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I recommend Jonathan Franzen's postal service essay in _How To Be Alone_ for some perspective on how important the postal service actually is. There are a number of business processes that actually touch normal people's lives that depend on postal mail.

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I just sat down and read that article and I didn't get any sort of sense of how important the USPS is. I did get a sense of how badly it's run, how powerful the employees's union is, how quickly (even in 1994) businesses were moving to electronic communication in order to route around the USPS, and how unlikely any sort of improvement is. Franzen even writes, near the end, "The attachement of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia." I have my own nostalgia for post offices of my youth, but the move away from the USPS for important communications has been going on for a long time.

I'm not defending the USPS, just observing things like the tens of millions of people who get bills and checks in the mail.

I believe we need some minimal standard of universal postal service, but I certainly do not believe we need the postal service as it exists today.

Is the essay online?

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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/10/24/1994_10_24_062_T...

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