USPS Will Fade Away in 5 years

When it first became available for mass consumption, the concept of sending messages electronically over the internet through a system called the “E-mail” seemed so alien, suspicious and at best, confusing. If memory serves, the first email systems I used was Hotmail, RocketMail and then Yahoo! Mail.

As if that wasn’t stretching the limits of consumers’ imagination, several years after the successful adoption of emails, online bill paying creeped up through websites like Paypal and few others. Today we have online banking, online credit card payments, online everything. But before we got to where we are today, we did 99% of those activities through regular mail utilizing the good people at our local United States Postal system.

Who can’t remember the times when we stood in line, bought a few stamps, stuck it to our letters and bills, then sending it off. Or if you disliked standing in line, you would have ordered books of stamps and dropped your mail into a USPS drop box. Either way, the postal system dominated written communication of all sorts about 8-10 years ago.

I still remember the reaction I got from friends about paying my bills online. “We can’t trust technology, there are just too many hackers!” - is a very common reaction I get. But look at where we’re at today - 9 out of 10 people I know are paying their bills online or managing some form of their financials over the internet. So the skeptics say that there’s no global adoption, yet. But do we doubt for one minute that globalization of online financial management and communication is inevitable? Thought so.

The BIG Question

I don’t have the answer to this. But many some of you might. Let’s say USPS revenue falls by another 40% over the next few years. How? Email becomes the preferred form of communcation. Online banking becomes de facto. Confidential documents are transfered over securely encrypted web connections. I’ll be a grandpa, but I will know how to use the internet to communicate with my grandkids. Granted most grandparents don’t today. But we will in the next generation!

After all that - what will the USPS do? I have theories - extreme, but I’ve stopped believing in normalcy these days.

• They have the federal government, congress, whatever else political branches exist - to impose a mandotory tax for online communication.
• The USPS becomes the central hub for every email, online payment, ecards and document sent. They charge 0.43 cents for each.
• The USPS completely drops regular postal service and becomes a competitor against FedEX, UPS and DHL - where the regular letter is not part of their core business model.
• The great United States Postal Service fades away in the the abyss - and 2 to 3 generations from now, our great great grand kids won’t know what stamps are! The only visual they have of what the USPS did will be found in the museum of Ancient Communication Collections.

Will it cost more job losses, you betcha. But I’m also confident that our government will do everything they can to slow the bleeding and drag it out as long as possible.

What do you think?