If you're like a lot of people, you read the recent story about the U.S. Postal Service proposal to eliminate Saturday service and said, "So what?"
And your next thought probably was, "What took them so long?"
Both those reactions are telling.
Many of us shrugged at the inevitability of the news because we have so dramatically changed our personal habits. More and more people pay bills online. They communicate with friends and loved ones via e-mail, text messages, Facebook posts or other digital connections that have all but replaced paper and pencils.
Most people probably have to think back to Christmas -- or longer ago -- to recall the last time they sent a personal, hand-written letter to someone. Like it or not, letter-writing via "snail mail" is a dying art.
Within most of our lifetimes, according to techies, we'll be doing almost all our communicating and business digitally. It's still something of a modern miracle that you can put something in your mailbox today, pay less than the cost of a can of soda, and in a couple of days that package will be exactly where you want it, whether three miles away or 3,000 miles away.
Miracle or not, though, there's no longer much need for six-day delivery (or even five-day, at some point.)
As for the "What took them so long?" question, the fact is it didn't take as long as one might think.
The Postal Service has proposed eliminating Saturday service several times, usually as it was preparing to increase rates. Congress, never eager to take on institutional lethargy or controversy involved with changing something as hidebound as mail service, repeatedly has declined to discuss changes.
Now, the time has come.
Just five years ago, 31.6 million pieces of mail went through the Wausau Post Office every year. This year, that number is projected to drop to fewer than 24 million pieces, and the pattern is being repeated across the country.
The triple-whammy of evolving personal habits, more competition from services such as UPS and FedEx, and the deepest recession in decades means the U.S. Postal Service likely will lose $7 billion this year.
Like any business, it must either cut expenses, increase revenues or both. Postmaster General John Potter wants to do both, by eliminating Saturday service and raising rates.
What's most striking about his plan is that so few people have resisted it. Most of us recognize that the time has come to change a service that hasn't evolved at the same pace as its customers.
In fact, it sometimes feels as though it hasn't changed at all since its creation in 1775.
Mail won't disappear anytime soon. Grandma still will send birthday cards, your dentist still will drop you a line reminding you of your appointment next week, and satellite television companies still will flood your mailbox with offers of three free months of HBO if you switch over from cable.
But the numbers will continue to decline, and the Postal Service will continue to bleed red until Congress is able to recognize what the rest of us see so clearly.
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