The Mail
The movie The Postman, starring Kevin Costner, got broadly dissed when it was released. That was in 1997 and looking at its IMDb Metascore of 29, I think its fair to say that it also hasn’t aged particularly well. Nonetheless, I’m, generally a fan of Costner’s and I really quite like the movie. I think what I like most about the movie is what it says about civilization as we know it. It is, after all, about a post-apocalyptic world, set in the Pacific Northwest, where a survivor impersonates a postal service worker in order to gain entrance and shelter at one of the small city-states that has fortified itself against the ravages of the new ruthless world. The leadership of the city-state is lured to admit this pseudo postman on the promise of reviving the communication links that bind people in a region, a nation or the world at large to one another through the oldest of communication linkages. When our nation was first formed in the late Eighteenth Century. No less than Benjamin Franklin was in charge of the pre-revolutionary postal service in the American colonies from 1753 to 1774. During those years, whatever pathways existed to connect towns one to another were superseded by the creation of The Post Road or Roads that ran from Boston down through the cities in the Mid-Atlantic region. This phenomenon did not only exist in America, these postal roads are also common in Europe and Asia, as well as Canada. Interestingly enough, when the Second Continental Congress authorized a postal service in 1775 and the Articles of Confederation were enacted in 1777, a postal service for the colonies was established, but it wasn’t for another twelve years, until the Constitution was enacted that the government took the right to establish Post Roads as the vehicles for postal transportation. It is fascinating but not so hard to grasp why postal communication is considered so vital to a growing nation.
Over the history of the United States, the postal service has grown and been modified to meet the needs of the times, most recently in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act. Notable changes in the service include the famous Pony Express service that operated for eighteen months from Missouri to California starting in 1860. The agency instituted zip codes in 1963 to streamline the delivery process. The service employs over 500,000 people and generates revenues of almost $80 billion per year. A first class stamp , as much as it has risen over the years, is still only $0.69. Of late, the service has had increasing competition from the likes of FedEx, UPS and DHL. Recently, a news report came out that all of those competitors, including the U.S. Postal Service, have been eclipsed by a 30-year-old start-up by the name of Amazon, specifically its Prime division. The last few times I drove cross-country, I couldn’t help but notice that the most common trucks that can be seen on the intercontinental highway system, all have the Prime swoop and smiling logo on the side. These days on a normal pre-holiday day, we get one delivery from the USPS, perhaps one or two deliveries from UPS and/or FedEx, and about three or four deliveries from Amazon Prime, either in the form of an actual Amazon Prime labeled truck or some third-party driver, paid by Amazon on a piecemeal basis for delivering packages to home. We have yet to get any deliveries from Amazon Prime’s much discussed drone delivery service, but it probably is just a matter of time before I see one hovering over my driveway and choosing to place our delivery on our hilltop in some spot or other.
Every day, Kim is accustomed to stop at the mailbox, indeed she insists on stopping to be sure to check the mailbox, mostly out of habit. The amount of meaningful mail that we receive these days is increasingly minimal. Most of our bills come via email with payments going back either via autopay with direct debit to our checking account or go to a credit card for payment. I would guess that 98% of all the stamps we use these days go to our holiday card list versus any business-related, much less personal mail needs. We are far more likely to go the UPS Store for any package mailing, and even Amazon Prime uses the UPS Store infrastructure for transmitting their errant and return packages. Now a days, mail service, or what the younger generation calls snail mail, is not really a big part of our daily lives like it used to be, much less the importance the service provided the citizens of the country in the centuries gone by.
Mail is just a form of communication and really no more, even though it has been a dominant form of communication for a long time. Verbal communication, including via telephone has already come and gone. Digital communication is now what makes the world go around and it is the medium by which we all operate. It almost seems that we keep the postal service for old time sake at this point. A typical mail delivery usually consists of catalogues, flyers, a few magazines (I think we are down to The New Yorker, Sunset, BMW Owner’s News, Esquire and Forbes, if you don’t count the free come-on magazines that we get), lots of junk mail and an occasional bill or piece of personal mail. Again, like our outgoing mail, perhaps 95% of the incoming mail consists of the holiday cards we get. It is only the most backward of vendors that haven’t gone paperless with their billing. And, as for personal mail, an increasing number of our friends use an email to send holiday greetings. There are still some folks who like the personal touch of sending a card or a note for a birthday or a thank you, but otherwise there is very little that comes through the postal service of any interest.
I will probably look at the daily mail with more interest than it deserves for the rest of my life. Some habits die hard. I feel like my physical inbox is getting followed by my email inbox. The amount of junk that flows through the email inbox is now at level that exceeds 80% versus the items of substance. Obviously that varies based on the inbox or email we are talking about, but even the business email inbox is starting to get some junk by virtue of the LinkedIn crowd that feels the need to solicit business through that channel. I suppose that means that we have moved to the text platform, but even texting has become a source of junk. It is easier to stop that junk flow in the moment by simply not accepting the text, reporting the text or typing “stop”. The system seems to work well for stopping the texts for a day or two, but they pop up like mushrooms after a spring rain. So between junk mail flyers, junk email, junk texts or spam phone calls, it seems that the forces of evil commerce have infiltrated every communication medium that man can create.
I guess we have to go back to dropping by for a visit because unless you count the occasional door-to-door salesman or Jehovah’s Witness, the medium of face-to-face communication remains relatively free of commercial influence. Nevertheless, I will still keep looking in the mail for salvation.