Post Office

As a letter-writer (who now uses mostly e-mail but never texts) I'm fascinated to read that the Postal service is in debt with more than $15 billion and that it's the nation's second-largest civilian employer--after Walmart!  They're thinking of ending door-to-door delivery, "which costs the Postal Service $100 a year for EACH of 30 million addresses.  (It's interesting to me that there are "only" 30,000,000 addresses, but of course their aren't separate addresses for each of the 300,000,000 people in our country.)  The Obama administration has signed on to ending Saturday delivery.  Others want to end no-layoff provisions in the union contracts, cut 220,000 jobs in the next four yeas, cut 3,700 post offices...They want to relocate post offices so they're in grocery stores, gas stations, etc.  I see that stamps are sold at Office Depot.    The article (by Carolyn Lochhead, by the way)says that letters with stamps plummeted 36 percent in the past five years.  Junk mail is now more prevalent than letter mail.  The PO service will lose $10 billion this year.  So Netflix is one of the few new customers, and it's a big one.  Netflix spends $600 million a year mailing DVDs. If we didn't have Saturday deliveries, I wouldn't have been able to watch (again) The English Patient, a movie I hated when it first came out but am now willing to reconsider.  I also learned that Congress in 2006 prefunded retiree health benefits by 100 percent over 10 years, and that's a rate "that no other entity, public or private, has to achieve."  One of the considerations in closing and/or relocating POs is that they're taking real estate places--more than Starbucks, McDonald's and Walmart combined (in the US).  The Postal Service was built to carry twice the volume of mail that it now delivers, but there's union and political resistance to closing POs.  Some say it's a vital component of our nation's infrastructure because a third of U.S. household don't have a home Internet connection, and a four don't use the Internet at all.  The article says close to the end that the Postal Service still delivers 560 million pieces of mail every day to 150 million addresses six days a week.  I thought they said 30 million.  Oh, and she mentions that it goes by mule to the Havasupai Indians at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, by boat to passing ships in the Detroit Rover, by plane to roadless Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska--but plane is how it arrives most places.  She says that European post offices have moved heavily toward commercialization and privatization.  "Germany's Deutsche Post has just one post office left, and Sweden none."