Postponing the inevitable…good news, and bad advertising, will still be delivered to your mail boxes, on time  and without delay.  A temporary agreement driven by a coalition of Democrat Senators has gotten the USPS to postpone the planned closing of a number of postal service centers, post offices, and the reduction in service standards the USPS proposed.  Whew, just another great challenge for our elected leaders in Washington to boot down the road until ‘later.’

While that was going on this week I spent my time interviewing local businesses and those I know who are professionals in the mail business on how they were taking the situation that will have big impact on them, and their customers.  The delay is good news, since we need more time to process and plan.  Almost to a person everyone that I have spoken with understands the situation – volumes have dropped, costs have continued to rise, and the direct mail support industry has continued to shrink.  Like my old compatriots in the newspaper business they understand the direction things are headed.  No heads buried in the sand here!

What they don’t understand is why it has taken so long to recognized what they see everyday.  The world has changed, and legacy forms of communication, mail, just as printed daily newspapers, aren’t the dominant forms of communications they used to be.  We all must plan for the next phase of evolution in how we send and received all of our information, including payments for bills, as well as Christmas cards.  This hurts because it forces us to once again, realize how much our entires lives have been transformed, and will continue to change.

I hope that in this ‘truce period’ we can lower the volume and come up with some plans on what we want our postal services to be.  I didn’t use USPS, because we might find other ways to communicate or ship messages with something other than a total government monopoly.  But we have to define what we want, what we are willing to pay for, and then gain agreement before moving forward.  If not, the plan will fail.  Here’s to coming up with some great plans…and to a Happy Holiday for all.