E-mail explosion poses growing threat to post office

This story was published in A-section on Saturday, April 7, 2001.

BY HARRY LEVINS The Postal Service says it may stop Saturday deliveries and close some outlets. Officials blame deficits. But behind those deficits looms a fact of 21st-century life: First-class mail has met world-class computers - and the computers are winning. Only half the mail goes by first class. But first-class stamps bring in 58 cents of every dollar the Postal Service collects. First-class mail carries its own budgetary weight, and then some. Trouble is, demand for first-class stamps is flattening out. In fact, the people at the Postal Service expect demand to start heading down within a few years. When demand slumps, so will revenue. Postal officials blame "electronic diversion." That's a bureaucrat's term for "computers," and for people like Bill Wagner. Bill Wagner has been figuring other people's taxes for 20 years. For the past three tax seasons, he has crunched his numbers at the H&R Block outlet at 1330 Big Bend Square in Twin Oaks. Twenty years ago, Americans put their tax forms in an envelope, stuck on a stamp and sent it off. Now, more and more Americans watch people like Wagner punch the numbers into a computer and file electronically. "More than nine out of 10 of the people I do taxes for file electronically," Wagner says. "People find it more convenient - and the refunds are quicker." This year, the Internal Revenue Service expects 42 million taxpayers to file electronically. That's at least 42 million stamps that will go unsold. At 34 cents a stamp, that's almost $14.3 million in lost sales. (The actual figure is much higher, because many returns cost more to mail.) And taxpayers are hardly the only customers lost by the Postal Service. More and more banking and bill-paying are done electronically, rather than by mail. Each transaction is a stamp sale lost. "We have approximately $17 billion a year at risk from diversion to electronic bill-paying," says spokesman Gerry Kreienkamp of the Postal Service headquarters in Washington. Even fellow bureaucrats in the federal government are going electronic. Kreienkamp notes that more and more, Social Security checks are deposited directly in pensioners' banks, skipping the step of going through the mail in an envelope. "That's millions and millions of stamps," he says. Normally, a boom in business means a boom in mail. When Americans go on a buying spree, they get bills in the mail and pay bills in the mail. A business boom echoes in first-class mail. At least, it used to. In the boom years from 1993 through last year, the American economy grew half again as large. But from 1993 on, first-class mailings grew by only 12.3 percent. Why use 1993 as a starting point? Because 1993 was the last year before the invention of the Internet as we know it - the World Wide Web and its e-mail feature. E-mail has been around since the late '60s. But back then, it was a toy for academic types hooked together in a government-sponsored research network. E-mail began to spread rapidly only in 1994. That's when snazzy graphics turned the staid Internet into the razzle-dazzle Web. The Web drew Americans by the millions to computers - and once there, they discovered the ease and speed of e-mail. That ease and speed were relative secrets as recently as summer 1993. That's when the University of Missouri system appointed a committee of 60 distinguished Missourians to peer into the near future and ask what it held for the university. On the committee was Jean Gaddy Wilson of the Columbia campus's journalism school. At the first meeting, she asked how many of her fellow committee members had e-mail addresses. Only three or four people raised their hands. The rest wore puzzled expressions: E-mail? What's that? Today, about half the households in America are online with computers - and to many of these Americans, e-mail is the main attraction of their computers. In a survey conducted for the government's General Accounting Office last year, 58.7 percent of users with a dial-up hookup called e-mail "extremely important" - the highest figure by far for any computer feature. In the same survey, the percentage of users with a higher-speed broadband hook-up who found e-mail "extremely important" was 65.3 - again, the highest by far. And once computer users discover e-mail, they tend to forget about first-class mail. The Postal Service's Kreienkamp shrugs off the loss of personal letters to e-mail. "Personal letters are just a small part of our first-class volume," he says. "Most of it is business mail." True, most Americans have never written letters with the frequency of, say, the Edwardian Britons chronicled in the hugely popular PBS series "Upstairs, Downstairs." Many a scene featured Lady Bellamy sitting at her desk in the morning room, sipping tea and scribbling page after page of personal letters. But in our era of flattening demand for first-class stamps, every stamp counts. And Paul Hollingshead of Florissant uses fewer and fewer of them. Before he went online with his home computer in 1995, he says, "I'd send maybe a couple of letters a month to my folks in Atlanta." Now, the family - his parents, a brother in St. Charles, a brother in southwestern Ohio and a sister in Canada's Saskatchewan - keeps in touch through e-mail. "My father writes us all by e-mail each Friday," says Hollingshead, a mechanical engineer at Boeing. "That draws a regular response from my sister - and I keep better informed." For Hollingshead, the biggest boon from e-mail is its ability to send snapshots electronically. "I'll take pictures of family events and send them by e-mail or post them on my personal Web site," Hollingshead says. "Before I had the computer, I never sent pictures in the mail." His experience - multiplied by those of millions of computer users - suggests that not every e-mail sent means a stamp lost. The ease of e-mail means that people write more messages than the letters they replace. "But the writing in the e-mail is much shorter," Hollingshead says. E-mail statistics are tough to pin down. It's all a guess. As of last year, one guess put the numbers of e-mail messages churning through America's computer networks at 9.4 billion a day. For a full year, that's 3.4 trillion - a three, a four and 11 zeros. Nobody knows how much of that is "spam," computerese for junk mail. But look at it this way: E-mail moved 3.4 trillion messages last year, while the Postal Service moved 207.8 billion pieces of all sorts of mail. In other words, for every letter that got to an American mailbox, more than 16 e-mail messages got to an American computer. And that ratio is sure to get bigger. Two years ago, the United States had 281.5 million electronic "mailboxes" - e-mail addresses. At the end of last year, the mailbox total had jumped to 439.6 million. That comes to 1 1/2 e-mail addresses for every American. Well, maybe not every American. Out in Twin Oaks at the H&R Block outlet, Wagner recalls one customer - but only one - who insisted on mailing her tax returns the old-fashioned way. Wagner says, "She was an older woman who just turned her nose up and said, 'I don't believe in that computer stuff.'" Reporter Harry Levins:

E-mail: hlevins@post-dispatch.com

Phone: 314-340-8144 Published in the A-section section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Saturday, April 7, 2001. Copyright (C)2001, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2001

Answers

The PO is in trouble but not as much as anyone who would wade through the above.

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2001

'tis so unlike OG to not format...

about the P.O. I hardly ever mailed anything but bills in the last 15 years anyway, and most e-mail is forwarded jokes and junk. Affordable long distance telecommunications did in the post office. JMO.

Dennis

-- Anonymous, April 09, 2001