneurial sensibility that can help embark the U.S. Postal Service on a course that leads somewhere other than its own institutional demise?

Watching this happen is depressing. Here's an enterprise that has an abundance of business and marketplace opportunities that are squandered by life-draining behaviors that even foreign postal observers find perplexing. It doesn't need to be this way. If such behavior continues to persist, however, then the only rational course of action for businesses that need a well-run "universal" postal system would be to call for turning the whole business of moving "messages, money, and merchandise" to someone who knows that "service" should mean more than merely being a monopoly-protected, governmental enterprise's last name.

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