Ask anyone who’s read a comic book and he or she probably can tell you how, as an infant, Superman was sent to Earth by scientist parents who predicted a planetary cataclysm pooh-poohed by the eminent graybeards of the planet Krypton. It turned out, of course, that Superman’s father Jor-El was right on the money with the prediction of Krypton’s demise.
At the last postal oversight hearing, the General Accounting Office shared a piece of information that’s had the graybeards of the pre- and post-reorganization postal community in a snit. The GAO recounted the findings of a study conducted for the U.S. Postal Service by the very same team that’s been predicting the course of mail volume for many years. These forecasts, over time, have proven to be 99.1% accurate.
The GAO told the House postal oversight subcommittee that “an era was coming to an end.” First class mail volume, it said, would reach its zenith in the year 2002, but would decline at a rate of 3% every year thereafter. That was a historic – and explosive – pronouncement.
The GAO noted the cause of this sea-change was the competitive world in which the postal service was going to have to find its way. The long-predicted impact of electronic communications technology was about to be realized.
The first impulse of the postal subcommittee’s minority was to question the GAO regarding the validity of its numbers. This has also been the reaction of Washington’s postal elders: “An end to the postal world as we’ve known it? That’s really too much to bear.”
I’m sure the GAO knows all too well how Jor-El must have felt when he predicted Krypton’s end. But the disbelief doesn’t change the fact that a crisis is in the making.
The same is true of the USPS. A fiscal cataclysm is more than some can imagine. Still, the realities of today’s electronic communications market will overwhelm the USPS unless more sober minds lead the way.
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