Tribune/Debra Reid - U.S. Postal Service mail carrier Chet Wychulis is proud to provide, in his opinion, the least expensive and most dependable mail service available.
Tribune/Debra Reid - Mailman Chet Wychulis scans a package for a customer along his Sparks route. Wychulis believes he may be the only regular visitor for some of his senior customers.
“Dogs usually know when I come, too,” Wychulis said with a laugh. “Although, I get along with most of them.”
Wychulis, a mail carrier for 15 years, knows the ins and outs of the postal service. The east coast native moved to northern Nevada from Pennsylvania five years ago and, rain or shine, loves his job.
“Getting out and meeting people is great,” Wychulis said. “And afterall, the weather isn’t that bad here. You gotta remember, I’m from Pennsylvania.”
Postal services in Pennsylvania, Nevada and everywhere between, though, are facing the same problem: mail volume is down.
Even Wychulis’ bag, he admits, is lighter these days, carrying fewer and fewere credit card bills and around Christmas time, fewer holiday cards.
“It’s a combination of a lot of things, but the economy has a lot to do with it,” Wychulis said. “People are cutting back.”
And as the U.S. Postal Service is not funded by tax dollars, but by the sale of postal products and services, they are not immune to such cutbacks as the entire national service has lost $7.9 billion over the last two years, a USA Today article reported.
In Sparks alone, mail volume is down by 13.2 percent, Sparks Postmaster Gary Fradd said. To combat this, routes in Sparks have been consolidated and rearranged, giving each mail carrier extra mail, extra stops and extra territory to cover.
Wychulis’ route, for example, added 24 stops, making for an extra 10 minutes on the clock and bringing his total stops to 436, he said.
That 436 is just one part of the 52,856 residents and businesses that the Sparks postal service delivers to, but Fradd assures no layoffs have been made.
“We’ve been trying to deal with this in attrition,” Fradd said, explaining that while no employees have been fired, there have been no rehires either. “We do have a reduction in the work force though.”
Nationally, this trend is no different, David Rupert, a USPS spokesman said, and he only expects more to continue.
“We are raising our rates in May for first-class letters, periodicals, magazines,” Rupert said. “For most people, the price of a letter will go up from 42 cents to 44 cents. With that (in place), we’re (still) looking at a $6 billion loss for this year.”
And just a few weeks ago, USPS asked Congress for a time extension on paying into its law-mandated $5.6 billion employee health benefits fund, thereby allowing them to break somewhat even costs for the year.
What garnered the headlines was that USPS warned at that time that if such reprieve wasn’t granted, then drastic measures of reducing service days from six to five might have to be discussed next.
No word has come back from Congress in regards to the reprieve.
“What we’re doing right now is managing all these costs,” Rupert said. “We’re looking at every portion of our operation and closing down facilities that are underutilized or underused.”
Besides the economy, technological advances like widely accessible e-mail also have cut into the postal service.
“We’re not easing our way into new technology, it’s taking over us,” Rupert said. “We expect mail volume to continue to drop but we can hope for the best. We hope it will stabilize though and probably as times goes on, we will have to morph and change into other things.”
Until then, Rupert said to look out for future postal services changes or updates.
“Changes are coming,” Rupert said.
I suspect the USPS (and printed newspapers) will eventually go the way of the pony express due to the internet. Probably some form of hard copy delivery would still be necessary, but I doubt very much that the government would be able to make a smaller system work without massive subsidies. Private delivery services are the future, I think.