Email And Postal Services
Fred is just like any other normal American In the United States, he has
kids, a
family, and, before yesterday, a job to support them. According to an
article by
Stephen Barr that appeared in the Washington Post, this sort of
thing will be
happening to over 9,000 American postal employees this year due
to layoffs(Barr
n. pag.). Many people believe that E-mail is a godsend but
this is what is
responsible for the continuous changes that the postal
service is having to make
to stay in business.
To stop the postal
service from going out of business
during the next five years they have
started many new programs such as Time
Stamp, E-Bill, their own special
E-mail service, and even increasing the price
of the stamp. Currently the
postal service has been working like crazy to keep
up with the 17 billion
dollar lose of the 65 billion dollars that they were
expected to receive this
year to stop them from going "redline"(Stephen
n. pag.).This is a huge task
for people like Carolyn Monnerat, the budget and
finance manager at the Saint
Paul Post Office who says that she is, "just
not sure what will happen to the
approximately eight hundred thousand employees
if our company dose go out of
business. It is a big enough task right now just
having to keep on having to
rearrange the budget we have to work with as we
continually come up short on
money. I just have to pray that some of our new
programs such as Time Stamp
will do something to help dig us out of this hole we
are in that just keeps
getting continually deeper"(Monnerat n. pag.). This
failure made the postal
service rethink about new programs they could create to
stay in business.
This eventually brought around the idea of the postal
service's E-Bill
program. According to Postmaster General, William J. Henderson,
their new
Time Stamp program will work on the basis of providing customers the
option
of sending sensitive E-mail over the net with an encrypted code of the
time
and date and where the E-mail originated from. If this code was not found
on
the E-mail that you then receive you would be able to know that someone
else
had intercepted your E-mail and possibly even changed the information
that is
written in it. According to an Arlington Morning News article written
by Michael
Hines, this program is expected to bring in over three million
dollars this
year. But since it costs over forty cents per E-mail it is
expected to only be
used by major companies such as banks and credit card
companies that can absorb
this exorbitant price(Hines n. pag.). This is why
the postal service has decided
to expand their E-commerce programs. The
newest tactic that the Postal Service
has just started up to aid in their
struggle to stay in business is called
E-Bill. The new E-Bill service
will be a "fast and simple new program
[that] lets consumers send and receive
bills electronically through the Postal
Service web site. If a company or
person will not accept electronic payments the
Postal Service will simply
print out and mail them a check. Many people believe
that this new service
will help save many procrastinators by in away offering
them their own
accountant to worry about their bills"(Barr n. pag.). This
service has an
estimated setup cost of over 3.6 billion dollars to heir the help
and buy the
equipment that will be needed to run it. Many height ranking postal
officials
such as Dan Luther, Post Master of Ohio, have argued that it is nice
that
people are trying to save the company from the wrath of E-mail but at
the
cost of this new E-Bill program we will just lower our budget
even
more"(Hines n. pag.). Along with this major attempt to keep on fighting
the
effects of E-mail they have also thought about giving up traditional
mail
delivery and become a company based on the sending of E-mails. The new
E-mail
world of the Postal Service would "...(give) people a E-mail address
that
would match their street address. If some one did not have access to
the
Internet (the Postal Service) would hand deliver the message
in
person"(Barr n. pag.). This may have more impact than the postal
service
expects. The major problem that it would cause is to make the public
ask and
start to question if they really want to pay money for the luxury of
having the
same E-mail address as their street address or if they would
rather just go with
a company like hot mail that would give them free E-mail
service. Very few
people right now would probably pay money for something
they can already get for
free. With this sort of thing already set in place
the Postal Service will still
not be able to fully get out of their hole,
that is why during the last year the
Postal Service has raised the price
of a first-class letter from 32 cents to 33
cents. "Many people," according
to an E-mail from the Postal Services
customer response department "fail to
under stand just what the process is
that a letter goes through. If they
understood this process a little bit better
they might just start to
understand why we have to charge 33 cents to send a
letter." Most people
believe that hen they drop off a letter in a mailbox it
is instantly
forwarded to the mailbox of the recipient. But this is not fully
true. The
first step that dose occur is that someone dose drop off a letter in a
mail
box and a mail man picks it up and brings it back to the local post
office.
Next the letter is delivered to a larger processing plant, that
may be over 1000
miles away, where the address is read by an optical reader
and placed on a truck
or plane to go to the local post office where it is
delivered to the recreant.
This is where real problems in the price of
mail handling start to come into
effect. "For the original price of just 33
cents a letter could be sent all
the way to someone at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon. Most people would not even
want to see the bill for a phone
call or package sent by FedEx to a place like
this, yet the Postal Service
still will do this just for 33 cents"(Barr n. pag.).
Many fail to think
of what impact the postal service would have on their life
though if they
went out of business. Others tend to get mad when having to pay
so much for
stamps but they fail to understand that no tax dollars go into
funding the
postal service, that is why the price of a stamp may seem very
exorbitant
even thought it is not. This also starts to create problems for the
national
economy if the postal service goes out of business because the
government
would not be able to save them, thus allowing companies like FedEx
to
monopolize and charge what ever they want to the public. It would also add
an
extra eight hundred thousand people on to welfare that Americans would
have to
support. Many Americans are hopping that programs such as Time Stamp,
E-Bill,
E-mail and the new price raise will be more effective for the
postal service
then originally projected. They have come to the realization
that if these
programs are not fully successful the national economy could be
drastically hurt
by the postal service going out of business and that their
companies may be the
next ones to suffer the same fate do to the changing
world of technology.
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