By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 19, 2024 | The post office almost tries to hide the cost of a first class stamp, since we now have “forever stamps.” There’s no association with the cost of the stamp printed on it. It’s like they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes about how much it now costs to mail a letter.
Today to mail a letter is now 73 cents. That’s right. That’s almost three quarters. The problem is that I am old enough to remember when to mail a first class letter, the price was once three cents!
Most of the people living today cannot imagine such low prices for mailing a letter. Let’s add another element to those older days of the 1940s of postal delivery: the service was good, no, it was excellent. There were seldom delays.
We are not up-to-date on the rules governing the management of the Post Office. But one aspect is clear: Postmaster Louis DeJoy clearly ought to be let go immediately.
Why President Biden and former President Trump haven’t canned DeJoy already is beyond me. I would be “overjoyed!”
Look at the Atlanta mailing area in particular. We can remember back, was it about 1990?, when the Post Office built regional centers to transfer mail from distant post offices to a central location. Mail in northeast Georgia, for instance, was sent from local post offices to the regional sorting center off Boggs Road in Duluth, where it was sorted and dispatched to other locations. If I am not mistaken, there were 96 loading docks at the Duluth dispatch center.
There were similar locations in Cobb County, downtown Atlanta, Augusta and Macon, serving similar geographic areas.
Meanwhile, higher muckety-mucks of the Postal Department sought ways to improve on these regional postal centers. Their plan: to have all these dispatch centers combined into one giant super-regional center. After all, bigger is better, right? Then the post office could build this super giant center, and have trucks from all over half of Georgia come to one location for sorting and dispatching mail. Won’t this be better, one central facility? What could possibly go wrong? Everything under one roof!
Now you understand the thinking of the muckety-mucks, who probably never worked even in a local post office, much less a regional center.
What could go wrong?
Well, several things:
- Being in metro Atlanta, a water main could burst, flooding that center, and put it out of business. And in Atlanta, who would ever think a water main might gush with water?
- Lightning could strike this one giant postal center.
- Highway construction could make it difficult for all these many postal trucks to get to this one site.
- Or once there, mail machines might back up, and letter processing might be slow, and cause hundreds of trucks coming to the center to be delayed at parking, and causing traffic congestion beyond belief, sitting there unloaded, and delaying the mail sorting and delivery to its destination even further.
Naw! We’re in the 21st century. Nothing like that could happen in Palmetto!
Well, it did. And though postal officials maintain that it’ll all work out, we beg to differ.
The U.S. Postmaster needs to can his massive sorting plan, admit that it flopped, and return to the regional sorting centers. Sending all our mail to Palmetto isn’t working out, and may never work out. It’s unreal to load your entire operation on such a massive sorting plant.
First fire Postmaster DeJoy, then return to regional sorting centers, and see better mail delivery in north Georgia. Hopefully, some day soon we’ll get our 73 cents worth.
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