The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has fallen on hard times. The Internet, email, FedEx, and UPS have been eating their lunch for years. It’s not hard to see why. A first class letter costs 55¢ with delivery time measured in days. Once you have Internet access, which just about everyone does, email is essentially free and delivery is immediate. Even Aunt Millie has more or less given up on snail mail. What the Internet is doing to letter delivery, FedEx, UPS, and even Amazon are doing to package delivery: the USPS delivers about 7.3 billions packages a year while FedEx, UPS, and Amazon together deliver about 12.6 billion.
What, then, to make of this Yahoo! News article about the USPS monitoring social media for posts about protests? The post office is hemorrhaging money and can barely carry out their legitimate roles. Why are they involved with this? Irreal is not alone in its confusion; no one understands why this happening. Putting aside its dubious legality, the experts can’t understand why the USPS was tasked with this instead of, say, the FBI or Homeland Security.
What’s odd is that the USPS has been doing better—from a customer service perspective—lately. It’s hard to see why they would embrace this sort of distraction. Despite their boilerplate attempt at justification, this operation doesn’t seem to have anything to do with delivering the mail or the type of problems Postal Inspectors generally deal with.
And speaking of Yahoo! News, their horrendous, very user-unfriendly site reminds me why I’m always surprised to discover that they’re still a thing. Just go look at the article to see what I mean.