A Murder of Cows

Earlier this year, a photo developing store in my neighborhood posted this notice in its window:

With equanimity uncharacteristic of San Francisco—a city obsessed with keeping everything exactly the same as it is now, while also fancying itself the most forward-looking “progressive” place on earth—the owner accepted that there’s not as much use for film developing anymore, and passport photos aren’t enough to keep food on the table. So the owner understood that Schumpeter’s creative destruction had come to claim his business, concluded he had a good run, and went on to other things.

And so it goes.

The owner did not demand the government subsidize film developers in order to save jobs, preserve a dying art, or protect people who own their dad’s Pentax. He didn’t demand the Board of Supervisors hold a hearing on the loss of film developers, or ask them for legislation banning the eviction of photo stores—good thing, too, because they totally would have done both.

A few days ago, I read that the US Postal Service is $10.2 billion in the hole to the federal government. In 2007 and 2008 they lost a total of $7.8 billion, and the volume of mail is down thirteen percent from the previous year. The agency is seeking permission to cut Saturday delivery, and to get out from under some of their federally-mandated pension obligations. The calls for outright subsidies will not be far behind, and will fall upon the ears of a Congress that has shown little willingness to say no to spending.

Let’s work backwards on this: if the Postal Service didn’t already exist today, would we invent it? Would we say that what America really needs is to forget all this internet malarky and start a nationwide network employing 659,000 people who carry stacks of envelopes from house to house, most of them unwanted? Would the Sierra Club not become apoplectic at the idea of cutting down so many trees, driving so many trucks, flying so many planes, and running so many giant sorting machines, just to move bits of paper around? If President Obama proposed such a scheme, might not Vice President Biden and the cabinet think about invoking Article 4 of the 25th Amendment?

I don’t know about you, but my mail consists mainly of:

• Junk mail, which I don’t want, except for catalogs from a few businesses from which I actually buy things;
• Bills, which I do want (not because I like parting with money, but because if they go unpaid, Bad Things happen);
• Magazines, which are, at least, invited guests;
• the very occasional Greeting Card, which is nice, I suppose;
• more Junk Mail.

None of this is essential in the 21st century. The junk mail isn’t necessary in the first place, and the few places from which I order have web sites which offer everything their catalog does. Magazines, increasingly, can be read online, and there are devices present and planned which aim to make the magazine-reading experience better, electronic, and just about as portable. Online greeting cards lack the personal touch, I’ll admit, but is it really worth billions of tax dollars for a bit of anachronistic charm?

Paying bills online makes more sense all the time. There’s something absurd about the idea that, in order to effect an electronic transfer of money from my bank account to PG&E’s, that PG&E sends me an envelope with a bill, some more ads I don’t want, and a return envelope, after which I take out a check, which has to be custom-printed for me, write the date, PG&E’s name, the amount I’m sending them, my account number, and my signature, put it in the return envelope with a part of the bill I tear off, affix a stamp that costs me 44¢, and carry this envelope down to the blue box on the corner. It’s even more absurd if you’ve seen my crappy handwriting.

I can hear the arguments now: lots of people don’t have computers or internet service, or can’t afford them. Buying cheap-ass computers and cheap internet service for the very poorest would, I think, cost only a fraction of what the total tab on keeping the Postal Service lumbering along is likely to add up to. Buying 30 million netbooks would cost $9 billion, and 30 million is probably way, way over the number needed to cover the people who truly can’t afford such things. A lot of supposedly “poor” people are buying cable TV and even high-speed internet service today.

For parcels, there’s already competition from private businesses like UPS and FedEx. The Postal Service delivers to a few remote locations unserved by private carriers, but by definition, very few people live in places that remote. Perhaps they would need to pay more to get things shipped to them. Living anywhere comes with all kinds of costs which differ from living elsewhere. People in Alaska and Hawaii pay more for milk than people in, say, Wisconsin. People in San Francisco pay vastly more for rent, but vastly less for heating oil, than people in North Dakota. There’s nothing wrong with paying a little extra because someone has to drive out to your farmhouse in Enid, Montana. All choices about where to live come with a unique set of costs and benefits.

UPDATE: I chose Enid, Montana as an example by taking out the 2005 large-scale Rand McNally Road Atlas and looking for someplace ridiculously remote to which UPS and FedEx obviously wouldn’t deliver. I did a little research, and lo and behold, not only do both UPS and FedEx deliver to Enid, Montana, but they both offer overnight service (for a price, natch). So to be outside the delivery zone of UPS and FedEx, you have to live someplace really, really, fucking remote, so we’re talking about a tiny number of people who would lose parcel delivery if USPS went away tomorrow. If you choose to live as a hermit atop a remote mountain, considered by many to be a local myth, it’s not reasonable for you to expect the other 299,999,999 people in the US to pitch in on the cost of hauling the stuff you order from Amazon up some road even goats fear to climb.

While we have competition in parcel delivery—which has led to useful innovations like overnight delivery, which, I stress, did not exist when I was a child—competition in delivery of letters and whatnot (everything under the rubric “First Class Mail”) is illegal. We can’t even begin to know what kinds of services and innovations have been lost because of that lack of competition.

It’s time to pull the plug on the Postal Service’s ventilator and see if the patient can breathe on its own, and give it a dignified burial if it can’t. Open up its First Class Mail monopoly to competition, and let it set its own prices and services, just like UPS and FedEx do. Let them charge extra for Saturday delivery if the market values that service so highly. Or drop the service outright if they don’t. The infinite number of monkeys at Google tell me Canada hasn’t had Saturday delivery since 1969, and I haven’t heard anything about the Canadians rioting in the streets over it, or being driven to suicide by weekend boredom.

One doesn’t have to sleep with a first edition copy of Atlas Shrugged under one’s pillow to see that the Postal Service is long overdue for privatization (maybe we should have realized this when, eleven years ago, the USPS produced the most ironic object ever) At one time, the Postal Service unified America as the sole source of communication between the former colonies; that era is long gone. Like the photo joint, it’s time for USPS to move on to other things.

Can’t someone convince an odd-bedfellows coalition of environmentalists and economic libertarians to join forces to privatize the USPS? Or do both groups raise too much money through junk mail?

Shortly after the photo store closed, the business next door went under too. It was a VCR repair shop. They’ve since been replaced by a cell phone store and a dentist’s office, respectively. They’ve been remodeled, and the buildings are looking nice. When I need a new passport photo, in 2014, I’ll have to walk a little further to get it. Change can be okay; creative destruction offers more than just destruction.