The US Postal Service Isn't Going Quietly to the Grave!

Have you seen this latest attempt by the Postal Service to stave off the inevitable? In the 21 ^st century the US Post Office is spending good money after bad on an ad campaign trying to convince people to stop using email and go back to licking stamps, walking down to the corner to drop our envelopes into a bin and waiting a week to have our mail delivered. It makes you wonder who's running the post office.

As a business owner it doesn't make any sense to go backwards and yet that is exactly what the post office wants us all to do. A business can only survive if they change. In its history the post office has changed with the times. There was a time when mail was sorted on trains in a special mail car, my late father-in-law used to do that. It was called the Railway Mail Service and it revolutionized the postal service. Now the mail is sorted in regional facilities. I'm sure there was an uproar at the post office when this change was made. Of course that was when the postal service was expanding.

Now they are shrinking, and no one likes to be downsized, especially not unions. And, yes, I said unions. If the postal service didn't have to deal with unions and federal restrictions on how they operate they'd have done what they needed to do long ago. But they are hampered by laws requiring them to provide certain minimums of service but are not guaranteed funding for that minimum service level. No business operates this way, it doesn't make sense. At some point the postal service will make the necessary changes to "right-size" their operation.

Small business owners need to watch these postal service changes and learn from them. Eventually we will see mail service scaled back to at least 5 days a week from the current 6. They will consolidate regional sorting facilities and scale back on many operations. But they will have done this after the horses are out of the barn, and after they've lost a lot of money. This could have been much less painful if the postal service had pulled their head out of the sand and accepted their situation long ago.

Sending letters is a dying business. Did you know that most postal employees still get paper checks mailed to them? How much could the post office save by switching to direct deposit? Of course they'd then have to admit that paper mail is dead. Utility companies and other businesses actually charge a fee to send you a bill in the mail, or offer you a discount if you switch to electronic billing.

Small business owners must learn from this so that you don't make the same mistakes. When your business is changing you need to change with it. Even if that means that in the end your business is smaller. A small business is better than no business. Make sure that your business is always moving forward, never backward.