t seems possible, maybe even likely, that before long the postal service will be reduced to delivering what "letters" which these days consists primarily of bills and junk mail. I wonder if that will be enough to keep them afloat long term?
The multi-national giant delivery services have been lobbying for half a century to get postal keys for 1st class letter delivery. No one wants to deliver promotional junk and letter junk because no one would subsidize it like USPS. That is the primary service of USPS and IMO they will be kept in business for that. The secondary service of USPS is delivering for multi-national giant publishers at extravagantly subsidized rates. That is becoming a past service, because printed publications are increasingly viewed as relics of the past and non-essential.
I am not a business or government insider, just a former postal worker. I was a letter carrier for the United States Post Office Department: the one established in 1792 by the 2nd United States Congress and George Washington, and abolished in 1970 by the 91st United States Congress and Richard Nixon in retaliation for the U.S. Postal Strike of 1970.
The old Post Office subsidized small publishers. If you had a subscription list of 500 and a bill for mailing out one issue, they would give you Second Class for future mailings and refund the difference from your first mailing. Second Class was a token payment to prevent frivolous use of the system, as the 2nd Congress intended. George Washington thought newspapers should be mailed for free like Congressional mail, but he lost the argument. This is what I.F. Stone wrote about the
Weekly newsletter he started in 1953 and shut down in 1971:
The second class mail rate made it possible to mail the Weekly in those days at only one-eighth of a cent per copy, the minimum piece rate then; it is 1.5 cents now. I shall always be grateful that the Postoffice not only granted second class quickly but gave me a refund for the first few issues mailed at a higher rate. Second class made my survival possible. Though I was regarded in the paranoid atmosphere of those McCarthy years simply and plainly as a Red, I had no trouble whatsoever with the Post Office. No political questions were asked me. I was treated with the utmost courtesy by the postal authorities then and since. It is no small testimonial to the strength of the First amendment that a new publication could be launched in those years with what amounts to a postal subsidy to a left-wing journalist.
The old Post Office was a rough place to work, but USPS got downright vicious. They introduced Taylorism, which you can read about here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
The Post Office timed routes to keep them manageable. Neighborhoods change and demographics change, but postal routes have to reflect what a carrier can actually carry. Union stewards would tell us "Work at your usual speed. Don't try to impress anyone." Some listened. USPS started time-and-motion studies. Someone follows you with a stopwatch, times you climbing stairs and divides by the number of steps. Taylorism can turn any job into hell on earth.
If you are curious about the old Post Office Department, read Charles Bukowski's
Post Office. We all read it. His love life is fantasy but the job and his alcoholism are real.
Richard Wright's first novel was set in the Chicago Post Office where he worked. He suppressed it but didn't burn it, and it was published after his death as
Lawd Today! It is the last day in the life of a Chicago postal worker and it ends when he is killed by his poor abused wife. It is a depressing book, too negative and alienated to be true to life, but parts of it ring true.