Crossposted, along with other interesting stuff, at Buffalo Ridge Blog
No, the usual bad guys ain't hooking up their truck to the local post office and dragging it off. This theft is far more insidous and downright devious. You may have noted in the mainstream media (MSM) that the Postal Service has released a long list of Post Offices slated for closing, with the usual excuse that the Postal Service is going broke. Truth is, the Postal Service is far from broke and their problems are really caused by stupidity like giving big mailers a four cent discount for doing presorting that would have cost the Postal Service four tenths of a cent to do.
Big city folks probably didn't recognize the Post Offices slated for closure, but to we citizens of the Buffalo Ridge the names were familiar- Arco, Avoca, Darfur, Hanley Falls, Marietta, and Porter in Minnesota and Corona, Peever, Revillo, Wallace, and even Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Oh, and Lowry station in North Minneapolis made the list too. I've delivered mail to that station by the semitrailer load, which blows the Postal Service's argument that these stations don't have enough mail volume to be viable right out of the water. But it seems like every little burg around wealthy Lake Minnetonka has a Post Office, and you guessed it, none of them are on the list of Post Offices to be closed. Looks suspiciously like the Postal Service was looking for closure targets that wouldn't put up much of a fight rather than economically unviable ones.
So for the past few weeks since the closure list came out during my wanderings about the Buffalo Ridge I've been checking out these towns and their Post Offices. Most of them are in towns over 100 population, and each of these towns seems to have at least a half dozen functioning small businesses. In fact one, in a town of barely over a hundred, spreads over a couple city blocks and looked to have over a million dollars worth of revenue work-in-progress spread about the place. For a small business a Post Office is a lifeline- they need one that's reliably open for at least a couple hours every business day so they can get the paperwork that businesses great and small live by out. You also need a secure place to recieve mail, like a Post Office box. And you need all of the above within a few blocks, not ten miles away so you have to close your business for an hour and drive twenty miles every day, maybe losing a walk in customer who dropped by while you were out.
Now the Postal Service will argue that it's to labor intensive to maintain a Post Office in a small town- they'll lead you to believe that you need a clerk, a carrier, a mailhandler, probably a janitor, and a Postmaster to supervise them all. That may have been partly true decades ago, but the Postal unions have agreed to sweeping reforms that allow postal workers to work across traditional craft lines and fulfill multiple roles. Thus the rural carrier who'd be delivering the mail in Tiny Town can pick up the mail at the Little Town Post Office in the morning, transport the mail to Tiny Town, open up the Tiny Town Post Office and serve customers while sorting the mail, close up and deliver the mail around Tiny Town and the surrounding countryside, have a well deserved lunch, reopen the Tiny Town Post Office and sort the outgoing mail while serving customers, close up and transport the outgoing mail to Little Town, and call it a day. Now the Post Office will argue that they still have the cost of maintaining a building... Well, they've already got one and it's going to sit empty for a long time in the little towns if they abandon them.
The Postal Service needs to quit picking on powerless small towns and inner city neighborhoods while subsidizing mass mailers with overly discounted rates. Period.