Put a Stamp on That

The mammoth James J. Farley Post Office in New York City sits on an entire city block just behind the world’s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden.

With an expansive row of Doric columns lining the front, the structure is among the Big Apple’s most notable landmarks and etched high above its entrance is this now-famous pledge: “Neither snow nor rain.. nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

For those who delight in keeping track of arcane facts, the phrase is actually a translation of an ancient Greek work by Herodotus who described the Persian system of mounted postal carriers circa 500 B.C.

But with this week’s blockbuster announcement by the U.S. Postal Service that in August it will cease Saturday mail delivery, that famous quotation might have to be tweaked a bit.

In making that stark decision, the Post Office cited the wave of new age communications specifically the move toward paperless that has drastically impacted the ways in which Americans correspond and pay their bills, or what’s called “remittance mail.”

For example, in 2000, just 5 percent of the U.S. paid their bills online.

In 2012, more than 55 percent did.

That dramatic shift has helped foster an aggregate $20 billion loss for the USPS  over the past four years and it expects to lose another $8 billion this year. The service incidentally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

It also plans to close more than 3,600 or so post offices out of the 32,000 currently in operation. Considering that each closing requires approval by Congress that looms as quite a lengthy and painstaking downsizing.

But as many of us who follow trends and cultural shifts, those in charge of our letter carriers probably should have seen this coming far earlier than the debut of say, the iPad. I would argue they should have sensed trouble brewing with the advent and, later, mass adoption of fax machines. I say that because in the late 1980s I asked a postal worker friend of mine if his office was equipped with a fax machine.

He just laughed and said, “Of course not. That’s a competitor to us.”

Apparently, the USPS  did not employ many futurists at the time who might have perceived that as the nucleus of a looming challenge to their business model.

Many of you in the profession have seen and fortunately reacted, to dramatic shifts in such areas as client demographics and niches, technology, partner tracks and overall firm structure and operations. The more progressive CPA firms saw the growing trend toward paperless workflow and remote worker capabilities and as a result, we now have such innovative concepts as virtual firms.

Sadly, the USPS will hardly be the last institution that will suffer the after-effects of new technologies and its subsequent failure to address them early enough in the process.

They found  out the hard way that an iPad is light years faster than any letter carrier.