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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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GOING BACK IN TIME WITH THE POST OFFICE Although I rarely visit our local post office– actually, I make every effort to avoid it – I did stop in recently when the need to mail a package left me no alternative. I stood on line for nearly 30 minutes as two clerks slowly stamped, snipped, wrote and pasted their way through the 18 customers initially ahead of me. Occasionally each clerk disappeared for long periods of time into the rear area of the office. (One customer in the queue actually died – probably of hunger. No one came to carry him out. We had to step over him. It was very unpleasant.) Two of the four clerking windows were empty. Of course, this was partly my own fault. I had carelessly arrived during the lunch hour. Many business people try to do their postal business at that time. There are always fewer clerks present then. (After all, they have to eat, too.) But I digress. As I counted the ceiling tiles, and eventually the floor tiles, I mused on the fact that Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the United States Post Office, would probably feel right at home if he could visit any local post office in 2005. A “modern” post office (a non sequitur as ever was) is a Blast from the Past. No business concern today has so faithfully retained the tools, methods, look and feel of the 18th century. Stepping inside one is like going back in time. To begin with, there is the Post Office’s signature: a long, slow-moving queue of customers. In most modern business establishments, managers frantically search the back rooms of the store for extra staff if a queue of more than three or four customers builds at the sales counter. Managers have even been known to try to hire passers-by in the street outside when they are short of salesmen or cashiers. Nothing must be allowed to retard the ka-ching of the cash register. Heaven help staff whose slowness should cause customers to leave the store without buying. (A California jury acquitted a store manager who lashed a cashier through the mall after three customers left his queue while he fiddled with a malfunctioning cash register.) Of course, there are exceptions to this modern rule of queues. Certain restaurants seem to prefer having long lines of customers – perhaps as a kind of real-time demonstration of the establishment’s popularity. Medical offices do this, too – possibly to emphasize the doctor’s importance. Stores like Home Depot also seem chronically short of staff. (One wag speculated that most HD staff must be either illegal aliens or people in the Federal Witness Protection Program – none of which would want to risk being seen.) Thus, the post office – if not exactly unique – is part of a very select company of establishments which do not mind making their customers cool their heels for long periods whilst awaiting the much desired service offered there. One imagines that long, tortoise-like lines were common in earlier centuries when few people wore wrist-watches and even fewer had vanloads of kids waiting to be taken to soccer practices or music lessons. We once toured 18th-century Fort Louisburg in Nova Scotia. Its clock had only an hour hand. (Frenchmen of that era, we were told, thought there was no need to measure time more finely than by the hour.) 18th-century technology, however, is the Post Office’s particular hallmark. Where else do clerks actually mark documents and other materials with inked rubber stamps, painstakingly paste labels onto envelopes, make customers fill out detailed documents by hand, stroll back and forth to drop finished items in bins far from their work-station, and vanish for long periods? At the grocery store I hand the cashier a small encoded card which hangs from my car-keys. Instantly, he and the store’s central computer know who I am, where I live, and how much I have spent in that store-chain in the last year. At the airline check-in counter a constantly moving conveyor belt takes luggage to a sorting point. Tickets and boarding passes are produced electronically. All modern businesses use register-scanners to check out customers’ purchases. If addresses or other data are needed, skilled clerks quickly key them in. Rarely do customers fill out forms in longhand, except at medical offices – another throwback to an earlier era. Nearly all activities in a post office could be automated into a comprehensive computerized system in which pen and paper would seldom be touched except to sign the credit-card voucher – and probably not even then. (Even Home Depot has virtual pads for your signature.) You would hand the high-tech clerk your plastic postal card, which would bring up your name and address. Destination address data would be quickly entered by the clerk from a note the customer prepared before arriving. The type of delivery would be clicked; the correct delivery label would be printed. The package weight, the origin and destination zip codes, and the delivery type would be linked to calculate the cost in a wink. An overnight or special delivery parcel could be prepared in a few seconds instead of the five or more minutes it now takes a clerk. In the truly modern post office, clerks would still sell standard or special-issue stamps. But every post office would feature banks of vending machines which would dispense all denominations of postage the way currency machines dispense money. The machines would take any currency denomination, as well as credit cards. A customer desiring only stamps would not wait in line. This would drastically cut the length of post office queues everywhere. This dazzling vision of non-purgatorial trips to the post office for millions of people, however, is unlikely to materialize for a single reason: the USPS doesn’t have to do this. They are fine the way they are because they have what no other business has – a government sanctioned monopoly. Except for package-delivery businesses like Federal Express, which the USPS allowed, nobody else can go into the business of delivering the mail. However slow or inefficient the postal service might be, the government guarantees them a profit. It is a beautiful arrangement. Because the USPS lacks competition, it has no need to restrain its labor costs. Executives are paid huge salaries, and every year lavish bonuses are spread across middle-management ranks. USPS workers are also organized under a powerful union which has pushed pay and benefits for its mostly unskilled workers into the stratosphere. In regions where salaries tend to be low, the USPS mail carrier is often the local fat cat. If you can get a job with the post office, you’re set for life. Years ago an acquaintance offended his postal-worker neighbor by saying his 12-year-old boy could do the neighbor’s job. The comment might have been indelicate, but it was undeniably true. Most functions performed in the post office today could be easily mastered by an eighth-grader. A high-tech post office, along the lines I described above, would be a different matter. Clerks would be computer-literate technicians deserving of their high pay-levels. Efficiency would go up. USPS labor costs would actually decrease because fewer clerks would be needed. Technology would replace unskilled labor. Postal rates would stabilize or even diminish. All this further indicates why change is impossible under the current system. The USPS union would fight to the bloody last to prevent replacement of its legions of highly paid, low-skilled workers with fewer, highly skilled workers. The status quo is a deal they won’t give up easily. If the electronics industry had had the same resistance to modernization that the post office has, televisions would still be black-and-white and would cost $10,000. There would be no personal computers because makers of large main-frames would have prevented their development. As for cars: we would still be driving Model Ts costing $50,000. Democrats set up the USPS while they controlled Congress. It is a legacy of the Great Society which they will hold onto with a death-grip reminiscent of Social Security. This leaves the task of modernizing the postal service mostly to Republicans. If they can learn to wield power as Democrats did, maybe they will get round to doing something about Ben Franklin’s antique. Meanwhile, bring a book or some knitting when you visit the post office. You’ll have a long wait.
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