Less Mail, Less Often

After August, you won't be getting letters on Saturdays, because the US Postal Service is cutting back to save $2 billion.

How will America survive? Easy. Polls show 70% of us won't miss Saturday delivery one bit. By September, you won't even remember to check your mailbox on the weekend. 

As I have written before, the no-Saturday-mail idea isn't radical enough. We don't need daily residential mail service anymore, so cut it back to every other day.

With e-mail and texting and cell phones, who writes letters anymore? So much of our life has moved online that the only mail I get these days is pure junk, and there's no urgency in getting that to my mailbox, just so I can carry it inside and throw it in the trash. The only mail I get that doesn't get tossed immediately is a Netflix DVD I'm probably not going to watch for a couple of days and a few birthday cards -- nothing particularly time-sensitive. Even the few bills that still come with a stamp on them give me enough of a grace period to pay that the delayed delivery would have no impact.

Wouldn't this mean lots of letter carriers and other postal employees being laid off? Yes, but the way the USPS is going, they're going to lose their jobs anyway.

Want to save more money? Instead of raising the postage rate by a penny every couple of years, why not make postage stamps free, underwritten by corporate sponsors?

There are plenty of major corporations who would like that space on the envelope to promote their products, and would happily partner with the postal service to expand the brand. Imagine being able to get company-logo stamps not just at the post office, but at any McDonald's restaurant or 7-11 store or Starbucks outlet. Then, when the USPS costs go up, they'd pass along the expense to their clients, not their users (the same model used by radio, TV, and the rest of us who live at the whim of advertisers).

Under my plan, you'd never again see this on an envelope: "Affix stamp here. The post office will not deliver without proper postage."

As if anyone who doesn't already understand the stamp concept would know what "affix" means.