If you're looking for one of the few remaining remnants of Soviet-era bureaucracy, don't set your gaze on Castro's Cuba or North Korea. The Post Office will do.
There may be other institutions in America that are perceived as being as incompetently run, as arrogant, as unaccountable, and as lacking in any fundamental strategic logic. But they certainly aren't as visible.
In a telling instance of bureaucratic synchronicity, the Post Office has just proposed a "ten year recovery plan" this week that includes a projected $40 billion lift to the bottom line that would come from just from eliminating Saturday delivery.
I call it "ironic" because it comes smack in the middle of the health care debate, a struggle in which the phrase "government bureaucrats standing between you and your doctor" is repeated about as often as "Next on line" is grunted by a bored and distracted post-office worker.
The Post Office is a daily reminder for millions of Americans of what happens when you create an organization void of incentive or motivation - an organization that is also incapable of even the most modest degree of marketplace awareness. That's why the carefully crafted Republican arguments about government clumsiness penetrate so deeply into our neural networks and stick like glue. Psychologists call it the availability heuristic. That means we make judgments about the things we don't know much about - or the things we fear - based on how easily a comparable example can be brought to mind.
So the President talks about a new regulatory agency and our brains fire up an image of the Post Office or the Motor Vehicle Bureau or the Passport Office.
This isn't an entirely unfair comparative framework. The reasons the Post Office is in its current mess has a lot to do with the way government operates in general. Government agencies tend to be very bad at forward-planning, at scoping out the trends and drawing conclusions from them, at -in the words of the 9/11 Commission - connecting the dots.
It was the Post Office's failure to first pay attention to the over-night business, which was innovated by Fedex - largely because the government wasn't meeting the needs of business - and then to overlook a little wrinkle called email, that conspired push them to the rim of bankruptcy.
It's been a slow and trackable decline that could have been addressed years ago. The use of the postal system hit its high in 2006, when 213 billion items were dropped in the mail. Last year, the number shrank to 177 billion, and it's projected to drop to 150 billion buy 2020. (That seems wildly optimistic to me.} Those metrics will result in a loss of $238 billion over the next decade. Those are subprime crisis numbers.
Of course, there are systemic reasons behind the government's inability to strategize and anticipate. Even the military - which is constantly playing war-games and using game-theory to plan ahead - constantly finds itself reacting late-in-the-game to what wasn't really that unexpected at all.
The problem is that anticipation and visioning involve risk and require courage. You've got to take a stand. It's far easier (and safer) to sit back, particularly in the government, to let things happen, and then react. Then you can point to "exogenous" market factors that changed the competitive landscape, and then appoint a clutch of committees to investigate the problem. And report back in twenty-five years. And collect a nice pension.
In fairness to the Postal Service, however, there is a built-in structural problem they face. There are crippling regulatory constraints that prevent them from being as nimble and responsive to market needs as a private-sector company would be. As they put in in a PowerPoint present that depicts the handcuffs they're wearing:
"Current regulatory requirements limit USPS's ability to quickly respond to the market and leverage its assets to diversify into more non-mail products and services that support its core mission."
Of course, any health care infrastructure established through new legislation is likely to be similarly burdened, similarly unable to react, and change course when market conditions demand such strategic nimbleness. We need to become much better at creating regulation without creating death-by-regulation.
Understand, I'm not someone who thinks any government is too much government. There are things that government should do and must do - and that the private sector should be kept out of it because there are inherent conflicts between the public good and the profit motive.
But as long as the comparison between walking into a Fedex office and the Post office is as much of a brand disaster for Uncle Sam as it currently is, the public will for an expanded role of government, or even a baseline role, will become as scarce as a 5-cent stamp.
Follow Adam Hanft on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hanft
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Recently claims have been made that the average POI wage is something like $83 K per years. The carrier I know has a take home of something like $36 K per years and works weekends sometimes, delivering 26 cubic feet of mail every day, facing crazy people and wild dogs.
They smeared the UAW the same way claiming the hourly wage was $70 or more per hour just before the GM UAW was broken.
GM's hourly wage for lineman was $28 per hour.
It's fun to beat up on the PO, and hard to defend it in some of its practices and its capacity to plan for the future. But I'll bet everybody attached to businesses attached to first class mailing were caught flatfooted by the explosive growth from out of the ether that is e-mail. Pitney-Bow
Sort of like health insurance companies.
I don't know about you, but I'd like to get my insurance from somewhere that's got an obligation to cover me.
"We're sorry, we couldn't deliver your letter (package) because it cost us more to process it than we anticipate
Can the current health care system, or more specifical
Our DMV recently revamped its technologi
The Post Office was created as a service for Americans, not as a corporatio
If you want true free market capitalism
Next blog might be entitled "Pets: Are They Really Pulling Their Weight, Why Health Care Reform is Like a Puppy"
And they rarely lose mail. And the online services are fantastic.
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as I understand it, the PO operates at a loss because there's no $ in delivering individual letters. Fed Ex or UPS wouldn't deliver a letter across the country for just 40-somethi
My brain is glad that the intent is there to create regulatory bodies and fires up a hope against hope that the regulatory agency proposed will actually have the power and the will to regulate the industry it purports to.
I would say thoug,h a suggestion to the USPS. Everyone in my town has to pay a yearly fee for a post office box and pick up their own mail, while everyone who lives outside of the town gets free mail delivery. That to me makes absolutely no sense. One mail carrier could deliver way more block by block than they can driving between orchards. Just make everyone get a post office box, or at least charge those people outside of town the same price as a post office box for delivery to their door. Ooooo problems solved!
I can count on my mailman.
I have had nothing but excellent service from the postal service in my community, population 2 million, and I would readily use them before I would even consider FedEx, with whom I have experience
Recently, I posted a stack of letters and bill payments at the drive thru at the U.S. Post Office near my house. Mistakenly
That's the USPS and I am proud of their service. They are courteous, helpful and hardworkin
Where else could you find an organizati