Email And Postal Services Essay, Research Paper

Fred is just like any other normal American In the United States, he has kids, a

family, and, before yesterday, a job to support them. According to an article by

Stephen Barr that appeared in the Washington Post, this sort of thing will be

happening to over 9,000 American postal employees this year due to layoffs(Barr

n. pag.). Many people believe that E-mail is a godsend but this is what is

responsible for the continuous changes that the postal service is having to make

to stay in business. To stop the postal service from going out of business

during the next five years they have started many new programs such as Time

Stamp, E-Bill, their own special E-mail service, and even increasing the price

of the stamp. Currently the postal service has been working like crazy to keep

up with the 17 billion dollar lose of the 65 billion dollars that they were

expected to receive this year to stop them from going "redline"(Stephen

n. pag.).This is a huge task for people like Carolyn Monnerat, the budget and

finance manager at the Saint Paul Post Office who says that she is, "just

not sure what will happen to the approximately eight hundred thousand employees

if our company dose go out of business. It is a big enough task right now just

having to keep on having to rearrange the budget we have to work with as we

continually come up short on money. I just have to pray that some of our new

programs such as Time Stamp will do something to help dig us out of this hole we

are in that just keeps getting continually deeper"(Monnerat n. pag.). This

failure made the postal service rethink about new programs they could create to

stay in business. This eventually brought around the idea of the postal

service’s E-Bill program. According to Postmaster General, William J. Henderson,

their new Time Stamp program will work on the basis of providing customers the

option of sending sensitive E-mail over the net with an encrypted code of the

time and date and where the E-mail originated from. If this code was not found

on the E-mail that you then receive you would be able to know that someone else

had intercepted your E-mail and possibly even changed the information that is

written in it. According to an Arlington Morning News article written by Michael

Hines, this program is expected to bring in over three million dollars this

year. But since it costs over forty cents per E-mail it is expected to only be

used by major companies such as banks and credit card companies that can absorb

this exorbitant price(Hines n. pag.). This is why the postal service has decided

to expand their E-commerce programs. The newest tactic that the Postal Service

has just started up to aid in their struggle to stay in business is called

E-Bill. The new E-Bill service will be a "fast and simple new program

[that] lets consumers send and receive bills electronically through the Postal

Service web site. If a company or person will not accept electronic payments the

Postal Service will simply print out and mail them a check. Many people believe

that this new service will help save many procrastinators by in away offering

them their own accountant to worry about their bills"(Barr n. pag.). This

service has an estimated setup cost of over 3.6 billion dollars to heir the help

and buy the equipment that will be needed to run it. Many height ranking postal

officials such as Dan Luther, Post Master of Ohio, have argued that it is nice

that people are trying to save the company from the wrath of E-mail but at the

cost of this new E-Bill program we will just lower our budget even

more"(Hines n. pag.). Along with this major attempt to keep on fighting the

effects of E-mail they have also thought about giving up traditional mail

delivery and become a company based on the sending of E-mails. The new E-mail

world of the Postal Service would "?(give) people a E-mail address that

would match their street address. If some one did not have access to the

Internet (the Postal Service) would hand deliver the message in

person"(Barr n. pag.). This may have more impact than the postal service

expects. The major problem that it would cause is to make the public ask and

start to question if they really want to pay money for the luxury of having the

same E-mail address as their street address or if they would rather just go with

a company like hot mail that would give them free E-mail service. Very few

people right now would probably pay money for something they can already get for

free. With this sort of thing already set in place the Postal Service will still

not be able to fully get out of their hole, that is why during the last year the

Postal Service has raised the price of a first-class letter from 32 cents to 33

cents. ?Many people,? according to an E-mail from the Postal Services

customer response department ?fail to under stand just what the process is

that a letter goes through. If they understood this process a little bit better

they might just start to understand why we have to charge 33 cents to send a

letter.? Most people believe that hen they drop off a letter in a mailbox it

is instantly forwarded to the mailbox of the recipient. But this is not fully

true. The first step that dose occur is that someone dose drop off a letter in a

mail 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 1000

miles away, where the address is read by an optical reader and placed on a truck

or 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 into

effect. ?For the original price of just 33 cents a letter could be sent all

the way to someone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Most people would not even

want to see the bill for a phone call or package sent by FedEx to a place like

this, 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 life

though if they went out of business. Others tend to get mad when having to pay

so much for stamps but they fail to understand that no tax dollars go into

funding the postal service, that is why the price of a stamp may seem very

exorbitant even thought it is not. This also starts to create problems for the

national economy if the postal service goes out of business because the

government would not be able to save them, thus allowing companies like FedEx to

monopolize and charge what ever they want to the public. It would also add an

extra eight hundred thousand people on to welfare that Americans would have to

support. 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 service

then originally projected. They have come to the realization that if these

programs are not fully successful the national economy could be drastically hurt

by the postal service going out of business and that their companies may be the

next ones to suffer the same fate do to the changing world of technology.

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