In the spring of 2013, the NALC organized rallies around the country to save Saturday delivery. In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 1,200 letter carriers and their supporters dressed in red-white-and-blue T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Delivering for America,” and chanted “USA for six days!” As Newsweek had put it in the late 1940s, “postmanitis” was still contagious. Several congressmen spoke at the event. “You are the ones [who] for 200 years have gone to every home in America six days a week tying this country together, building communities, making sure that everybody stays in touch, not skimming the cream off the top and just taking the big money folks or expensive businesses—no, everybody,” said U.S. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat. “That’s what sets you apart.”
At a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Craig Schadewald, vice president of the state’s NALC chapter, shouted, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor the postmaster general’s misguided plan will stay these supporters from protecting six-day delivery.” Meanwhile, in Roanoke, Virginia, 91-year-old James Rademacher came out on a snowy day to join local union members at a protest. “If they open the door here for eliminating one day, we’re in trouble,” he said. He added that he could have been home watching college basketball, but as a former letter carrier, he had to stand up for six-day delivery. “It’s in my blood,” Rademacher said. “That’s why I’m here. I believe in this.”
In March 2013, Republicans from rural districts joined forces with liberal Democrats and reaffirmed six-day delivery in the annual appropriations bill, dooming Donahoe’s cost-cutting plan. It didn’t seem to matter that around the world, postal services were making similar cuts in the face of declining mail volumes. New Zealand announced it would move to three-day delivery in cities and five days in rural areas to avoid a financial crisis. Canada said it would end home delivery in urban areas over the coming five years. Australia Post asked its customers if they would be willing to pay the equivalent of $26 a year for five-day delivery. If not, the Australian postal service wondered if they would accept three-day delivery instead. It decided to stick with free six-day delivery, but the questionnaire suggested that delivery changes were inevitable in a time of dwindling mail.
Meanwhile, many foreign postal services were closing their post offices and moving their operations into local stores. “At the end of this year, we will only have 30 post offices left in Norway,” said Norway Post’s chief executive officer Dag Mejdell in a 2014 interview. “The rest are 1,400 postal shops, which are basically retailers that run small postal operations, where you can buy your stamps and pick up your parcels. That has helped. We used to have 35 mail [processing plants] in Norway. Now we have nine.”
At the same time, foreign postal services were using the savings to develop the kind of digital services that the USPS had tried to introduce in the 1990s only to be slapped down. Itella, the Finnish postal service, keeps a digital archive of its users’ mail for seven years and helps them pay bills online securely. Swiss Post lets customers choose if they want their mail delivered at home in hard copy or scanned and sent to their preferred Internet-connected device. They can also decline junk mail deliveries.
Sweden’s PostNord has developed an app that enables users to send physical postcards from their smartphones. It has also developed technology allowing them to send letters without stamps. PostNord texts them a numerical code that they can jot down on envelopes instead. “The customers are all on these digital interfaces now,” says Anders Åsberg, PostNord’s head of marketing and development. “That’s where the growth is going to be in the future.”
But for Donahoe making any of these changes seemed impossible. In November 2013, he unveiled a plan to open post offices in stores owned by Staples, the office supply chain. “Staples is open seven days a week, they’re open nine o’clock at night,” he said. “They like the foot traffic.” However, Donahoe soon found himself in another labor battle, this time with the APWU. Two months earlier, the union had elected Mark Dimondstein, a former aide to Moe Biller, as its new president. During the election, Dimondstein sued the APWU to get its e-mail lists because he complained it was too expensive to send voters letters. He won the case.
After his electoral victory, Dimondstein called for a boycott of Staples. “This is a direct assault on our jobs and on public postal services,” he said. Union members picketed stores, prompting the American Federation of Teachers to tell its members not to buy back-to-school supplies there. It was too much for Staples; the company canceled its plan for the in-store post offices. The APWU may no longer have had as many members as in Biller’s heyday, but it was still the largest postal workers’ union, with nearly 200,000 members, and it could make life difficult for Donahoe.
Donahoe remained surprisingly ebullient for someone with a myriad of problems. In 2013, the total mail volume fell to 158 billion pieces, roughly the same as it had been a quarter of a century ago, and the USPS defaulted for the second year in a row on its annual $5.6 billion retiree health care prepayment. Congress was still deadlocked on postal reform; there wasn’t much Donahoe could do about that. “We talk to the White House people,” he said. “I’ve met the president, but I’ve not talked to him about it. Believe me, he has much bigger issues than the postal service.”
There was one reason for the postmaster general to be hopeful. Thanks to the rise of online shopping, package volume rose that year by six percent to three billion items. It seemed as though the dying institution still had a pulse. “There’s a little saying that we have,” Donahoe said. “The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away. We’ve lost a substantial part of our letter business, but e-commerce has been great for us.”
The USPS was already delivering smaller parcels for UPS and FedEx. Then in November 2014, Donahoe announced that the USPS would deliver packages on Sundays for Amazon.com, ending the century old ban on Sunday mail delivery. The postal service could manage this because of its new labor contracts, which required new employees to work early mornings, evenings and Sundays when veterans would have been automatically entitled to overtime. In another era, the unions surely would have resisted, but now they conceded that the USPS needed more freedom in the digital age. “We did this with the idea that we were going to have some non-traditional deliveries—evening deliveries, Sunday deliveries,” says Jim Sauber, the NALC’s chief of staff.
That Christmas, UPS and FedEx were overwhelmed by Amazon orders and delivered many of them late, much to the displeasure of the e-commerce giant. The USPS, on the other hand, had a smooth holiday season because of its new Sunday workforce. “We did get a rush of packages at the end, and our people came through,” Donahoe said. “As a matter of fact, we delivered over 100,000 packages on Christmas day.”
Since then, the unlikely relationship between the futuristic retailer and America’s oldest federal agency has only grown closer. In 2014, Amazon built a network of more than 15 sorting centers where it separates packages and then trucks them directly to post offices; the government’s carriers then take them the last mile. Amazon plans to build more of these plants around the country, weaving its operations more intimately into those of the USPS. The postal service won’t say how many packages it carries for Amazon; Amazon doesn’t even respond to calls to its press office about this. But David Vernon, an analyst at Bernstein Research who tracks the shipping industry, estimates that in 2014, the USPS handled 40 percent of Amazon’s packages—almost 150 million—more than either UPS or FedEx.
In October 2014, the USPS started another service with Amazon that harked back to its failed partnership with Time Warner in the 1990s. In cities such as San Francisco and New York, letter carriers arrive on doorsteps as early as 3 am with groceries for Amazon customers who ordered them the night before. “I never thought I would order groceries and have them delivered to my house, but people do it,” Donahoe says. “It’s amazing.”
A visit to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Post Office in Manhattan shows how
Amazon is reshaping the postal service. When the FDR Post Office was completed in 1968, the four-story building on Third Avenue was a post office and a processing center filled with clerks sorting letters, first at pigeonhole cases and later using machines equipped with an optical character reader. The clerks worked three shifts, but as the mail volume dropped, the USPS shut down the building’s processing operation, leaving much of the cavernous building vacant. For a time, it even thought about renting out the space to a big box retailer like Staples. What else could it have done with all that empty space in the heart of Manhattan?
Now the upper floors of FDR Post Office have been converted into package handling operation. Jesse Garrett, a postal service supervisor who oversees Sunday delivery in Manhattan, enjoys seeing the building come back to life. A third-generation postal worker from Oklahoma, the 32-year-old Garrett came to New York City to be a record producer and instead ended up taking a job delivering parcels for the USPS in 2007. “It was down, down, down, bad, bad, bad,” Garrett recalls. “People used to pay bills with first-class mail, and they don’t do that anymore. The post office’s number one product was going away.”
Garrett became a supervisor, and in 2013, the USPS put him in charge of Sunday delivery at the FDR Post Office. “All of a sudden, we became the premiere package delivery company, in large part, due to our partnership with Amazon and our willingness to go to seven days,” he says. “Every day, you hear, ‘Thank God for Amazon.’”
Garrett has assembled a team of recently hired carriers to handle new kinds of delivery from Sunday to same-day to groceries. One is a former Bank of America employee laid off during the financial crisis. Another is an ex-exotic dancer searching for more than tips. Then there is Shante Sapp, a 29-year-old former nurse who wanted a more stable income and soon found herself driving a van in the USPS’s Internet-fueled package delivery service. She has seen only growth at the postal service. “Nobody is really delivering letters anymore,” Sapp says. “It’s mostly junk mail. If you have to send something important, you mail it. but otherwise, that’s all being done electronically now. But parcels are picking up.”
There’s a bleaker aspect to the embrace of Amazon by both the USPS’s management and its unions. For the unions, it’s an endorsement of a company that has long had a fraught relationship with its own rank and file. Amazon warehouse employees in some cases make only $12 an hour, a pittance compared to a veteran postal worker.
For the postal service’s managers, it means increasingly tying their business to a fiercely competitive company led by Jeff Bezos, whose loyalty in the long term is dubious. Amazon already has its own trucks and drivers; it is testing same-day delivery and crowd-sourced delivery, along with its much-publicized experiment with drones. “Amazon will drop us in a heartbeat if they find a better way,” says the NALC’s Sauber. “We can’t just put all our eggs in one basket. We want to become a utility for all retailers, big and small. We want to be a merchant selling to both sides.”
It will only get more challenging for the USPS. It isn’t just battling with FedEx and UPS for customers. Google and eBay are offering same-day delivery to people who shop on their sites. Uber is picking up and dropping off packages for its users. Start-ups like Deliv and Roadie have their own versions of crowdsourced delivery.
The USPS must compete with such fast-moving rivals at a time when it has virtually no money to invest in upgrading its operations. It desperately needs to replace its 190,000 mail trucks, the world’s largest fleet. Most of them are more than 25 years old, and they are configured to carry letters rather than packages. They also lack basic safety features like seat-belt reminders and anti-lock brakes. But it has been estimated that it would cost as much as $5 billion to purchase new ones. The USPS doesn’t have that kind of money.
In November 2014, a year after the announcement of the Amazon deal, Donahoe announced his resignation. Before he departed, he made a farewell speech to a handful of journalists at the National Press Club in Washington. It was an icy January morning, and many reporters didn’t bother taking off take their coats. “It’s a tough day for a letter carrier, especially going up and down steps,” Donahoe said. “Keep them in our thoughts today as they are out there making sure the mail gets delivered.”
Donahoe read his prepared remarks, repeating many of the reforms for which he had failed to win support in Congress. The reporters looked disinterested, checking their e-mail or their Twitter feeds on their laptops. The only one who seemed excited to be there was a writer for Direct Marketing News a junk mail trade publication. He had a buzz cut and an earring and boasted that his publication’s readers were “paying the bills” for the USPS.
As usual, Donahoe was buoyant, but his frustration showed during the question-and-answer period. One writer asked why the postal service didn’t put banks in post offices again. “We don’t know anything about banking,” Donahoe said.
“You don’t know anything about groceries either,” the reporter persisted.
“We know a lot about delivery,” Donahoe said. “We’re the best delivery company in the world. We know more about delivery than anyone else.”
A woman asked Donahoe why he was closing mail processing plants when postal workers’ union officials and their congressional allies objected to it. “When I was a kid starting out in Pittsburgh in 1976, every night Bell Telephone would bring in mail,” Donahoe said. “Remember Bell Telephone? How about Mellon Bank? They would bring mail in. Or Duquesne Power and Light? They are still in business. But every night, in every facility across the country, people would bring in commercial mail. We would sort it and deliver it overnight.”
Donahoe said those days were done. He explained that he was hired to work an afternoon shift that no longer exists throughout the country because there is so little mail. “The bottom line is this,” Donahoe said. “With the exception of the holidays and your birthday, think about your own mailbox. When was the last time you got a piece of mail that had a stamp on it? You don’t get it.”
The questions kept coming and Donahoe’s answer remained the same. “If I take a survey, I’ll bet a lot of people in here don’t pay any bills by mail,” he said. “I hate to say it, but that’s what’s happening.” The room was silent. The reporters looked uncomfortable. Did the outgoing postmaster general just say they were destroying the US Postal Service?
Donahoe had groomed a successor whom he said would be just right for the job. “Who is he?” a senator asked.
“His name is Megan,” Donahoe replied.
On April 7, 2015, Megan Brennan, the nation’s first female postmaster general, appeared onstage at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., with first lady Michelle Obama, talk show host Oprah Winfrey, and poet Nikki Giovanni. They were there to unveil a new Forever stamp honoring the late author Maya Angelou. A former letter carrier from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Brennan was dressed for the occasion in a bright fuchsia jacket and a dark skirt, and she had come with a prepared speech.“ Today,” she said, “Dr. Angelou receives the Postal Service’s highest honor, the commemoration of her image on a United States postage stamp, and yet her life, so meaningful and varied, can hardly be contained within the four corners of a stamp.”
Predictably, Winfrey stole the show, channeling the honoree: “She would have called me up and she would have said ‘Babe, ha ha ha! They’re going to have a stamp with my name and face on it! How incredible is that?’”
Unfortunately, the tribute was marred by the Washington Post’s discovery that Angelou hadn’t actually written the inspirational quote on the stamp. The USPS had used the words of a children’s book author that have sometimes been mistaken for Angelou’s own. “It seemed to many that the folks at the Postal Service had simply believed too readily what they read on the Internet,” the New Yorker wrote. It was too late. The USPS had already printed 80 million of the stamps. It was an awkward beginning for Brennan, but it’s the USPS. “It deliver
s more than 40 percent of the world’s mail like clockwork six days a week, but then something like this happens and people say the USPS can’t do anything right.”
The Angelou stamp was the least of Brennan’s troubles. Packages continued to rise, but first-class mail continued to fall and even junk mail was weakening. In Washington, few people seemed to care or even notice. The only presidential candidate in the 2016 election who talked about the postal service was Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old senator from Vermont and self-proclaimed “Democratic socialist” who had vigorously opposed any of the USPS’s transformation efforts. “We have people in Congress and wealthy corporate interests who want nothing else but to privatize and destroy the United States Postal Service,” Sanders told a cheering crowd of APWU members at an event in Las Vegas. “But we are not going to allow them to do that!”
Sanders, who was facing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, extolled the postal service as an engine of democracy in words that would have resonated with John Wanamaker. “The strength of the postal service, as you all know, and what many people sometimes take for granted, is that the postal service provides universal services, six days a week, to every corners of America, no matter how small, no matter how remote,” Sanders said in his distinctive Brooklyn accent. “In other words, if you are a big business, you get your mail six days a week. If you are a low-income person on a dirt road in a small town in Vermont, you get your mail six days a week.” Sanders didn’t bother to mention that Americans are getting mostly junk mail now.
Even people who admired Sanders’s passionate defense of the USPS found it archaic in today’s world. “The goals are laudable,” said Gene Del Polito, president of the Association of Postal Commerce, the country’s leading group of junk mailers. “But the mail doesn’t hold the place it once held in society. How are we going to pay for it without cuts?”
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