You've Got Mail, Sort Of

Yesterday I was walking down the street in Chicago.  It was a cold mid-afternoon and I was the only person out and about except for a guy walking across the street to my left.  From the corner of my eye I could see the monochromatic grey-blue figure catch up to me and walk past, revealing a heavy bag full of mail.  He was a USPS postal carrier.

And why is the USPS going broke?

Here's a guy walking door-to-door in a major city-- rain, snow, sleet and hail, except when the weather sucks.  He's delivering a series of paper packets originating from far away to where he was going.  Each letter is being custom moved for less than half a buck.  This is freakin' Amish!

I'm feverishly doing the math in my head and it seems like the system is bound to fail.  The costs of fuel to move it, the machines and people to sort and handle that letter, and the costs of that one guy's pay to do a tough physical job, pay for his health insurance and pension.  It seems like it can't work.

And New Math reveals it doesn't.   The USPS is 9.2 Billion in the hole here at the end of 2011.  That's equivalent to the GDP of Mongolia or the Bahamas.

Worse yet, I'd guess about 80% of what I get via the mail I don't want anyway.  Even those Victoria Secret catalogs that somehow ended up coming to me are pretty boring after the first 700.  Every mail room and lobby has a special garbage can just for junk mail.

Could we maybe just ditch the whole system and go electronic?  I seem to get email everyday without a problem and can filter the junk, no problem.  I can respond quickly and have a solid record of the correspondence.  Sweet!

Could we build a nationwide 3G network that would provide everyone email access?   A simple email reader could be provided to each person for a nominal fee, and maybe a few cents could be charged per email sent via that network.

This way we'd save a fortune in paper, subsidies to paper and timber companies, a ton in the costs of physically moving a document from point A to point B.

The small charge would deter wasteful usage and massive mailings.

It just seems like in the age of data and information, we can do it much better.