Bill Schubart: Rural Free Delivery (RFD), rest in peace (RIP)?

I think the heat-drunk garter snake living in our mailbox is an omen. As I lower the dented cover and reach gingerly inside to get our mail, I wonder if our battered mailbox won’t soon become an artifact of a bygone era.

Our iconic U.S. Postal Service is nearly bankrupt . Its valiant history calls up the Pony Express, steam trains with a dedicated postal car ( rail post office ) wherein postal employees sorted mail as the train ran from city to city, postmen and women bearing parcels trudging through knee-deep Christmas snows, country stores with mailboxes on the wall. Could this all soon be history? Should it be?

Perhaps it no longer makes sense for thousands of postal workers to drive cars or vans or push handcarts to every doorstep in America for what is supposed to be six-days-a-week delivery of a handful of catalogs, magazines, credit-card offers, sales flyers and donation requests?

In a good week, my wife and I get one or two first class letters. In the same week, we get 500 emails, many of which bring news from family, friends and loved ones. Email and social media have largely supplanted first class mail as a means of staying in touch.

While handwritten letters express sentiment with the sender’s personal script, choice of stationery, an expressive stamp or, in even earlier days, the sender’s favorite scent, email and social media are free and immediate, though digital communication lacks the beauty or significance of a well-penned letter that can be held, read, and treasured.

In July of 1775, Ben Franklin became the first U.S. postmaster general. What would he think of what it has become ?

Similarly, futurists are projecting the near-term death of the handwritten check in favor of more secure direct deposits and online bill pay options. My Social Security check appears automatically in my bank account every month. Most of our regular utility bills are set up for automatic payment. The last check I wrote in my own checkbook is dated Feb. 17, 2024.

As a country, we have a choice. Either we invest billions in keeping our revered historical post office system alive as it was originally conceived, or we reinvent it to make it financially sustainable in the future.

One option might be to limit delivery to local post offices and charge extra for home delivery. The volume of junk mail we get and recycle surely doesn’t warrant delivery to us four miles from the post office.

Another option might be to restore and enhance its utility as a low-cost national banking system, as it was to a limited degree prior to 1967, when people could buy government savings bonds, cash checks and maintain savings accounts.

Today commercial banks offer these services to people who can afford them. Payday lenders charge people living on the margins usurious rates for payday loan advances — annual rates average 391% . Meanwhile, in 2020, Wells Fargo bank agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve criminal and civil investigations into sales practices involving the opening of millions of accounts without customer authorization.

In practice, of course, the system — drained of federal support — is winding down of its own accord. Even as our under-resourced local post office staff work hard to sort, deliver and service counter clients, we rarely get more than two or three rural deliveries a week.

A bellwether moment occurred last week when we got three New Yorkers in one mail delivery. For those unfamiliar with it, the New Yorker is a weekly magazine.

As to parcels: do we really need four different branded trucks (UPS, USPS, DSL, and FedEx) smoking along our rural roads delivering them? Might they collaborate to reduce fossil fuel consumption, mitigating environmental harm and rising costs by sharing a single fleet of trucks delivering branded packages?

Home delivery six days a week has become an expensive and unnecessary luxury — expensive financially and environmentally. Those who still depend on it should be treated as a special class. Those of us who don’t should let it go. In truth, very little of the mail I remove from the mailbox even makes it to the house. I toss it in recycling on the way in.

Although the price of a first class stamp has risen considerably over the last few decades, we should raise the price of First Class mail to reflect its actual value, cost and rarity. Businesses already get preferential rates called “ marketing mail ” for their promotional mailings even though most business transactions like B2B marketing, purchasing and billing have moved to secure online transactional networks.

The catalog and mail order industry generates some $125 billion in annual revenue . 7,600 companies mail 12 billion catalogs annually, and 90 million Americans buy from them each year.

Is the direct-mail industry paying its full share to maintain this lucrative slice of their business?

But in every loss, there’s opportunity, if we think large.

According to the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, there’s an epidemic of loneliness in the United States that has significant health consequences.

When I traveled to Cuba many years ago, I was fascinated by their health care system and how functional it was. There was one doctor for every 400 Cuban citizens then and doctors made periodic universal home visits, which gave them the opportunity to assess and diagnose medical issues before they became chronic or acute.

Costa Rica uses the same concept of universal home visits in their health care system . It’s broadly understood among health care professionals that community-based primary care is critical to the success of any health care system, even though in Vermont we’ve moved towards consolidation and growth of our largest hospitals… to our detriment.

Imagine if we were to build on the extensive infrastructure of the USPS, our local EMT services and fire brigades, and even some volunteers to create an army of trained paraprofessionals to offer universal home visits here in Vermont. They would be trained and guided in their mission by paraprofessionals.

Such periodic home visits could address multiple problems: fear and loneliness would be reduced by visiting with and listening to homebound rural Vermonters, offering an ear in conversation, answering technical questions, providing information about local community resources like councils on aging, chronic-disease management, parent/child centers, and hospice services and the like, all while bringing important mail.

For better and for worse, tradition lingers, and, while mourning its loss, too often we ignore the reality of perpetual change.

Maintaining traditional postal services and standards for those of us who no longer need them is a waste of money that could be better invested elsewhere in the social contract, like combining the challenges of loneliness, primary care, rural delivery and technical help.

We must think strategically in these days of limited resources. Perhaps that may mean curtailing nonessential federal services like rural free delivery — except in cases where it remains essential. Personally, I’d be happy to either pick up my mail as I pass through our town or pay extra for three-day-a-week delivery.

I’ll miss our dented mailbox if RFD goes away as well as its somnolent resident snake. I’ll miss resetting the post every spring after the snowplow finishes the wreckage of the night-riding vandals.

We need our postal system but must reimagine it more cost-effectively for today’s needs. We can no longer afford to maintain this revered tradition with such diminished utility. We must find new ways to cope and let go of what no longer works.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: Rural Free Delivery (RFD), rest in peace (RIP)? .