The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene A. Del Polito prepared for publication in Direct magazine. The sentiments expressed are the author's and do not necessarily represent the official views of AMMA.
I'm sure you heard the one where a guy walks into a restaurant and asks for a glass of iced tea. When the waiter tells him that the restaurant doesn't serve iced tea because it's not on the menu, the thirsty patron then asks the waiter to bring him a pot of hot tea and a glass filled with ice cubes. When the waiter returned, the patron poured the hot tea over the glass of ice. He then turned to the waiter and said: "There, you now serve iced tea."
Some people life begins and ends with the menu that life lays before them. Any smart restauranteur knows, however, that the menu is only the beginning. If there's something you want that you don't see, ask, and the cook will fix it for you.
This is a smart-headed, customer-driven response to a competitive marketplace and changing consumer demands. Responding in this way, however, doesn't come naturally to an enterprise like the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
The Postal Service, unfortunately, only recently has learned that its marketplace is changing rapidly, that customers no longer want to be satisfied with a fixed menu of services that now exists in the Domestic Mail Classification Schedule, and that its monopoly over the carriage of messages is being rapidly eroded by electronic communication technologies.
For years, the Postal Service's relationship with its customers has been characterized by the behavior evidenced by the waiter in the story above. "Here's what we have. What do you want to buy?." To survive in today's environment, the Postal Service has got to learn how to change its attitude. Rather than telling customers "here's what we have; take it or leave it," the attitude has got to become "what do you need, and can I build it for you?"
For instance, mailers' postal needs are changing with a fast-paced Internet-based economy. "Did my mail get there" should never be a question postal customers should have to ask. Indeed, with all of the whiz-bang electronic communications tools that are (or can be made) available to the Postal Service today, there is absolutely no reason why the Postal Service cannot offer its customers an electronically-based, message-delivery confirmation service. Better yet, if the Postal Service doesn't have such capability, there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go out and build it or buy it.
This is not an invitation for the Postal Service to go off and waste ratepayers' dollars entering e-businesses that already are well served by private sector businesses. Rather, it's simply to encourage it to invest dollars judiciously into the building of an electronic information infrastructure that will enhance the value of its core hard-copy messaging business.
One postal vendor I know has the perfect way of addressing the needs of his customers when they pose problems that that demand innovative solution. He simply says "we can do that," and then he goes out and gets it done. If the Postal Service expects to survive in today's marketplace, it needs to get that attitude.