This rant might get me in trouble, but I’m pretty fed up with the United States Postal Service.
Just recently the price of a stamp was raised to 71 cents. It seems like the price goes up another 5 cents every year. I’m old, but I remember when it was only 5 cents.
But that’s not my main problem with the USPS. We rely on this service to deliver newspapers to our subscribers. The price of this service increases every year, but the service gets worse and worse.
I can’t tell you how many complaints we get every week from customers who don’t get their newspapers on time. And if you’re an out-of-state subscriber, you’re lucky if you get your newspaper within seven days.
I’m a pretty big USPS customer. I pay between $50,000 and $70,000 a year to use their service. Do you think they care? Try to find someone who can help you with a customer complaint. It’s a futile exercise.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve taken some of our newspapers out of mail delivery altogether. Instead, we offer subscriptions that are sent directly to the email address and actually sent and received before the newspaper is printed. It’s much more efficient than the USPS, and subscribers really seem to like getting their newspaper on time.
But unfortunately, partly because we had so many problems with the post office, we had to stop publishing our smallest newspaper, the Marion Press. Like dozens or perhaps hundreds of newspapers across the United States that depend on the postal service to deliver their products to their subscribers, we could no longer operate successfully.
I have many other publications that attract my attention, so I’m lucky. But I feel sorry for the individual newspaper publishers who have had to accept price increase after price increase, only to stop publishing because they’ve lost dozens of customers because they don’t receive their newspapers on time.
This is a huge problem. Some of these newspapers have been published for 150 years or more. I believe the USPS has “blood on its hands” because its poor service is making the situation so bad for small newspapers that they have to stop publishing.
I don’t claim to know the answers, but I do know that the USPS needs a complete overhaul. Maybe it needs to be shut down and the post office needs to be privatized so that Amazon or another company takes over mail delivery. I know that it cannot exist as it is now. It needs to provide better service and constantly raise prices.
My son often says, and he’s right, the USPS is the only company that can raise prices while providing worse service. If it were a private company, it would be bankrupt. But hey, it’s part of the government, and we all know they don’t really care how they serve their constituents, the taxpayers.
Enough of the rant. Make something good happen, USPS.