Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

GEORGE SMITH: What is the post office, if it doesn't deliver?

George Smith

At the turn of the 20th century, there were five post offices in Mount Vernon, and the mail was delivered to each of them twice a day, usually by buckboard.

On July 1, 1903, Rural Free Delivery took effect and all the post offices closed except the one in the village. That original village post office is now an antique store. The second village post office is now the Post Office Café. The third village post office serves us today in a modern air-conditioned building.

There is nothing free about Rural Free Delivery today. And just as the post office buildings have changed, service has changed, too.

No one would mistake today's U.S. Postal Service as a customer-driven business. In most places, the service in Postal Service has vanished.

Indeed, as technology improved and made delivery of the mail easier and faster, service got slower and less accommodating. If the Postal Service were allowed to fail, it would be long gone.

Not long ago, I mailed a form to the agent who handles my retirement account for a large, well-known firm out of an office in Orono. I used his Orono office street address.

About a week later, the unopened envelope was returned to me, stamped "Forward Time Exp Rtn To Send." They couldn't even bother to stamp the entire message that the time for forwarding mail from the man's street address to his new address had expired.

The man's new address followed the abbreviated message. Unbelievably, his new address is a box in the Orono Post Office that returned my envelope!

It seems like it would have been cheaper to put his envelope in his box, right there in the building, than send it back to me. It certainly would have demonstrated a higher level of customer service.

My exasperation is timely because the Postal Service has asked its governing board for a rate hike and also proposed the end of Saturday delivery.

Businesses that reduce customer service and hike prices to stave off bankruptcy are already bankrupt and destined to fail.

Perhaps the honchos high up in the Postal Service should visit the Mount Vernon Post Office to see one place where customers are still appreciated and served to the highest degree possible. Our postmistress is unfailingly polite, greets everyone with a smile, is quick to provide whatever we need, and wishes us a good day when we leave.

Our Rural Free Delivery ladies are even better. They go well out of their way to deliver whatever is meant for us. Even though the Postal Service discontinued the RFD route numbers years ago, I still receive mail sent to my RFD number. In Mount Vernon, the forwarding time doesn't expire!

I also get mail addressed to "George Smith, Mount Vernon." Linda once received a card addressed to Nana Smith, Mount Vernon. Most anyplace else, those would be stamped "insufficient address" and returned to the sender, none to promptly.

Our rural delivery ladies sometimes drive right into the yard to personally hand over a large quantity of mail or a box too large to fit in our roadside mailbox. Most other post offices would give me a slip of paper, requiring me to muster out and pick up my package at the post office. So yes, in the hinterlands, it is possible to find the service in the Postal Service.

I'm not pleased to give up Saturday delivery. The publications I receive by mail are important to my work, and I wouldn't be able to get them the entire weekend. They will also be more expensive. Newspapers like this one, magazines, and other publications delivered by mail will pay 8 percent more when the new hike takes effect.

Thank goodness the Kennebec Journal/Morning Sentinel delivers my newspaper. But many out of our circulation area receive the paper by mail.

Paying nearly half a buck to send a letter to one of our kids out of state will simply eliminate that practice in favor of e-mail and other delivery methods.

As a man who values history, the end of letter-writing saddens me. Much of what we know of our past came to us in the form of letters.

E-mail, to me, is too impersonal, too apt to be short and intemperate. Fritter, or Twitter, or whatever it is, is even worse.

The Postal Service has lost a lot of business to due the changing technology and their poor service. Maybe they should open more post offices and start using buckboards again.

George Smith is executive director of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine. He lives in Mount Vernon and can be reached at george@samcef.org.