SIFT THIS -- I'm very concerned about the United States Postal System.
I've been concerned since the early 80's when my obsessive romps on local bulletin board systems gave me the idea that, very soon, no one would have the need to send mail via the Post Office. They'd just fire off e-mail. Good-bye, Post Master General.
It was a naïve idea. The world wasn't ready for a global network until the mid-90's when the Internet wave flooded the world with promises
of global communication, information at your fingertips, and easy access to pornography.
My concerned resurfaced one afternoon as I walked into the office to a pile of mail on my chair. Without even looking at the stack, I knew there was nothing that would hold my interest. The PC-Week and InfoWorld articles were already a week old and the invitation to various conferences were merely duplicates of an electronic version that arrived months ago. Suddenly, reading the mail was boring because it was either junk or dated.
What is Post Office going to do? The 32 cent stamp remains in my mind as one of the best deals on the planet, but if everyone is sending their idle chatter via electrons rather those strange blue boxes on the corner, how is the Post Office going to compete? Are they in trouble? Do they care?
I recently number crunched the numbers for the past five years of the Postal Services Operating Statistics and here's some of the tidbits I found:
-- In terms of volume, first class mail (which makes up roughly half of all the revenue of the USPS) saw it's lowest increase in volume in 1997 (just 281 billion more letters than 1996)
-- While the decrease in first class mail may be a fluke, it was countered by the fact that the USPS saw a five-year high in both priority and express mail revenue and volume
-- The volume of priority and express is dwarfed by first class mail, but, remember, the cost of a first class letter is pocket change compared to the staggering prices for priority and express mail (Priority mail averages $3.61/piece and express averages $12.96/piece in 1997)
Microsoft wants your kitchen, the whole thing, read about it in "Windows for your toaster" It's obvious why the Post Office would be giddy about the increases in the higher priced mail services and it only takes a minute of staring at your credit card to understand where those increases are coming from. You're no longer send those weekly 32 cent letters to your sister in Nantucket, you're sending her the next best seller from Amazon.com. While you're drooling over that 40% off, you're forgetting the $3.00 plus $0.95 per book that goes to the your federal Postal Service. Hint: E-Commerce works.
As is typical in businesses which intersect with the Internet, while one facet of a company's profits may fizzle thanks to changes brought on by the 'Net, the affect on other potential revenue stream may very well make up for the loss in spades.
july 6, 1998
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