Email And Postal Services 3434

Fred is just like any other normal American In the United States, he has kids, afamily, and, before yesterday, a job to support them. According to an article byStephen Barr that appeared in the Washington Post, this sort of thing will behappening to over 9,000 American postal employees this year due to layoffs(Barrn.

pag.). Many people believe that E-mail is a godsend but this is what isresponsible for the continuous changes that the postal service is having to maketo stay in business. To stop the postal service from going out of businessduring the next five years they have started many new programs such as TimeStamp, E-Bill, their own special E-mail service, and even increasing the priceof the stamp. Currently the postal service has been working like crazy to keepup with the 17 billion dollar lose of the 65 billion dollars that they wereexpected to receive this year to stop them from going "redline"(Stephenn. pag.

).This is a huge task for people like Carolyn Monnerat, the budget andfinance manager at the Saint Paul Post Office who says that she is, "justnot sure what will happen to the approximately eight hundred thousand employeesif our company dose go out of business. It is a big enough task right now justhaving to keep on having to rearrange the budget we have to work with as wecontinually come up short on money. I just have to pray that some of our newprograms such as Time Stamp will do something to help dig us out of this hole weare in that just keeps getting continually deeper"(Monnerat n.

pag.). Thisfailure made the postal service rethink about new programs they could create tostay in business. This eventually brought around the idea of the postalservice's E-Bill program. According to Postmaster General, William J.

Henderson,their new Time Stamp program will work on the basis of providing customers theoption of sending sensitive E-mail over the net with an encrypted code of thetime and date and where the E-mail originated from. If this code was not foundon the E-mail that you then receive you would be able to know that someone elsehad intercepted your E-mail and possibly even changed the information that iswritten in it. According to an Arlington Morning News article written by MichaelHines, this program is expected to bring in over three million dollars thisyear. But since it costs over forty cents per E-mail it is expected to only beused by major companies such as banks and credit card companies that can absorbthis exorbitant price(Hines n. pag.

). This is why the postal service has decidedto expand their E-commerce programs. The newest tactic that the Postal Servicehas just started up to aid in their struggle to stay in business is calledE-Bill. The new E-Bill service will be a "fast and simple new program[that] lets consumers send and receive bills electronically through the PostalService web site. If a company or person will not accept electronic payments thePostal Service will simply print out and mail them a check.

Many people believethat this new service will help save many procrastinators by in away offeringthem their own accountant to worry about their bills"(Barr n. pag.). Thisservice has an estimated setup cost of over 3.

6 billion dollars to heir the helpand buy the equipment that will be needed to run it. Many height ranking postalofficials such as Dan Luther, Post Master of Ohio, have argued that it is nicethat people are trying to save the company from the wrath of E-mail but at thecost of this new E-Bill program we will just lower our budget evenmore"(Hines n. pag.). Along with this major attempt to keep on fighting theeffects of E-mail they have also thought about giving up traditional maildelivery and become a company based on the sending of E-mails. The new E-mailworld of the Postal Service would "…(give) people a E-mail address thatwould match their street address.

If some one did not have access to theInternet (the Postal Service) would hand deliver the message inperson"(Barr n. pag.). This may have more impact than the postal serviceexpects.

The major problem that it would cause is to make the public ask andstart to question if they really want to pay money for the luxury of having thesame E-mail address as their street address or if they would rather just go witha company like hot mail that would give them free E-mail service. Very fewpeople right now would probably pay money for something they can already get forfree. With this sort of thing already set in place the Postal Service will stillnot be able to fully get out of their hole, that is why during the last year thePostal Service has raised the price of a first-class letter from 32 cents to 33cents. “Many people,” according to an E-mail from the Postal Servicescustomer response department “fail to under stand just what the process isthat a letter goes through. If they understood this process a little bit betterthey might just start to understand why we have to charge 33 cents to send aletter.

” Most people believe that hen they drop off a letter in a mailbox itis instantly forwarded to the mailbox of the recipient. But this is not fullytrue. The first step that dose occur is that someone dose drop off a letter in amail 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 1000miles away, where the address is read by an optical reader and placed on a truckor 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 intoeffect.

“For the original price of just 33 cents a letter could be sent allthe way to someone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Most people would not evenwant to see the bill for a phone call or package sent by FedEx to a place likethis, 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 lifethough if they went out of business. Others tend to get mad when having to payso much for stamps but they fail to understand that no tax dollars go intofunding the postal service, that is why the price of a stamp may seem veryexorbitant even thought it is not.

This also starts to create problems for thenational economy if the postal service goes out of business because thegovernment would not be able to save them, thus allowing companies like FedEx tomonopolize and charge what ever they want to the public. It would also add anextra eight hundred thousand people on to welfare that Americans would have tosupport. 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 servicethen originally projected. They have come to the realization that if theseprograms are not fully successful the national economy could be drastically hurtby the postal service going out of business and that their companies may be thenext ones to suffer the same fate do to the changing world of technology.

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UMI/Bell and Howell. 9 May 2000. Barr,Stephen. “Postal Service Unveils E-Payment Program; Agency Partners With 2Internet Firms.” Washington Post 6 April 2000, E2: PRO-QUEST Direct.

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