The next time you drive down the road, force yourself to take a good look at the number of mailboxes you see neatly positioned in front of every home. Whether you’re in Middle America, Metro America, or Rural America, without exception, one of the almost 1 million U.S. Postal Service (“USPS”) employees hand delivers your daily snail mail.
Today it came to me as we were driving down the street. As we passed each residence,I felt like RainMan as I observed every detail of each passing mailbox. Sitting in the passenger seat – the wife was driving – and I was pecking away a message via Twitter on my Blackberry; reviewing unread emails deposited in my Inbox, etc. Suddenly, in a flash of brilliance I thought to myself, “Here’s how we could reduce our reliance on foreign oil: if each of these people with old dented mailboxes had an electronic ‘inbox’ like me, they wouldn’t have to rely on receiving their daily snail-mail via an old clunkin’ gas consuming U.S. Postal Service vehicle!”
The high-tech man that I am; I came home and Googled some research material on the U.S. Postal Service’s public reporting of the organization’s fuel consumption. What I also discovered will make great material content for a future article — the USPS uses way too many acronyms. WAY TOO MANY. If one digs deeper into their syndrome, they will wonder if some of the terminology the USPS uses originated from an acronym. They even abbreviate USPS by calling themselves “The Service”. Again, that’s a topic for future discussion.
In their mission statement, the USPS boasts:
The Postal Service delivers to nearly 148 million delivery points six days a week and provides mailing and shipping services through almost 37,000 postal retail outlets and the usps.com Web site.
All Americans should ask themselves, “WHY”?
Okay, okay, I can already hear the central argument: “not everybody has access to the internet”, but it seems that everybody is becoming pretty serious about the environment, and the price of a gallon of gasoline. If they’re serious about decreasing our dependence on oil, as well as the impact of USPS vehicle emissions polluting the environment, they should seriously consider setting themselves up on electronic mail delivery. For those resistance to the technology, I foresee a potential economy of retail kiosks that will allow individuals to retrieve their email. For that matter, we’ll have postal centers conveniently located throughout the U.S., and if we abolish the service, they could convert most of their facilities to serve the members of the public who do not have access to computers.
In a report published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO – another popular government acronym) entitled U.S. POSTAL SERVICE Vulnerability to Fluctuating Fuel Prices Requires Improved Tracking and Monitoring of Consumption Information, the GAO clearly indicates that the U.S.P.S. is struggling with accuracy in tracking and monitoring their own fuel consumption. In the report, the GAO reports finding “incomplete data for most of its transportation and facility fuel consumption”, and generally describes the over 34,000 postal facilities that are dependent on fuel to support its mail delivery and transportation networks, as well as heat and operate those facilities. It’s obvious in the report that the USPS is not very concerned about measuring their own fuel consumption based on the evaluation by the GAO, and the specific findings by the GAO that “The Service was only able to provide cost data for most fuel categories for 2004, 2005, and 2006.“ In my opinion, that fact should be enough to upset most tech-resistant Americans to seal their mailboxes forever.
To support the network of transportation and facilities required to deliver your daily mail, the USPS spent approximately $2.3 billion (roughly, as the GAO report indicates “the Service does not know how much fuel is being consumed in the majority of its facilities, for fuel used to service nearly 55,000 rural routes, or through most of its air transportation contracts. The Service currently has metering systems at only a few of its over 34,000 occupied facilities).
Simply stated, if we completely abolished the USPS, we would eliminate several problems. The GAO would have much less fuel to account for – $2.3 billion less. The $900 million dollars in paper junk mail we receive could be delivered electronically and therefore improve American productivity by eliminating the need to physically sort through their mail daily; needless to say we could potentially save billions of trees. The environment would so much cleaner as a result of burning $2.3 billion dollars (2006 dollars) less fuel annually.
One last note, don’t be misguided by the USPS’s ploy to “develop” alternative fuels and efficient vehicles. Their fuel costs actually increased when they replaced lighter vehicles with heavier hybrids and flex fuel vehicles. The loss in jobs is equivalent to what happened to Blockbuster Music and Video employees when cable T.V. and the internet made them irrelevant. The world really is a much better place than it was when we used to shag down to the video store with the whole family. On top of all that, those old CD’s don’t wear as nicely as my new 160 GB iPod.
From here on out, I’m going to do my part by going 100% paperless. Save yourself the ink, paper and .41 cent stamp, please send my email to peter@petersantilli.com.