Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Dark of Night...

...will keep the Postal Service from hiding vital information from its customers. (Warning: rant ahead.)

The Las Cruces Post Office has been criticized for slow mail delivery, even intra-town delivery. I haven't noticed such a problem, except for one time seven years ago, when it took three weeks for a letter to get from me to my parents in Albuquerque. (I could have driven it there myself in 3.5 hours.) I do have a complaint, though, about the national postal system.

Every so often, I get a large card stuck in my mailbox. It usually depicts characters from the comic strip "Cathy" advertising special delivery services. ("Pay more, and your letter will receive 'special' attention and arrive on the same day you'd expect a regular letter to arrive.") Not too long ago, there was a card (with "The Family Circus") asking us to put non-perishable food in our mailboxes for charity. Where, then, was the card with popular comic strip characters notifying us that the price of stamps was going up?

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and you're right. I am so woefully ignorant of the outside world that I am the one person in the country who didn't know about the two-cent increase in a first class stamp price. (It appears that my unfamiliarity with celebrities (see "Check This Out" on 4/17/07) is indicative of my general unawareness.)

Perhaps it was on TV or in the newspapers. Oops! I watch very little TV and don't subscribe to the newspaper. (Have you seen how pitiful my local paper is?) Maybe it was on the radio. Maybe, but I'm only in my car for about ten minutes at a time, and the news always seems to be about Iraq. How about word of mouth? Nope. When was the last time anyone I know talked about the Post Office? (Maybe back in the 70's when my dad was working on E-Com with RCA.) How did I find out about the increase? From my ATM. Well, sort of.

I was busy putting away my card when I saw something about "new 41-cent stamps" disappear from the screen. ("Wait. What was that?" appeared to be useless in going back to the information.) Stamps have been available from my bank for some time. Still, something in the long-enough-to-be-noticeable-but-too-short-to-be-useful ad sounded different. Tie that in to a comment my mom wrote (!) about getting "new" stamps, which sounded different than buying "additional" stamps. So, I had to ask my mother directly, and now I feel like a little boy still dependent on her for everything.

Here's the crux of my complaint. If the Post Office can send out cards advertising their services and charity work, can they not actually use the same method for actual, relevant information? If they used the mass media (i.e. "news" services) to broadcast the change, why didn't they fall back on the method already in place, which is a direct line to their customers? (Even if someone tosses all junk mail and pays bills online, s/he still goes to the mailbox once a week to get the circulars from the local grocery stores.)

Here's another hint to the Post Office, since I'm already telling them what to do. Tell your customers! (That sounds redundant, but here's why it's not.) I've been to two different post offices in two different cities (Las Cruces & Albuquerque) a total of three times within the past two months. Not once did I see a simple, black-and-white, 8.5"x11" computer-generated sign announcing the price increase. Not once did I see even a hand-scrawled note on a piece of scrap paper.

If you can't mail your users a notice, nor even post a sign for the people that come to you, how can you possibly do anything else right?