Word: postalized
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Competing with the Government is supposed to be a hopeless task, but it is all too easy when the rivalry is with the U.S. Postal Service. By now stories of mail lost, delayed or damaged by federal carriers are wearily familiar. They have, if anything, become even more depressing since the USPS was set up 20 months ago to take over from the old Post Office Department. It is no surprise that many businessmen, tired of the slipshod service, are finding private ways to move mail more quickly and cheaply than the Government...
...only a USPS postman can put mail into a home mailbox. So the private carriers often hire housewives or students, for about $1.60 an hour, to stuff their clients' mail into plastic bags and hang the bags on homeowners' doorknobs. One of the biggest of the private postal services offices, Oklahoma City-based Independent Postal System of America, Inc., began operations five years ago. Last year it deployed 5,000 full-time carriers and 13,000 part-timers through 32 states east of the Rockies to deliver mail for clients who paid $3.5 million. The company collected another...
Similar services have sprung up in Charlotte, N.C., Northern Illinois and throughout the Midwest. In Northern California, National Postal Service last year delivered 84 million advertising circulars and other third-class mail for J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, among other customers. N.P.S. was paid $33 per thousand pieces of mail, about $17 less than the USPS charges...
...mail, neither management consultants nor computers seem able to speed letters on their way. James Rademacher, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, complains that a cost-cutting job freeze has reduced the number of letter carriers in the past year by about 10,000. The reorganized Postal Service relied greatly on computerization to improve service, but the result has been slower deliveries and angrier postmen...
Three years later came The Crying of Lot 49, which seemed to be about the search for a 16th century postal service believed to be secretly operating in 20th century America. Random clues flowered into leads that might or might not have had anything to do with the truth...