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Two news items caught my attention today that I wanted to share.
One is that the postal service of Denmark has stopped door to door delivery of letters due to the digitization of communications in that country. you would need to hire a private company to process mailing of a letter.
The second is that the US post office will not guarantee the date a piece of mail is postmarked. According to the article I read, the postmark date will be the date the letter is processed which could be days after it is dropped off.
This will affect tax returns and vote by mail ballots which in some states need to be counted depending on deadlines and the postmark date.
It will also affect responses to various financial transactions that have due dates and rely on postmark dates.
I wanted to know how HD readers are dealing with these changes and what do you think the future of mail is in our country.
Here’s the recent USPS tracking arrival dates for a package shipped to me in Charlottesville, VA on November 27th:
Chino, CA 11/27
Memphis, TN 11/29
Washington, DC 12/1
Richmond, VA 12/1 (about an hour from Charlottesville:)
Fayetteville, NC 12/3
Fayetteville, NC 12/5
Fayetteville, NC 12/6
Greensboro, NC 12/7
Richmond, VA 12/8
Charlottesville, VA 12/9
Delivered to me 12/10
Seems like there could be a more efficient way to do this.
I write very few checks these days, and when I do I always mail them at the Post Office. I also use a gel pen, which is supposed to be much harder, if not impossible, to wash off checks.
However, I am a stamp collector, and I use the mail quite a lot to buy and sell stamps on eBay and Hipstamp. I have sent several hundred orders via email and never had one lost. I buy more than I sell, and I have had a few lost over the years, some from the US and some that I purchased internationally. Of course, I don’t know if the internationally purchased stamps were lost once they made it to the US.
I have voted early since that became an option.
I submit my tax returns electronically. I am a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) preparer, and I always tell folks who want to file a paper return that refunds are handled much faster if you file electronically. However, I rarely have a refund, because I deliberately plan to owe some so that, if someone files a fake return in my name, my refund will not be held up. (IRS will always accept your payment, but they might hold a refund.) I arrange to owe less than $1000 each year (after estimated taxes) to avoid penalties.
This excerpt is from the brookings.edu website.
The USPS employs more than 600,000 people and manages more than 31,000 retail post offices (six times as many outlets as Walmart). It handles 44% of all the world’s mail. And, it has been operating at a loss since 2007, largely driven by declining mail volume and the shift towards digital communication.
First-class mail, marketing mail, and periodicals—which together account for more than half of the USPS revenue—have seen significant declines over the past 15 years. First-class mail, a product over which USPS has exclusive delivery rights, has declined by 50%, from 91.7 billion pieces in 2008 to 46.2 billion pieces in 2023. Periodicals have fared even worse, with volume shrinking so much that the cost of processing and delivering them far exceeds the revenue that they generate for the USPS.
While not explicitly defined, the Postal Service’s universal service obligation (USO) is broadly outlined in multiple statutes and encompasses multiple dimensions: geographic scope, range of products, access to services and facilities, delivery frequency, affordable and uniform pricing, service quality, and security of the mail.
Declining letter delivery not only reduces direct revenue but also makes each delivery less profitable. This challenge is further exacerbated by the postal service’s USO in the context of an increasing number of delivery points—on average, 1.16 million new delivery points have been added every year since 2008. As USPS is required to expand its delivery network to accommodate the growing population, it must serve more addresses while handling fewer pieces of mail—placing an even greater strain on its financial sustainability.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/return-to-sender-what-privatization-might-mean-for-the-future-of-the-usps/
I am not a fan of USPS. I find their customer service is akin to the USSR circa 1970.
My younger son recently spent 1 year living in St. Croix, USVI. I decided to send him a care package of junk food (candy, cookies,etc.) because things are so expensive there. The package took 29 days only to be returned to me. As per tracker it spent 15 days sitting in Jacksonville, Fl. I specifically marked it to be held at his local Post Office because he did not get home delivery of mail. Sure enough the tracker informed me it was
“out for delivery” the day it arrived in St. Croix. Then “addressee could not be located”. Package was returned damaged.
I foolishly went to my local P.O. to try to obtain some info. I remember the clerk telling me her mom was from St. Thomas, USVI. She the said,” You know how they are down there” as she made a drinking motion with her hand.
Kind of comical but sad.
Agree. Even for packages sent within the US it can weeks for a package to show up. Recently made a purchase on EBay which the seller used USPS ground shipping. I tracked the package across the US twice before it arrived 2.5 weeks after the shipment date. Very weird…
As I may have mentioned in previous posts, I live in Greece for part of the year and the rest in the US. While in Greece, a friend checks my house and mail. I have subscribed to the USPS’s Informed Delivery which sends you a daily email with a photo of each individual piece of mail you will receive that day. It is very helpful while I am away. If I see a piece of mail that I want opened I ask my friend to open it and take a photo of it.
my point is that although I have requested digital correspondence, I get a lot of mail and 95% is not necessary or junk. I hope in the future we digitize correspondence and there is no more mail. I know I may be an outlier on this but I feel very strongly especially on the day I return to the US after being away.
Our mailing address is with a service that receives mail and scans it, and forwards it if we want. In practice we/they get very little.
That’s great. What service do you use?
Here are several
https://www.postgrid.com/mail-forwarding-services/
Thanks
My wife is old school and still writes check and mails bills-at least she drives to the post office which she probably does 3 times a week. I do very little through the mail, most everything is digital and try to take the appropriate precautions there. I am still astounded that our megacorp snail-mailed our 401k checks when we retired in 2017/2018 when we cashed out and did rollovers-we had no choice. I believe there will be some significant changes coming in USPS.
Personally, I’m not in panic mode—but I have moved to a “built in buffer” mindset: send earlier, use online options when available, and when a postmark matters, get it done at the counter with documentation.
Curious what you think this looks like 5–10 years from now.
I would say that, in general, parcel delivery from most couriers has been especially abysmal for the past six months, especially in terms of on-time and damage-free. Regrettably, the USPS is the best of the worst.
Recent changes in our household have prompted more online ordering of goods nationwide including the west coast, from respectable companies I’ve worked with over several years. Anything delivered by USPS generally takes at least twice as long as quoted when the order is confirmed. A recent parcel took 18 days from CA to MI, mostly because the tracking showed it got caught in a nearly endless loop between Indy and Grand Rapids, MI. Ignoring volume, the Wells Fargo Wagon allegedly, on average, completed deliveries between 10 and 21 days, depending on a variety of factors, including weather. The Pony Express, 10 days, on average. Much like stocks, it appears we are reverting to the mean.
And while it can vary greatly by area, here, FedWrex takes the cake for seemingly trying their best to destroy packages or just dumping boxes in the middle of my driveway versus the front porch and made no bones about it when asked directly to please move the packages there. I do find it somewhat amusing that, regardless of carrier, including Amazon, that when there is damage to the package, somehow a picture of the delivered parcel isn’t shared by email (as they ALWAYS do as a requirement) or the damaged section is placed away from the camera shot, etc. My all time favorite was when the postal delivery person would jam a package into my mailbox by the street which would literally require cutting the package apart to remove it. After the fourth time, we had a friendly chat and he told me that the company should make their boxes smaller, and then drove off on a huff (and I didn’t get my mail that day either…hmmmm?). Too lazy to get out of the truck.
And to be fair, companies shipping products using inferior packaging (especially re-re-recycled cardboard) need to get it together as well.
Former federal prosecutor here. I will never put mail into a blue box on the street. If I have to mail anything, I drive to the local post office and put it in the slot inside the facility. And I hope that there’s no dirty USPS employee – usually seasonal hires – scraping through the mail looking for checks and cards. I use electronic payments as often as possible.
I don’t see blue boxes anymore
Unfortunately, my local post office had (maybe still has) just such an employee. Friends of mine had a lot of trouble dealing with the fall out of check washing. Apparently you can buy a pen that resists the process.
Jonathan wrote in July 2022 of being the victim of check-washing: https://humbledollar.com/2022/06/a-dirty-business/
Nick, thanks for posting! I wasn’t aware of this change.
Since I didn’t see a link referencing the USPS change, a search on the internet found several sources. One I found helpful is from snopes.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/30/usps-postmark-rules/
Nice post , Nick. We need the Post Office, but, I stopped relying on the United States Postal Service (USPS) when I had my tax practice. Even paying extra for Priority Mail, I could not count on them to deliver on time, or even track the package, on one occasion they lost a client’s tax return.
Today I have online access to all important documents. For voting, we either go to our assigned location on election day, vote early at the county board of elections, or if absentee voting, we physically deliver our ballots to the county.
I don’t know what will become of the USPS. They have shuttered facilities in order to save money, but I feel it has come at the cost of reliable service. The problems I described with Priority Mail coincided with the closure of the facility in Toledo. It seems to me that moving to a five day delivery schedule would have been a better option for cost savings, but most customers of the USPS do not agree with me.
Last year when I renewed my US passport I paid to mail the form and the old one Priority Express. I did this on a Monday, the paperwork said it would be delivered by Friday…. Admittedly it was Thanksgiving week, but I had expected next day delivery. Maybe they should charge more – I paid Fedex a whole lot more for a similar delivery to the UK this year. I sent the package on a Monday, they said it would arrive two days later on Wednesday, and it did.
Like Fedex, UPS costs more, but I’ve been very happy with their service.
For some time I have been questioning why I get mail 6 days a week. It seems like 3 days would be fine for me and many other residential postal clients with a fee charged annually for anyone who wants 6 days.
With regard to the postmark date change and the impact on vote by mail, I think this is not that big of a deal so long as people are aware of the change in policy and other options like drop boxes for sending in completed ballots.
It would be more efficient if you could choose how many days of delivery you want. If you want the maximum then you pay a certain fee. I personally would opt for none as long as I could go and pick up my mail at the post office.
We try to use the mail as little as possible for bills, we pay most of them online. Taxes too. The post office used to be one of the most trustworthy of the govt agencies and I think it is sad that people steal from the blue drop boxes and even our individual mailboxes. We do voting by mail, we may have to stand in line for hand cancel. Will be interested to see what others say. Chris