When the Postal Service set out last week to notify reporters about a news conference to announce a proposed 19 percent increase in the postal rate, it didn`t mail a press release, as had been done in the past.
It sent the announcement by fax.
In a sense this single incident says more about the plight of the U.S. Postal Service than the thousands of hours of rhetoric heard at congressional hearings and union negotiations.
Fax machines are another service soon to be offered at many post offices across the country as the Postal Service struggles to catch up with the technology that seems always to be outracing it.
The Postal Service invested nearly $1.2 billion in automation technology across the country in the 1980s. For example, it placed optical readers in the Chicago area`s three big general mail facilities to bring new economies and efficiencies to the processing of mail.
By 1995, Postmaster General Anthony Frank hopes that 100 percent of the nation`s mail will be sorted by automated systems, which can move letters faster and less expensively than is being done now.
The Chicago division is well on its way. By the end of the year, the division plans to sort 50 percent of the mail using the latest optical readers, the most sophisticated of which were installed in May and can read typed addresses on 35,000 letters an hour.
Two people are needed to operate an optical reader. The cost of sorting one letter is three-tenths of a cent.
With all of this going on, Carl Shier wants to know why he probably will have to pay 30 cents come next February for each of the 100 or so letters he writes each month to a far-flung network of relatives and friends.
Shier is a 72-year-old retired autoworker from the old International Harvester plant in Melrose Park who enjoys being the self-appointed ”family correspondent.”
If the Postal Rate Commission raises the price of a first-class stamp to 30 cents, Shier, who lives with his wife, Marion, in a Rogers Park
condominium, will have to find the extra $5 a month, or $60 a year, for postage from a fixed income of Social Security and a pension.
”I just write to everybody in the family, cousins and all, and another 20 percent increase will be rough,” he said.
And with all of this automation, banker Eugene Workman wonders why the Postal Service announced a plan last fall to slow some first-class deliveries and why it will take a letter carrier longer to deliver some of the mortgage payments owed his small bank.
Workman, president of the Orrville Savings Bank in a rural community southwest of Akron, asked, ”The real issue in my mind as a country banker is, how can you justify a 20 percent increase at the same time you are cutting service?”
Despite postage increases every few years and promises that the mail system will improve, Frank said another 19 percent overall increase is needed to raise $7.1 billion more a year not only to complete the $5.3 billion automation program but also to pay off a $1.6 billion debt the Postal Service expects to incur this year.
Despite automation, the number of postal workers continued to grow, peaking at 763,781 in 1988, This is 60,000 more than worked for the Postal Service in 1985. Automation did not produce the expected efficiencies, Frank explained, until the latest generation of multiline optical readers became operative last spring.
Since then the work force has dropped by 20,000 and will continue to be trimmed, he said, even as the volume of mail grows from 161.6 billion pieces in 1989 to an expected 200 billion pieces by the end of the 1990s.
In addition, Frank indicated, the 1987 contract with postal workers was too expensive and health-care costs were double what was predicted.
The 10th postage increase in 20 years gives new ammunition to advocates on opposite ends of the political spectrum for wholesale changes in the postal system.
James Miller, a budget director under former President Ronald Reagan, believes it is time to end the Postal Service`s monopoly on first-class mail and begin competition.
”The Postal Service is an anachronism in this country,” said Miller.
”Privatization would mean an improvement in the postal industry.”
Miller pointed to examples such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service, saying they ”beat the pants off the Postal Service.”
They have done it largely through lower costs and better service, said David Bunn, executive vice president of the Parcel Shippers Association. As a result, he said, the Postal Service was left with less than 10 percent of the parcel market.
But, United Parcel Service increased its rates in early February, which made it more expensive than the Postal Service, at least until it raises its rates next year. For the time being, some business has returned to the Postal Service.
Meanwhile, consumer advocate Ralph Nader believes it is time to restore a role for Congress, which ended in 1971, by giving it the power to veto service and rate changes and by creating a committee of average mail users whose voice could be heard in postal decision-making.
He cited the Citizens Utility Board in Illinois as an example of how it would work.
Frank ridiculed both ideas, saying privatizing the Postal Service is
”laughable on the face of it” and that Nader is seeking to create a consumer board to raise funds for his activities.
The proposed new rates recognize that when large mailers such as charities, advertisers, banks, utility companies and department stores do more of the sorting, coding and transportation of the mail, they should get a break on the postage rate that the average citizen pays when buying a stamp at the post office window and dropping a letter in the corner mailbox. But even those discounts brought mixed reviews.
”At first blush it`s going to be good for our members who can take advantage of it,” Bunn said about the parcel shippers. ”But for those who can`t, it`s a disappointing 24 percent increase.”
David Stigler, senior vice president of ADVO-System Inc., which sends out over 17 billion pieces of advertising annually and is the country`s largest private mailer, said the proposed rates are seen as recognition by the Postal Service that when bulk mailers do 35 of the 42 steps needed to deliver a letter they should get better rates.
When the postage rises, however, the rates ADVO charges its clients will go up, too. The last time that happened in 1988, Stigler said, some clients cut back on the amount of advertising they did by mail.
Bob Sanchez, president of Casa Sanchez, a San Francisco-based company that makes Mexican foods, said he would stick with United Parcel Service and private mail companies.
”I can trust them,” he said. ”I`ve tried the Postal Service. It`s not on time and there`s no one I can turn to.”
Realizing that it has to do more to bring back customers like Sanchez, the Postal Service will begin installing services such as automated bank teller machines and electronic machines that weigh packages and figure postage. The teller machines will arrive in the Chicago market this summer.
