Editorial 4.2, March 2002, by Deirdre Helfferich Post Office Horrors The other day I received a CD in the mail, an increasingly common occurrence. Unlike your average piece of junk mail, I can’t recycle it at the post office, and it doesn’t serve any useful purpose at home, such as providing BTUs in my wood stove. But I took it home anyway, thinking that perhaps I might use it in an art project or something. (This is one of the reasons my house is so full of junk—I can’t bear to throw things out.) I didn’t really look at it until later, when I was cleaning off the kitchen table. "NEVER GO TO THE POST OFFICE AGAIN!" yelled the label on the the CD package. "The way things should go," asserted another. How odd, I thought. Don’t they like going to the post office? I always have fun there. I like to hang out and talk with my neighbors while we’re collecting packages or buying stamps. The bulletin board always has interesting items on it, and the local artists have nice stuff on the walls. Why should things go some other way, using some isolated postage-on-a-disk method, where all you get is a way to post something to a box, with no chance to socialize and find out what’s going on? What’s so fun about that? Going to the post office is a pleasure, not a chore. Really bad advertising campaign, I thought. And then I remembered the last time I went to the College post office. Nightmarish, that was. For some reason, the post office beuracracy has decided that small, local post offices, where the people know you and you know them, are a terribly inefficient way to do business. So most post offices are giant machine-like tools for getting the mail through, and the staff has a hard time getting to know anybody but the most devoted of regulars. It can’t be good for postal employees to work in that kind of rush-rush impersonal environment. A small place is as good for them as it is for the patrons. And I’m not so sure it’s all that efficient, either. Put in a change of address form, say from Fairbanks to Ester, and your mail goes from Fairbanks to Anchorage and then back to Fairbanks and then to Ester. That’s because the major sorting center in Alaska is in Anchorage, and in the name of centralization (often confused with efficiency), the mail gets to ride around for a while before it gets to you. Silly. And since none of the post office employees know who you are or who gets their mail at your box, you’re likely to get mail with somebody else’s name (and occasionally with somebody else’s post office box, too) stuck in your box. I’m quite happy with our local post office. It’s a pleasant place, and I know the folks who work there, and they know me. They don’t have that stretched-tight look that I see on the faces of some of the postal employees downtown, who quite obviously have to deal with so many people and so much mail that they can’t take the time to really get to know their customers, much less take a breather. So I can see why, what with the grand plans that the postal powers that be have saddled the nation with, that postal patrons everywhere would hate to go to the post office to buy stamps. Sad when an organization has to play on its unpleasantness to get people to buy its products, isn’t it? I think that perhaps the U.S. Postal Service should take a lesson from small post offices like ours, and rethink the approach they are taking in trying to increase customer satisfaction and sales. Perhaps the post office should open more offices, not less, and make them smaller. Perhaps they should make the mail delivery and collection points human, and make the mail sorting centers just that: sorting centers, not post offices. People might not dread going to the post office anymore. What kind of business can survive when the thought of going to visit it is so horrible that people look for ways to avoid it? Think: It’s easy for madmen to be anonymous and send bombs through the mail when no one at the giant sorting center they go to recognizes them. It’s harder for madmen to depersonalize their victims when even the postmaster can say howdy and call them by name when they step in the door. Think: Convenience is nice, but so is human contact. Suppose you had them combined? If there were tiny local post offices, where people knew each other, wouldn’t this help develop local customer loyalty, and community pride, as it has in Ester? A sense of community is important to the success of any endeavor—and local access is very convenient. The College post office used to have that kind of rapport with its customers, but no more. Suppose there were a post office on Chena Ridge, and one on Chena Pump, and one in College, and one in Aurora, and one in Lemeta? The Geist Road post office could be a sorting center and local post office, and the outlying post offices, including the University post office, would be part of the lubrication that gets neighbors talking to each other and actually WANTING to visit the post office. Imagine that. | ||
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