By Mel Carriere – February 4, 2015
Maybe it’s just me – I’m not an economics major after all, but I can’t understand the business model behind taking a premium product, the one that brings in the largest amount of income by far, and deliberately destroying it. Imagine, if you will, a fast food chain announcing that they are going to increase the drive-thru time so that customers will have to wait for their hamburgers longer, or Microsoft saying that they are going to create a slower operating system in order to save money. Maybe tomorrow the GEICO lizard will declare in his odd Cockney accent that it will now take you 20 minutes instead of 15 to buy car insurance. It’s even weirder when the organization proclaims that this measure will somehow save the business. You don’t need to be a business major, and you don’t need the lady on the Esurance commercial to tell you that that’s not how any of this works.
I thought I was the only one to notice that first class mail really has been slowing down since January fifth of the current year, when the delivery standards were reduced from 1-2 days to 1-3 days. I actually think 1 to 3 days is incredibly optimistic. From personal experience, it seems like 1 to 5 days plus would be a more realistic evaluation for how first class mail has been performing since Postal Management, in its infinite wisdom, killed the one product that is barely keeping it solvent.
I have some first hand anecdotal evidence about how first class mail is doing since the change, but the anecdotes are being increasingly backed up by news that Washington is being bombarded by complaints from people who have been getting their mail on time for the last 40 years and now all of the sudden open their mailboxes not to find a check that has always been there on a particular day or not to find a bill that is way past due.