Saving the Post Office

There are, in many ways, two U.S. Postal Services.

There is the one that people love to hate, especially after a hike in rates such as last week's two-penny jump. This is the Postal Service that made Mark Tornga, 24, hold his head in disbelief as he walked out of a post office on 14th Street NW at 4:30 one afternoon last week.

"Fifty-two minutes I spent in line -- 52 minutes!" the College Park resident fulminated after sending a certified letter for his employer, a public relations firm.

Then there is the Postal Service that has made huge strides in on-time delivery, runs one of the most impressively automated operations in the world and, for now, is bringing in a huge profit. This is the Postal Service that customers such as Tornga don't see, and, frankly, take for granted -- the one that moves 580 million pieces of mail a day with remarkable speed and accuracy to every address in the nation, six days a week.

The first Postal Service is the one that executives are trying to fix, the one with the bad rap, the one that delivers mail late, the one that drives people crazy with its long lines and sold-out 2-cent stamps.

The other Postal Service is the one they are trying to save.

"Am I optimistic or pessimistic? I'd have to say I'm anxious," said John M. Nolan, who retired last year as deputy postmaster general and now works as a consultant.

The structural problems facing the Postal Service are monumental. Despite a tiny uptick last year, first-class mail volume is slowly but steadily eroding as people pay more bills online, send Evites instead of printed invitations and shoot off e-mails rather than write letters. The agency also is facing massive and escalating personnel costs, especially for health care, even as it has embraced automation and reduced staffing needs. And finally, there is the federal government's attempt to change the structure of Postal Service regulation, an effort that postal officials regard as riddled with problems and with favors to private industry.

"It doesn't give us nearly the flexibility we believe we need," said Tom Day, senior vice president of government relations for the Postal Service.

Without making some hard decisions -- and revisions -- in the near term, Nolan and others say, the Postal Service "is on a crash course with cataclysmic change."

What kind of change and when is unclear. Privatization? Shuttered post offices? Dramatically more expensive mail? Less frequent delivery? It could be any of those things -- or none of them. It just depends on how things go.

And this is when people start thinking about the third Postal Service -- the one that delivers possibility six days a week -- a letter from an old friend, a tax refund or an acceptance from the admissions office. This is the post office that brings us the letter carriers we admire, who avoid dogs and leave footprints in pristine snow. It gives the tiniest towns their own proud postmarks. It's the post office that found you even when the address under your name was so incredibly incorrect it was laughable.