http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2099187,00.html?artId=2099187
By Josh Sanburn
Inside a grad student's apartment at the University of Pennsylvania sits a slightly faded blue-and-white wooden sign from a post office in Malone, Wash., that no longer exists.
If this were any other college student's place, the sign would probably be a trophy from some kind of prank. But no: it was a gift from the post office to 25-year-old Evan Kalish, a UPenn graduate student who has crisscrossed the Northeast, driven down South and flown to Hawaii to see more than 2,700 post offices, many of which are in danger of closing or have already been shuttered.(See pictures of the history of the U.S. Postal Service.)
Over the past three years, he's documented the slow death of an institution that was once at the heart of small-town America, taking photos, collecting postal cards, paying tribute. Many of the postal buildings are historic, some marking the establishment of a community in a growing nation or the revival of one after a disaster. "The post office helped build the country," Kalish says. "And it's almost like they're trying to destroy themselves."
The Malone post office is the only landmark listed if you search for the town on Google Maps. But it closed down Aug. 9. The next day, across the street, Red's Hop N' Market began providing limited postal services — selling stamps and fixed-rate shipping boxes alongside live worms, cigarettes and beef jerky. It became the first "Village Post Office" in the country and part of a strategy that the postal service is counting on to help close a massive budget gap.
Resistance, both emotional and economic, to the closing of 3,000 to 15,000 post offices is growing, fueled by the objections of individuals like Kalish and mail-carrier unions which have taken out ads as part of a national public-relations campaign to save what could be more than 100,000 layoffs. But the financial situation remains dire.(Read "1 in 10 Post Offices Could Close.")
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been sliding down an unsustainable fiscal path for years. A toxic combination of a poor economy, an increase in online bill paying, the proliferation of e-mail and other digital communication, and congressional mandates have created billion-dollar deficits for the USPS since 2007. Last year it lost $8.3 billion. This year, it lost $5.1 billion (only because a mandatory $5.5 billion prepayment for retiree health benefits was postponed). Mail volume declined 1.7%. Projected mail volume over the next decade? Down, down, down. Officials say if nothing's done, the postal service will run out of money by August or September of next year, and absent congressional action by Friday, the USPS will default on that mandated $5.5 billion payment.
There are a number of plans in the works to stem the losses, including one now making its way through the Senate. Some proposals being considered would lay off 120,000 postal workers and cut another 100,000 through attrition, not to mention the recent announcement that two-thirds of all mail-processing centers will close and — the thing that has riled up people across the country the most — the closure of thousands of post offices. All told, it would reduce costs by $20 billion.
"It's a race against the clock," Kalish said when asked about the fate of the small-town post offices and the institution itself. His hobby turned addiction that often has the grad student on the road from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. many days, talking to locals, updating Google Maps as well as his blog Going Postal with images and details about each postal building he visits. "The postal service is threatening all of them. You have no idea how long any of them will be around."
Kalish's fascination with post offices has become a kind of quirky and extreme thesis on Americana, but it's hardly unmerited. For years, the USPS hasn't just delivered our mail. It's been a gathering place for small communities while operating as part of something larger than just a collection of mailboxes and places that sell stamps.
"The post office is a foundation piece of democracy," says New York University professor Steve Hutkins, who has been studying the USPS's financial issues. "And it's being treated like a business. And it's not."
Pack Mules and Snowmobiles
It wouldn't be far-fetched to argue that the postal service has been the most important institution in our country's history. For decades, the postal service was the largest public-sector employer in the U.S. At one point in the 19th century, three-quarters of all government employees were postal workers. The Founding Fathers considered the postal service so important that they put it in the Constitution, mandating that Congress have the power to establish and regulate post offices. (See how the postal service must push the envelope.)
In the country's early days, the postal service held together the far-flung populations of the U.S. by delivering newspapers — the only real source for information about the new nation — throughout the country. It provided a link between families and soldiers during war. It carried mail by steamboat when no roads existed. It linked California to the rest of the country by delivering mail across the Isthmus of Panama, even before the canal was built, by using boats, pack animals and canoes.
Even today, the USPS's methods to deliver our mail are just as remarkable. Want to send a letter to the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon? The postal service will take it there by mule. Need to mail a package to the Alaskan wilderness? The USPS can get it there by parachute or snowmobile. (It used sled dogs until 1963.) Have to mail something along Alabama's Magnolia River? The USPS has boats that travel from dock to dock. It has even sent mail via pneumatic tubes, missiles and hovercraft. And somehow, it's still just 44 cents to get a letter anywhere (well, 45 cents starting Jan. 22).
Today it's the country's second largest employer (after Walmart) and operates the world's largest fleet of vehicles — not to mention that it handles 40% of the entire world's mail volume. (See if the postal service could really close.)
For decades, this massive operation ran fairly smoothly, expanding along with the country and taking advantage of the new technologies brought about by railroad and flight. Mail volume increased from 50 billion pieces in 1953 to 75 billion in '66. Even so, the postal service often ran deficits. Its mandate of universal mail access almost ensured that it would go in the red. By the middle of the 20th century, the postal service was losing $600 million a year, and that's when the system starting breaking down.
On the brink of the holiday season in 1966, a sudden influx of advertising mail hit the enormous Chicago main post office (13 stories high, covering 60 acres and billed at the time as the world's largest postal facility). What happened? The mail simply stopped. Stopped. For almost three weeks, 1 million lb. of mail — 10 million pieces — barely moved. It was a confluence of employee hours' being cut, inexperienced workers' attempting to sort the mail, a postmaster position left empty for too long and improved pensions that led to a high number of retirements.
The fiasco made two things clear: the institution was vital to the nation's functionality, and there was something very wrong with the way it was being operated. Postmaster General Larry O'Brien proposed a new postal service, warning that there were cracks in the postal service's foundation and that it was close to collapse.
A few years later in New York City, a wildcat strike (one in which workers defy their union leadership) broke out, primarily over low wages. TIME called it "the Strike that Stunned the Country." At the time, postal workers were making less than sanitation workers, according to Philip Rubio, an assistant professor of history at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. "A postal worker with a family of four could qualify for food stamps," he said.
When the workers walked out, President Richard Nixon sent in National Guard and U.S. Army troops to try to sort the mail. But it didn't help. "They rapidly realized what a failure that was," Rubio said. "They just couldn't get up to speed, and the mail kept stacking up. Within eight days, the Nixon Administration signaled it was willing to negotiate."(Read about a small success at the U.S. Postal Service.)
These incidents led to the Kappel Commission, a presidential advisory group made up of corporate leaders who had, admittedly, little knowledge about mail-delivery operations. By 1970, they were at work on proposals to reform the postal service, which eventually became the Postal Reorganization Act, turning the U.S. Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service. It was more than just a name change. Congress essentially turned the postal service into a quasi-governmental organization — not really a business but not really part of the government either. It was being forced to run more like a corporation or a private entity, to be self-supporting, even as it was still tasked to maintain service to every home in the country.
For the next several decades, the USPS was successful by most measures, surviving the occasional disgruntled worker's becoming violent — incidents that brought the phrase going postal into our consciousness. And, of course, there were some perennially angry customers fed up with long lines at the post office. But in general, the USPS was doing well enough that Congress decided it should start prefunding its retiree accounts — for the next 75 years. So in 2006, Congress passed a law requiring an annual prepayment of retiree health benefits, to the tune of $5.5 billion a year for 10 years. Except Washington didn't see the recession coming two years later. "That act has left such a devastating legacy that it threatens to drive our nation's postal service off the rails," Rubio said.
Penny-Wise and Pound Foolish?
Enter Patrick Donahoe, the 55-year-old Pennsylvanian who became the nation's 73rd postmaster general in October of last year, perhaps the rockiest time in the history of the place. Donahoe has worked at the postal service for 36 years, first as a clerk in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He eventually worked his way up to the office that Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin once held, postmaster general. "I'm an antique," Donahoe jokes.
Speaking to TIME, Donahoe calmly laid out his plans to fix the USPS's predicament: reducing costs by $20 billion through 2014, pushing Congress to approve five-day rather than six-day delivery, laying off tens of thousands of workers. Listening to his sleepy Pennsylvania accent, one could easily forget that he's talking about gutting and radically transforming an American institution. (See how much a postal stamp should cost.)
The Obama Administration recently extended the deadline for the post office to make its next $5.5 billion retiree payment. That deadline is Nov. 18. But even that isn't enough — even without making that payment, the USPS lost $5.1 billion in the fiscal year ending in September.
And that's where the post-office closings come in. Thousands of them. So far, it has placed 3,650 post offices on a review list for possible closure, but that's not the end of it. Donahoe says that the number could be much higher.
"We'll probably look at 15,000 post offices rather than just 3,700," Donahoe says. "Not to say that anything is guaranteed to close, but if you're spending $70,000 to operate a place that's bringing in $10,000, there have to be some other solutions."
According to Donahoe, officials are looking at two types of post offices that could be closed: rural post offices that have less than an hour's work a day and urban post offices that generate less than half a million dollars in revenue and have another post office nearby. But to some, shutting down post offices seems not only reckless but also pointless.
"Closing post offices has almost nothing to do with the financial problem that the postal service finds itself in today," says Hutkins, founder of savethepostoffice.com. "Virtually nothing. The cost of operating these post offices and the amount of money that will be saved by closing them is minuscule in the context of the budget of the postal service and the deficit that it's running."(See why the postal service must change, from TIME's archives.)
Hutkins teaches courses at NYU on our sense of place and how traveling affects our behavior. He got interested in post offices when he heard his post office in Rhinecliff, N.Y., was going to close. So he fought back. With magnets.
He began artfully constructing refrigerator magnets with a photograph of his post office on them and then handed them out to raise awareness around town. What concerns him is not just losing an important service but also what he sees as willful destruction of something that helped build the country. And he thinks postal officials aren't being truthful about it.
By the USPS's calculations, closing all the 3,650 post offices up for review would save just $200 million, or 2% of the deficit of about $10 billion. But it would also eliminate thousands of jobs. "This is a problem I really struggle with because it seems so irrational," Hutkins says. When you get him going, he has a litany of complaints against an institution he holds dear to his heart — the way the USPS is explaining the post-office closures to communities, how it uses "emergency suspension" procedures to eventually close post offices that have been damaged by natural disasters, how it's laying off not 100,000 workers but actually more than 200,000 through what the postal service calls attrition.
When I asked Donahoe about the post-office closings and if they amounted to only about 2% of the deficit, he, surprisingly, agreed. (See why stamps will now feature living people.)
"It's pretty close to being accurate," he said. "If you think about it from a $20 billion perspective" — the amount the USPS is trying to cut — "it's about 1% of that. But any other business would do this, and the postal service by law is required to do better than break even."
True, any other business might do this, but that's what makes this debate so difficult. The USPS is a quasi-governmental public utility. It's a semiautonomous organization that is partly private, partly governmental.
"The rhetoric of business is a way to push the postal service toward privatization," Hutkins says. "That's ultimately what this is all about. My one theory is they're just penny-wise and pound foolish, and it may simply be that they're so locked in to the mind-set that if they can save a nickel, that's reason enough to close a post office."
In Philadelphia one of the locations slated to close is the colonial-themed B. Free Franklin post office. It doesn't fly a flag because the mail delivery there was established before the nation was founded. It uses a unique postmark featuring a franking technique created by Ben Franklin. And it's on the list of post offices slated to close, stirring up sadness and anger for those who love the historic location.
I asked Donahoe what sort of advice Franklin, the first postmaster general, might give his successor today. "I think that Benjamin would probably say, Don't be penny-wise and pound foolish."(See a post-office ad that warns about the dangers of e-mail.)
Will Walmart Be the New Post Office?
While some post office services are migrating to small general stores, many are going into national big-box stores like Walmart and Costco and Safeway, where you can get anything from a flu shot to spark plugs to new glasses.
Some will have P.O. boxes, and they'll all sell stamps and allow people to mail packages. Many will even be open later than a traditional post office.
"They really like to make the point that you can buy stamps in 100,000 places like Walmart, but that's really not all the post office entails," says Kalish, the postal-card collector. "The reason they're doing this is so they can say, Hey, look, in your community we just saved money. But it's just devaluing that community."
Those who are trying to save the USPS often argue that Village Post Offices like the one in Malone are being incorrectly billed as direct replacements for traditional post offices. "They're designed to be as bare-boned as possible," Kalish says. "You can't request a [return] receipt. You can't weigh a package. You have to send it priority. You have to send it in this type of box. It's just not a sufficient replacement."
The services are reduced, but the real issue that is driving those concerned and obsessed with the postal service is that we're slowly watching a piece of American history evaporate — the colonial Franklin post office in Philly, post offices (some designed by Franklin D. Roosevelt himself) with incredible New Deal murals, the South's first post office built after the Civil War. All of them could be gone as those and others get turned into shops and real estate offices and Bergdorf Goodmans. (See if post office cuts will cost you late fees.)
In the end, the debate about the USPS is simple: it's the privatization of a service that is supposed to be universal. But universal access doesn't exactly sync with the market's guiding hand. That's why UPS and FedEx don't ship everywhere. It's just not profitable for them. So where do they turn for last-mile delivery? To the postal service. Those private mail carriers are two of the USPS's biggest customers.
Meanwhile, as post offices are closing, as Washington is grappling with the larger financial problems of the nation and as communities are protesting, Kalish is on the road. In between taking classes and adjusting to his new life as a grad student, he's documenting the slow death of an American institution.
"This weekend I visited another 119 post offices, including 32 on the hit list," he e-mailed me last month. "Four days, 1,110 miles, 45 hours on the road. Grand total: 2,561 ... And yes, all this while doing graduate work at UPenn. But somebody's got to stand up for these communities."
Editor's note: Since we talked to Kalish, the Malone, Wash., sign has been moved to a museum in Ohio.
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