We're taking care of General Motors. The blob known as Citigroup will soon be slimmer and less dangerous. Another 20th-century business must now check in to 21st-century fat camp.
The U.S. mail is losing billions. It's at "high risk" of failing financially, say government auditors. It may raise stamp prices again even though it just did. It's talking about closing post offices, including five in metro Baltimore.
You've heard before about Postal Service budget crises. This is the big one. To deal with a plunge in mail volume that began in 2007, the U.S. Postal Service is about to become a very different part of the economy and a different part of our lives from the one we have known.
It still does what it has always done very well. A letter retrieved from your house and delivered to any of millions of addresses, thousands of miles away, by humans, for the cost of a few pieces of gum, is a screaming deal.
But nostalgia products won't support an outfit with 700,000 employees, 38,000 offices and a $75 billion budget. The Post Office is very well organized for a world where the Saturday Evening Post arrives each week and lonely doo-wop singers serenade the mailman.
But personal letters haven't been the main media of love or anything else for decades. For a long time, utility and credit-card bills, and their reciprocal monthly payments, kept the Postal Service afloat. But now people do business online.
Today's Postal Service, more than anything else, is partner in annoyance with the junk mailers. Most mail is unsolicited advertising. Nobody sings songs about that.
The recession has hurt all advertising but slammed "direct mail," as the snail-mail spammers call themselves. All told, deliverers are expected to carry 18 percent fewer pieces of mail this year than they did in 2007.
Volume usually goes down 5 percent or less in a recession. Much of this business isn't coming back, the Postal Service acknowledges. With losses of $7 billion projected for both this fiscal year and the next, Postal Service bosses know they have to act - and not just by cutting employee overtime. Now they show signs of doing so.
"In essence, we are delivering less mail to more addresses, which means we receive less revenue per address served," says Freda Sauter, a Baltimore-based spokeswoman for the Postal Service. "It's not business as usual any more."
