reality BYTES
Is there any good reason to maintain an old, slow, postal service? The postal system is an antiquated, inefficient, anti-environmental hangover that encourages bad planning, cripplingly slow business transactions and personal laziness.
Consider the following simple transaction: suppose I need to set up a bank standing order. Unless I go to the bank and queue up for an hour (during the 20minute window in which the bank is open everyday), here is what the process involves.
1. I need to get a piece of paper and an envelope.
2. I need to walk (or drive) to the post office, queue up, buy a stamp and drop all the paper in the post box.
3.Then someone comes and takes the contents of the post box and puts it in a van, which they drive half-way across town to a sorting office.
4.Then lots of people root through the post until they find my letter. Then they drop it into another box.
5.Then another person comes and takes it and brings it out to a van. Then the van drives half-way across town to another sorting office, where yet another person sorts it into a pile.
6.Then, the next day, another man takes it from the sorting office and delivers it to the bank. When it gets inside the door of the bank, it is left in a pile for two days. 7.Then it is opened, looked at for two seconds and ‘processed’. (That means that a person just taps the details into a computer.)
My standing order is now operational. However, to tell me this, the bank must prepare another letter. And it will repeat steps 1 through 8 listed above. This is simply ludicrous. The only meaningful action that has taken place is the bank clerk typing into the computer: 25 seconds of work. All the rest is pure inefficiency, regardless of how many jobs it artificially supports.
Defenders of the current system fall into three categories: (i) older people, (ii) businesses that rely on mail orders to sell things, and (iii) romantics. In fairness to older people, some do not have a viable alternative to the postal system. Many older people are not technologically literate (nor should they be expected to be), and are relatively immobile.
In fact, if there is one solid reason for maintaining the postal service, it is for them. Such an excuse can only continue for about another 10-15 years, however.
Businesses who rely on a cheap postal service to sell physical things have an obvious reason for wishing to maintain the status quo.
Aside from the elderly, they would be hardest hit.
For romantics, it is all about the joy of getting a birthday card or Christmas card. Nothing can replace that, certainly not a text or an e-mail. While they are right about the pathetic nature of texts and e-mails as celebratory missives, surely they are misguided about cards, most of which are twee and betray no thought whatsoever.
Besides, how about a phone call? Doesn’t someone actually telling you what they think , and how they feel, beat a mass-produced slogan on a Hallmark card?
So what could replace the postal system? How would we get our online purchases? How would we pay for things, and be paid?
For financial transactions there are a variety of methods to hand. These are, mainly, credit cards, PayPal and similar services. We also have a (never-used) digital payments infrastructure that could be dusted off to kick-start a proper, efficient financial delivery system.
The fact that banks largely support the status quo for financial transactions only proves their own lack of competitiveness and market nous.
For online orders, there is no reason why the goods should be delivered to a person’s house. We buy things in a supermarket, why not pick up post and purchased items there?
As regards general items that we receive in the post, there is virtually nothing there that cannot be communicated or transferred easily in some other way.
The only exception is personal cards. But how many of those do we really get every year? Enough to keep an entire creaking, inefficient system up and running?
There’s very little good reason for maintaining the status quo. The current system is slow, inefficient and lazy. We need a new one.
