Category: Postal Service

U.S. Postal Service question: Deliver mail, or dump it in the river

Posted by dcrim – April 19, 2010

The U.S. Postal Service is hemorrhaging money, laying off employees and talking about reducing delivery to five days a week to keep from going broke.

So it couldn’t have been welcomed news Monday when it was reported that a Southeast Missouri man who worked for Postal Service admitted to dumping mail along a river instead of delivering it last year.

The Associated Press reports Lance W. Kinder of Oran pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to one felony count of delay or destruction of mail. The U.S. Attorney’s office says Kinder dumped the mail sometime between Aug. 1 and Nov. 5 of last year. Sentencing is set for July 20. Kinder faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

An Oran man and his son said they found the undelivered mail along the Diversion Channel last Thanksgiving. Authorities said there were about 600 to 1,000 pieces of mail that should have been delivered to people in Sikeston, Dexter, Kennett, New Madrid and other Bootheel towns.

Any wonder why people prefer e-mail?

It’s time for a different business model for U.S. Postal Service

Posted by dcrim – March 8, 2010

David Nicklaus of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the U.S. Postal Service as we know it is quickly becoming obsolete — and costly to taxpayers — in the Internet age. His cure: Privatize mail service, rather than raise rates and cut services.

Far better would be to admit that first-class mail is no longer the essential service it was a generation ago. We no longer need a government monopoly. We should privatize the Postal Service, as Germany and the Netherlands have done, or subject it to private competition, as has happened in Britain, Finland and New Zealand.

Either way, we’d be introducing market forces. Would that mean fewer stand-alone post offices? Would it mean less frequent delivery for some of us? Would lucrative business-to-business mail perhaps get cheaper, while people on rural routes pay more?

Yes, yes and yes. But those are the consequences of living in the Internet age, and the longer we ignore them, the bigger the ultimate bill for taxpayers is going to be.