WASHINGTON — Imagine a nation without the Postal Service. No more birthday cards and bills or magazines and catalogs filling the mailbox. It’s a worst-case scenario being painted for an organization that lost $8.5 billion in 2010 and seems headed deeper into the red this year.
“A lot of people would miss it,” said Tony Conway, a 34- year post office veteran who now heads the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.
Businesses, too. The letter carrier or clerk is the face of the mail. But hanging in the balance is a $1.1 trillion mailing industry that employs more than 8 million people in direct mail, periodicals, catalogs, financial services, charities and other businesses.
Who would carry mail to the Hualapai Indian Reservation in the Grand Canyon? To islands off the coast of Maine? To rural villages in Alaska? Only the post office goes to such places.
Ernest Burkes Sr. said his bills, magazines and diabetes medication are mailed to his home in Canton, in northeastern Ohio, and he visits the post office down the street to send first-class mail, mostly documents for the tax service he runs.
“I don’t know what I’d do if they’d close down the post offices,” said Burkes, who doesn’t use UPS or FedEx.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is struggling to keep his money-losing organization afloat as more and more people ditch mail in favor of the Internet. Donahoe has a plan to turn things around, if he can get the attention of Congress and pass a series of hurdles, including union concerns.
“The Postal Service is not going out of business,” said postal spokesman David Parten heimer. “We will continue to deliver the mail as we have for more than 200 years.”
Partenheimer acknowledged that if Congress doesn’t act, the post office could reach a point next summer where it doesn’t have the money to keep operating.
Donahoe’s solution includes laying off staff beyond the 110,000 cut in the past four years, closing as many as 3,700 offices, eliminating Saturday delivery and switching from the federal retirement plan to one of its own.
Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the proposal “outrageous.”
Yet Donahoe’s efforts are drawing praise from people such as Conway, the head of the nonprofit mailers, who says these are necessary steps that officials have shied away from in the past.
The changes that Donahoe is proposing would mean a different post office, but one that still operates for people such as Jovita Camesa, who is 75 and lives in a downtown Los Angeles retirement complex.
Camesa said she wouldn’t think to use the Internet for birthday and holiday greetings, or start going online to seek out the articles she now reads in Vogue, Readers Digest, Prevention and other magazines that are delivered to her.
“I’m not interested in the Internet or computers,” she said. “I’m very traditional.”
Related numbers
$8.5 billion Money the U.S. Postal Service lost in 2010
171 billion Pieces of mail handled by the Postal Service in 2010, down from 207 billion in 2001
8 million Workers in direct mail, periodicals, catalogs, financial services,charities and other businesses that depend on the post office
