Earlier this month, the price of a first-class stamp fell for the first time since 1919. The drop, from forty-nine cents to forty-seven cents, took place following the expiration of a rate surcharge that was enacted in 2014 to help the U.S. Postal Service deal with the aftereffects of the Great Recession. The dip likely won’t matter much to most consumers, but it amounts to a loss of about two billion dollars a year for an organization that lost 5.1 billion dollars in the 2015 fiscal year alone.
Despite the service’s evident money problems, squeezing two more cents out of each letter may seem, to some, like just about the laziest possible way to raise revenue. Contrast that with postal services in other countries, many of which are managing to reinvent themselves: last year, the Singapore Post has opened an e-commerce branch that sells consulting services to companies hoping to reach Asian customers; elsewhere, Australia’s postal service is reportedly testing drone delivery, and Italy’s sells mobile-phone services.
Why does the U.S.P.S. seem to be so comparatively uncreative? Some post offices are offering smaller-scale postal services—an approach that countries like Germany have taken, to good effect. Share Mail allows marketers and political campaigns to send pre-paid flyers or pamphlets that you can forward to friends. “Just like social networking,” he said. To me, it sounded more like the U.S.P.S. was working to make junk mail even more annoying—a hunch that was reinforced when I learned that advertising now makes up more than half of the mail that is delivered. Most of the innovation taking place at the postal service seems to be aimed either at downsizing or making its remaining customers marginally happier, rather than creating new revenue streams by anticipating what Americans might actually want.
The postal service was once central to our social, financial, and intellectual lives. A working paper published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that post offices were crucial to American innovation. The researchers, who studied the relationship between the number of post offices in a given county and the number of patents filed there, found data suggesting that, from 1804 to 1899—a rich period of invention in the U.S.—the establishment of new post offices made people living nearby likelier to file patents. The authors considered several potential reasons for this, from the obvious fact that being near a post office made it easier to file a patent application to the idea that post offices served as a kind of proto-Internet, helping to distribute information to and from counties fortunate enough to have access to them.
The postal service is no longer as significant a manifestation of state power, of course. But the U.S.P.S. still has infrastructural might, in the form of a highly interconnected network of well-placed buildings and people. So here’s a thought experiment: What if we were to reconceive the postal system in light of that network? What more could the service do with its infrastructure?
There is actually an agency within the U.S.P.S. that has been thinking about these questions. Employees could, for example, deliver groceries, alert social-services agencies when people on their routes need help, or, even more ambitiously, supply “wellness services.”
Other proposals from the inspector general’s office would take advantage of the postal service’s buildings—for instance, by allowing post offices to provide basic financial services, like cashing checks, keeping savings accounts, and even taking out small loans. Countries such as Brazil, China, and New Zealand have been doing this for years.
The U.S.P.S. doesn’t have the authority to bring them about. When I asked Reblin about the possibility of getting more creative, he pointed out that, whereas other countries’ postal systems are free to provide non-postal services, U.S.P.S.’s legal mandate doesn’t allow it to do much besides handle mail and packages. Some within the postal system have advocated for the government to change this, but, Reblin said, “My objective right now is to innovate within the law.” The U.S.P.S. also employs thousands of unionized workers who might not be excited about seeing their responsibilities expanded, presumably without a pay raise. And adding new services would, of course, require hiring or retraining employees, as well as reorganizing infrastructure to handle the new work and deal with the related security and privacy issues—significant tasks for an organization under serious financial pressure.
Fees for some of the more innovative new services could potentially bring in significant revenue to offset the costs.