PRIORITY MAIL IS ANYTHING BUT

Chicago Tribune: It's been a rough stretch for the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS has had to react to anthrax attacks, recession, red ink, much higher security costs -- even pipe bombs in rural mailboxes. And now its own embarrassing statistics confirm something many customers have long suspected. That $3.50 you're shelling out for Priority Mail is a big waste of money.
The Wall Street Journal reports that average delivery time for a piece of Priority Mail has now risen to 2.7 days compared with 2.1 days for the average piece of first-class mail.
Post office folks don't take issue with the figures, but they do argue that comparing Priority Mail to first-class mail is like comparing apples to oranges. Almost all first-class mail is letter-size while bulkier parcels make up two-thirds of Priority Mail. Also more than half of first-class mail is local delivery compared with just 19 percent of Priority Mail. With less distance to travel, mail arrives faster.
But the bottom line is that nobody tells you all that at the post office. You have to figure it out for yourself. So here's the deal. You're far better off paying first-class postage of 34 cents to send that thank-you note to grandma in the 'burbs even if it's way late.
Of course, at month's end that first-class postal rate is going up to 37 cents, courtesy of a hike approved in April. But Priority Mail rates are going up too, by an average of 13.5 percent.
Advertising campaign
About a decade ago, the Postal Service was pitching Priority Mail with a flashy 2-2-2 advertising campaign, telling customers they could ship two pounds for $2 with delivery in two days.
Today the postal service is bleeding red ink. Its volume is dropping, its costs exploding. It has launched yet another campaign to try to transform itself into something that is viable for the 21st century. It is vowing to cut $5 billion in costs over the next five years with the loss of 20,000 jobs this year alone.
That will bring employment down to around 755,000. At that level, the USPS is the second largest civilian employer in America, right behind Wal-Mart. And while we're on the subject of Wal-Mart, that retail giant might not be nearly so profitable -- it made $6.67 billion last year -- if it too were congressionally bound to operate in every hamlet in America and forced to home deliver just one class of products.
The Postal Service is free to use this argument when it next lobbies Congress for permission to shut down one of its 38,000 retail outlets or suspend Saturday delivery. We just have one piece of advice: Don't send the message by Priority Mail.