Death Of A Postman

In our neighbourhood one can still see the posties cycling around making snail mail deliveries; sadly they are a dying breed.

A couple of decades ago it was possible to set the time by the regular nature of their beat but no more.

In Singapore weekend deliveries have now completely ceased as the volumes of traditional mail have dropped dramatically.

Recently release figures from the States show that at th end of June, year-to-date total mail volume was down 4.9% from 2009 to nearly 129 billion pieces.  This represents a drop of 700 million pieces in the last quarter which in the long term is simply not sustainable.  The US Postal service lost $2.5 billion in June and the revenue trends show the situation worsening.

While it may be comforting to blame this on the recession, the real reason is that one form of communication has replaced another.

I recall stock market advice given more than a decade ago to invest in courier firms.  At first glance this may seem to be going against the global trend of less snail mail volume.  The rationale is the the growth of e-commerce would see an increased need for home deliveries and so it has proved to be.

Though email has supplanted the written letter there are still quite distinct usage patterns  vary widely as this analysis from Rackspace shows.

The prevailing advice is not to send out marketing email at these peak times as the "delete" button is likely to be fully operational.  Better to time the delivery for the start of the working when the volume is less and recipient is more receptive. 

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Does Snail Mail Have A Place?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Is there still  a place for Snail Mail?

The folks at CNN would have you believe that the tactile and personal nature of a handwritten letter will always have more of an emotional connection than its digital alternative.

They may be on to something, but the reality is that the volume of posted mail has declined dramatically and continues to do so. 

In Singapore the postal service has just stopped delivering in the weekends citing plummeting volumes of mail and this pattern is a global one.

In the States there are 10 billion less letters sent than there were 20 years ago -  that's a lot of paper and stamp revenue.

Physically writng a letter does provide more time for thought and it is true that email can be somewhat impersonal; the emotion in a handwritten letter is often easier to decipher.

There is also the vicarious thrill of opening the condo mail box to see if the postman has "left something".  More often than not the contents of the box reveal printed advertising circulars and even the power bills are now easier accessed and actioned online.

Then of course there is the mail that belongs to someone who occupied you apartment a millennium ago and has not notified the sender of their change of address.

At least with email you know that someone received it and opened it.  In a recent survey I conducted in East Asia the results confirmed that most respondents chose email as their first choice for receiving our communications.

There remains a nostalgia for the personally written word and a physical letter is a memento that has been touched by the hand that sent it. An email seems somewhat transitory by comparison.

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