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Saving the Post Office
Post offices give away small, cardboard scales to help customers determine how much postage their mail needs.
(By Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post)
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In the meantime, postal officials keep coming up with ways to keep people -- happily -- out of the post office.
There are the post office's retail partners, grocers in particular, that sell books of stamps, which has become one of the most common ways people buy stamps.
(Day bristles at the thought that the post office seems to get no credit for such efforts. "It's as though supermarkets dreamed it up all on their own," he said.)
There's the almost-four-year-old Click-N-Ship service: Go online and find out the rates, print the postage at home, then schedule a free pickup.
The problem has been getting out the word that Click-N-Ship even exists, in a world where many small-volume mailers now reflexively call United Parcel Service or FedEx. Day says even his own nephew was using UPS to ship things he sells on eBay.
"There is, in the younger generation, a sense that the Postal Service is out of date, slow and all the rest," he said. "So reaching them and letting them know that we do provide online services that are useful, customer friendly and timely is a challenge."
Computer-generation technology has also reached 2,000 postal offices nationwide in the form of new Automated Postal Centers, which can do many of the things people stand in line for: dispense stamp sheets, sell postage in any denomination, look up rates and Zip codes, provide certified mail receipts, and so on.
"I'm sure my mother would struggle with it, but people who are comfortable with computer technology, after just a few basic tips, they understand how to use it," Day said.
And for the lower-tech among its customers, post offices now give out nifty cardboard scales that measure how much postage you need for a letter.
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To encourage people to use the mail more, the post office has been aggressively advertising some of its newer services on television. It is even getting downright touchy-feely. In another effort borrowed from Madison Avenue, it's giving people what they love: babies and animals.
The Postal Service is in the midst of a second test of PhotoStamps, which let consumers put their own cute pictures on commemorative-size stamps they can order online. It was the brainchild of Stamps.com, which has long had a contract with the Post Office to sell postage online.
