Mail: The Postman Rings Twice

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Since the U.S. Post Office Department became the semiautonomous U.S. Postal Service in 1971, the cost of mailing a first-class letter has gone up about a penny a year. Right on schedule, the service announced last week that a one-ounce letter, which has cost 200 since November 1981, will require a 220 stamp starting next February. The cost of sending postcards will go from 130 to 140, second-class mail like magazines will rise 14.2%, bulk-rate third-class 13.8%, and parcel post 11.4%.

"Our costs have overtaken our revenues," said Postal Service Board Chairman John McKean. Despite mechanization and the automation of mail sorting, the service has barely managed to keep up with an explosion in the volume of material it handles. The Post Office now needs only 702,000 employees to deliver 131 billion pieces of mail per year, 39,000 fewer than in 1970 when it processed 85 billion pieces. But the average annual pay and benefits for postal workers have gone up from $8,878 to $28,416 in the past 14 years. Even though the USPS made a $1.5 billion surplus in the three years since the last increase, it has slipped $593 million into the red in the past eight months.