Privatization, or strategic asset?
Since the 1980s, the ever-present debate has been what to do with the United States Postal Service. Like a tug of the war the struggle has shifted from side to side – from ‘it’s a government monopoly that restrains trade in the private sector by locking out private delivery companies from lucrative access to the home mailbox while being heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars, …’ to it’s a ‘strategic asset of the United States of America’.
And while the debate continues to this day, with citations of how the Continental Post Office, then the Post Office Department, and now the independent US Postal Service has served this nation are known knowns, there numerous lesser-known facts about the organization. Two notable ones – if there was no Post Office there would be no mail order industry, i.e., no Rural Free Delivery to deliver the Sears Roebuck and Mongomery Wards catalogs that launched the B2C fulfillment of millions packages via Parcel Post service; if there was no Post Office there would be no commercial airline service transporting millions of kilos of US Mail, and passengers daily. Yes, the US Post Office actually spun off its airline to the commercial sector in 1927. The Post Office, and later the US Postal Service was a pioneer not only in logistics and transportation, but technology as well. The Post Office Department began research and development of optical character recognition [OCR] technology in the 1950’s leading to equipment capable of sorting up to 36,000 piece of mail per hour. Other R&D projects led to hybrid mail systems, global fax networks, and electronic funds and payment systems. All the while still delivering personal and business correspondence whose unique feature is that it cannot be hacked. Today the USPS has over 1,560 patents.
So, the current news bites that a recent investment bank research paper has triggered today about what is the value of a privatized Postal Service’ brings to the debate into very sharp focus. The paper, reported on by MSNBC makes some bold assertions about the monetization of a series of spun-off businesses, but in doing so it opens the door to intense scrutiny about the true value of the United States Postal Service. We leave you this thought and look forward to returning in the next weeks with some outside the box (and envelope) observations. – – “What’s over your horizon?”