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“Thank God for Amazon”
Cliff Island is 10 miles from Portland, Maine, in Casco Bay, but it feels farther away. The trip by ferry can take an hour and a half because the crew stops at several other islands along the way, dropping off passengers, groceries, and the mail. Once you arrive, it’s hard to avoid the Cliff Island post office, which is just beyond the town dock, on the first floor of the recreation center. For 14 years, Anna Dyer, a soft-spoken woman with glasses and graying hair, was the island postmaster and a local institution. She knew everything about the island’s nearly 60 year-round residents and quite a bit about the 250 summer people. She knew that the older people didn’t like it when the USPS put Elvis Presley on a stamp. “He’s a druggie,” one woman complained. “It’s outrageous that he’s on a stamp.”
“That’s fine,” Dyer answered, “but you know, everybody has their own ideas about that.”
She had to enforce the USPS’s rules, which became more rigid after 9/11 and the anthrax scare. There was no door-to-door delivery on Cliff Island, so everybody needed a post office box. Now Dyer had to ask people who wanted one for their IDs, even though she had known most of the islanders all her life. One woman refused to show her driver’s license. “I’ve known you since you were a baby,” she told Dyer. Dyer apologized, but insisted on seeing it anyway. “It was a tough transition for the community,” she says. “Back in the day, it was a little bit looser.”
Over time, Dyer came to know many people’s secrets too. They came in for their mail and ended up talking about their problems. “I always thought I was the island psychiatrist,” she says. “I think it was because people felt comfortable with me. They knew that things they said would never go further.”
As time went on, Dyer had a complaint of her own. People were still coming in to check their mailboxes and confide in her, but they weren’t buying anything. “People are using the computer to pay bills or they have auto-pay,” she says. “There were days at the post office where I never sold a stamp.” It was painful for Dyer. She loved using the mail, sending everybody on the island birthday cards, Halloween cards, Valentine’s Day cards, and Christmas cards, carefully selecting the right stamps for the recipients. Dyer even had a pen pal in Scotland, with whom she had been exchanging letters since 1959. Her Scottish friend wanted to switch to e-mail now, but Dyer couldn’t bring herself to do that.
Dyer felt the effects of the disappearing mail in other ways too. When she took over the post office in 1998, the USPS’s district office in Portland was full of managers. But so many left because of budget cuts that it became difficult for Dyer to get anyone on the phone when she had a problem. So Dyer kept in touch with the other island postmasters in Casco Bay. If one of them had a problem with the office computer or the credit card machine, they would solve it together.
In July 2011, Dyer took the ferry into Portland with her husband, Bruce, who had a dentist’s appointment. While Anna waited in the reception area, she checked her cell phone messages. Her supervisor had left one, saying that the Cliff Island post office was on a list of 3,700 that the USPS might close. Dyer had figured something like this would happen one day. Still, she was shocked. Cliff Island needed daily mail delivery. Without it, she feared, the island would become a more remote and less desirable place to live.
Dyer telephoned the other island postmasters to see what they had heard and found that their post offices were on the closure list too. Patrick Donahoe, the new postmaster general, said he was doing this to save the USPS, although many people would accuse him of trying to destroy it.
“Are you a fan of the Allman Brothers?” Donahoe asked. “They used to sing that song ‘One Way Out.’ There’s a way out.” It was early April 2011, and he sat in a blue leather chair in his wood-paneled office, surrounded by postal artifacts. There was a portrait of Benjamin Franklin on loan from the Smithsonian Institution and a bronze statue of a Pony Express rider. An automotive enthusiast, Donahoe had decorated his office with framed images of hot rod stamps.
A tall, broad-shouldered native of Pittsburgh with curly brown hair, Donahoe was surprisingly upbeat for someone in charge of an agency on the verge of bankruptcy. He conceded that letters were disappearing, but junk mail was coming back as the economy recovered from the recession, and packages continued to rise with the expanding e-commerce market.
Donahoe had a plan to shrink the USPS so it could survive on the remaining mail stream. He wanted to end Saturday delivery, which he said would save $3 billion dollars a year. Donahoe hoped to close money-losing post offices and shutter processing plants that were no longer needed. He was also negotiating new union contracts enabling the USPS to hire new workers at lower salaries. “Crisis, unfortunately, opens doors that ordinarily wouldn’t be open to us,” he said.
Donahoe was no stranger to anybody in the world of mail. He had spent his entire adult life in the postal service. In 1976, Donahoe was a 20-year-old student at the University of Pittsburgh. He had an after-school job at a W. T. Grant department store that paid $2.25 an hour. His uncle, a letter carrier, told him he could do better. “You ought to take the postal test,” he told Donahoe. “The pay is $4.76 an hour.” Donahoe breezed through the exam and started working afternoons at Pittsburgh’s central sorting plant. He told himself he would stay until he graduated from college. “I just never left,” he says, chuckling. “That’s the story of a lot of people here.”
The enormity of the postal service fascinated Donahoe. Every evening, trucks arrived at the plant with one million pieces of mail from Pittsburgh and the surrounding cities in western Pennsylvania. Donahoe and his coworkers sorted it by zip code and loaded it onto another fleet so it would be delivered all over the world. He felt a sense of achievement every night when it was done. Donahoe soon became a manager, overseeing men who operated 16 mechanical letter-sorting machines. When a postal worker died in a vehicular accident, Donahoe was charged with getting thousands of mail trucks inspected so it wouldn’t happen again. As he put it, he was “trying to get things organized in a world that’s not terribly organized.”
Over the years, Donahoe became known as a crisis manager who could parachute into a dysfunctional district and get it running smoothly. In 1993, the USPS put him in charge of the Capitol district in Washington, D.C., where five out of ten letters arrived late. Clerks were rude to customers. Employees told congressional investigators that a high percentage of their coworkers were either drunk or stoned on the job. Donahoe discovered that the optical character readers were overriding bar codes and sending letters to the wrong addresses. “You had mail going all over the place for years!” Donahoe says. “People were like, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ I was like, ‘Ah, yes, there is!’” He had the clerks play role-playing games with each other so they would learn to be more polite to stamp buyers. When Donahoe departed in 1997, the district’s on-time delivery rate had reached nine out of ten letters. He says the district’s customer satisfaction scores had risen from “the mid-50s to up to the 90s.”
When he became chief operating officer in 2001, Donahoe oversaw the cleanup of anthrax-contaminated facilities and the placement of biohazard detection systems. He also unveiled a plan to cut costs by $1 billon a year, which made his senior vice presidents gasp. There was only one way to get there. Eighty percent of every dollar spent by the USPS went to employees’ salaries and benefits. Donahoe had to reduce the number of employees through attrition. Remarkably some plant managers still let clerks sort mail by hand because they didn’t want them to lose their jobs. Donahoe put a stop to that. “It was like, push that volume into machines,” he says. In 2000, the USPS had 901,238 employees. By the end of the decade, there were 671,687.
It would be up to Donahoe to sell his remedies to the American public and, more important, to their elected officials. He faced a divided Congress. Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate. Their party received the vast amount of co
ntributions from postal workers’ unions in the 2010 midterm election, so they were eager to support legislation that protected jobs. Senator Thomas Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, introduced a bill in May 2011 that would have relieved the postal service of its annual prefunding payment, sparing it the need to make painful cuts. “If we do no nothing, we face a future without the valuable services that the postal service provides,” Carper said.
The Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which had been elected the previous year, was less charitably inclined. Darrell Issa, a congressman from Southern California, was now chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which had jurisdiction over the USPS. He argued that anything that relieved the postal service of its $48 billion future health care obligation would be a taxpayer-funded “bailout.” Instead, Issa wanted to treat the USPS’s pending default as a bankruptcy. He proposed legislation to create a commission that would take over the agency’s finances, nullify its union contracts, and lay off large numbers of employees. He advocated closing two post offices in every congressional district, although he sounded nervous about it. “Let’s hope there’s not one—or three—in mine,” Issa said at a hearing. (A spokesman for Issa said he was trying to “introduce a bit of levity” into the proceedings and was fully in favor of closing post offices.)
Meanwhile, the White House seemed determined not to get involved. Two years earlier, President Barack Obama had offhandedly expressed impatience with the perennially troubled USPS at a rally for his health care proposal in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine,” he joked. “It’s the post office that’s always having problems.” The NALC responded with an angry letter accusing the president of giving the agency “a kick in the chest.” Now Obama remained silent, even though the White House quietly inserted language in its federal budget proposal absolving the USPS of all but $1.5 billion of the mandatory 2011 payment. That would enable it to muddle through for another year.
That July, Donahoe announced a list of 3,700 post offices under consideration for closing and said he hoped to make a final decision by the end of the year. He said the plan would save the USPS $500 million a year and argued that it didn’t need as many post offices at a time when more than 35 percent of the postal service’s stamp sales came from grocery stores, drugstores, office supply stores, ATMs, and the agency’s own website, adding that the postal service would allow local store owners to sell stamps and accept packages in affected towns to soften the blow.
Many of the post offices on Donahoe’s list were in forgotten towns with evocative names like Odd, West Virginia and Sleetmute, Alaska. Their residents may have purchased fewer stamps, but they couldn’t imagine losing their local post office. People in small towns tended to think of their post office as a community center, a place where they mingle with their neighbors. In many parts of rural America, it was one of few places still open on the main street.
On a snowy Friday in November 2011, I drove to Redfield, New York, an hour north of Syracuse. Redfield had 550 residents and a post office on the closure list, and not much else. The hotel where people once held wedding receptions had closed after a fire several years before and never reopened. People driving through Redfield stopped at the nearby convenience store only to see a sign indicating that it was no longer in business. Locals said the owner had suffered a stroke the previous year and no one else had wanted to sell cigarettes and lottery tickets. There was a bar with a Budweiser sign outside welcoming hunters, but other than that, only the post office on the town square showed signs of life.
The following day, the sun came out and townspeople converged on the post office to check their P.O. boxes and mail packages. In Redfield, at least, the Saturday morning trip into town to get the mail was still a ritual. The recurring theme from the residents was that Redfield was dying and, without the post office, most people would leave. There was no cell phone service in the town. If people wanted to pay their bills on the Internet, they had to use slow dial-up connections. In the 1960s, rural Americans worried that their towns would lose their names to the zip code. These days, the people of Redfield feared losing their zip code if the post office closed.
The U.S. Postal Service assured Redfield’s citizens that they would get home delivery if the post office was shut down, but that didn’t make anybody happy. Redfield typically gets several feet of snow in the winter, and it buries people’s mailboxes. So nearly everybody had a P.O. box. “This morning, there were 10 inches of new snow,” said Tanya Yerdon, the town supervisor. “I go out and plow and the last thing I want to worry about is hitting the damn mailbox.”
Similar complaints, large and small, were heard in the other towns with endangered post offices. In South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, angry residents protested the proposed closing of their local post office at a meeting with USPS officials. “We are adamantly opposed to it,” said Dana Grubb, president of the local historical society. In many towns, residents circulated petitions. “We’re not going to take this lying down,” said Philip Lack, a retired college professor in Orchard, Iowa. “Besides the social aspect, there is also a community bulletin board where people can see what’s going on. It’s just a nice thing to have in town.” In Breaks, Virginia, Keith Mullins, a retired coal miner, decried the USPS’s plan. “We ain’t started carrying no picket signs or throwing rocks yet,” he said. “Maybe in the future.”
In December, twenty Democratic senators wrote to Donahoe asking him to delay his ruling for five months. Shortly afterward, Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, invited Donahoe to visit Ingomar, a town in his state with an endangered post office. In April, Baucus paraded Donahoe through the tiny post office, trailed by the local press corps. Then Baucus and Donahoe spoke to 150 anxious people in the school gymnasium. Donahoe listened patiently as the silver-haired senator played to the crowd. “It doesn’t make sense for the financial problems of the postal service to be solved on the backs of the rural communities of America,” Baucus said. He noted that the USPS operated 50 post offices in the nation’s capital and wondered why Donahoe didn’t close some of those instead.
Donahoe tried to explain the Internet had devastated the postal service’s most profitable business. “We’ve lost about 27 percent of our first-class mail,” he said.
But most of his listeners didn’t seem interested in the postal service’s problems. “I need you to really consider what we are saying,” said a woman from a town with no Internet service. “People need their rural post offices.”
Another woman said the USPS needed to start selling merchandise in post offices again as it had in the 1990s. “You used to sell teacups and T-shirts,” she said. “That was awesome.”
“We’ve had some issues with people not wanting us to do that,” Donahoe said.
Baucus made Donahoe promise in front of the crowd that he wouldn’t make a final decision on his post office closing plan without consulting the Senate first. By then, it was an academic point anyway. The following month, Donahoe scrapped his closure plan and announced another to reduce window hours in 13,000 rural post offices, in some cases to as few as two hours a day. Ultimately, he said the USPS would save the same amount of money, but the capitulation showed how weak the postmaster general was politically.
Donahoe’s proposal to end Saturday delivery of letters, but not packages, didn’t fare any better. Polls showed that at least 70 percent of Americans didn’t mind giving up Saturday delivery if it helped the financially troubled USPS. However, the greeting card and junk mail lobbies opposed it. So did letter carriers who feared their jobs were at risk. Donahoe tried to explain his thinking in Buffalo to 2,500 rural letter carriers gathered for their annual convention in August 2012. “Right now, 70% of Americans pay bills online,” Donahoe said. “If you go back to the year 2000, only 5% paid their bills online. That’s a lot of 45-cent stamps, billions of them, which we are no l
onger selling.” But the rural carriers booed Donahoe when he brought up five-day delivery. Then they gave a standing ovation to a local congressman who had called for the postmaster general’s resignation because the USPS was targeting a local mail processing plant for possible closure.
The same summer, Fredric Rolando, president of the NALC, used the issue to rally his members at their convention in Minneapolis. He lamented that the USPS was “insolvent,” that Congress was “deadlocked and dysfunctional . . . especially when it came to postal issues,” and that the White House was “like a deer frozen in the headlights.” Worst of all, Rolando said, Donahoe had joined with House Republicans in a plan to “dismantle the postal service.” “If we let nature take its course, we won’t be fighting five-day delivery,” Rolando warned. “We’ll be fighting three-day delivery or worse. And we won’t be fighting for a better contract. We’ll be fighting for any kind of contract.”
In August 2012, the USPS defaulted on its $5.6 annual retiree health care prepayment. One might have anticipated that this would have a sobering effect on the debate about the USPS’s future. After all, an enormous federal agency, the second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart, had just effectively declared bankruptcy. Perhaps now Donahoe’s pleas for help would get a fair hearing in Washington.
Instead, critics of Donahoe’s plan redoubled their efforts. Lobbyists for Hallmark Cards worked the halls of Congress and pushed members to oppose his plan to eliminate Saturday delivery. Maynard Benjamin, CEO of the Envelope Manufacturers Association, joined the battle. “The least-used delivery day is Tuesday, and mail builds up on Thursdays and Fridays,” he said. “Why did they throw Saturday under the bus?”
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