The joke about being self-employed is that you work part- time, and you don’t care which 12 hours per day you pick. I look up from an office cluttered with papers, mail and packing boxes and notice the clock. It is now 9 p.m. The competent staff of my neighborhood post office in south Denver know me by my first name and ask after family, but that tiny, picaresque postal hobbit hole has been closed for hours.
In a 24/7 world, personalized service is the competitive edge for little businesses; time is of the essence. I send faxes, order supplies and furniture, pay bills, transfer bank funds, track packages and order postage from the comfort of my home business. Friendly and efficient delivery persons arrive at our office to pick up express deliveries during business hours. But there are still postal-ish activities that are best conducted in person and that can’t wait until morning. I pack several plastic official Postal Service white plastic bins with letters and packages, and head downtown to the post office at 20th and Curtis streets, across from the Greyhound bus station.
At 10 p.m., there is rarely a line, but a few customers straggle in. The impatient professional in stylish leisure pants and sweater needs to mail a draft of a contract to a client’s post office box in a rural community, where only the Postal Service can tread. The owner of a home-based book business, with a day’s worth of Amazon and eBay orders balanced on a kid’s wagon, needs to send them out book rate. The couple with the kind faces run a hard-luck nonprofit; those grocery sacks are filled with their latest newsletter, neatly sorted for bulk mailing.
What about the tubs being carried in by a gang of sullen teenagers directed by a frantic mom? It is a direct mail campaign: the small-business owner’s version of the note in the bottle. Fourteen pieces of paper hand-stuffed into 1,600 oversized envelopes by recalcitrant family members and their buddies. To stand in line at their tiny neighborhood post office would mean a good 20 minutes waiting for a clerk, while other customers glare at the overstuffed boxes. It would also mean abandoning her business during peak work hours, and for those of us who work alone, a 2 p.m. weekday visit to the postal office is problematic.
I notice several people with familiar red, white and blue priority mail envelopes, waiting in line to hand them over personally to a clerk, as the law requires for packages weighing over a pound.
A few civilians join the queue. They are mostly hard-working people with day jobs, folks who can’t get away during normal business hours, people who don’t have high-speed Internet and e-mail accounts or postage machines at home. They come with packages to ship to family in the old country, money orders to fill out, birthday cards and bills to mail. And 10 p.m. is the only time they have to stand in line and do their business.
And what do you do when the local street-corner mail drop is filled to overflowing? A young woman and her mother stop by because there was no other place to safely leave 500 stamped wedding invitations.
A note posted to the front door of the building alerts me that the hours are changing in a few days. No more Sundays, no more evening hours. I am glad I found out before I had a late-night crisis: a last-minute report to a client who needs a hard copy, signed and dated, or an order of books that need to arrive on a weekend for a conference via express mail.
The Postal Service won’t go broke on the money I shift away from its services, but I think of the people for whom the loss of the downtown office will be more than an inconvenience. In a different world, a thousand small- business owners would be able to open their own versions of off-hour enterprises that could legally replace what only the Postal Service can do today. Perhaps, the end of Sunday and late-hour services will actually move us closer to that day.
Pat Wagner and her husband, Leif Smith, have been visiting the late-hours post offices in downtown Denver for 30 years. They run a research and consulting business.
