The end of Saturday mail delivery

In the category of trends, the U.S. Post Office has announced that it intends to end the Saturday delivery of mail. This move will save the Post Office a great deal of money.  No doubt that's true, and the move can come as no surprise.

Rural mail carrier transferring mail to a second mail carrier, in Kentucky, in the early 1940s.

The surprising thing this go around, as this has been suggested before, is how this is now coming without a whimper or hint of complaint from the general public.  It just is.  This really shows a huge evolution in how we view the mail, as well as a big evolution in how the mail itself is viewed.

When I was a little kid, and at home from school for the summer, I used to really look forward to the mail.  It seems odd to look back at now and realize that.  The mail coming was sort of exciting.  There was "junk mail" then, and bills of course, but I didn't worry about the bills or the junk. The exciting stuff was the other stuff.  Magazines and letters.  My mother in particular wrote a lot of letters and received a lot of letters.  She had family correspondence that went all over. Letters from Canada, Florida, Massachusetts, Mexico and Hawaii were always arriving.  And the magazines were pretty interesting too.  My father, for his office, subscribed to both major news magazines of the period, Time and Newsweek, as well as Life, Look, and later on, People.  National Geographics, and a host of monthly magazines also arrived almost daily it seemed.

Rural mail carrier in Kentucky, 1940s.

Later, when I was in basic training, Mail Call was a huge deal.  Every mail call we hoped for some mail.  Letters were a great distraction from whatever else we were doing at Ft. Sill,and they were eagerly anticipated.

Such was also the case when I was twice at the University of Wyoming.  While in law school I had post office box at the campus post office, and I checked it darned near every week day.  Sometimes I checked it on Saturdays too, particularly if I was going to the early Mass at the Newman Center, which took me right by the post office.  Letters from family and the few magazines I received were always looked forward to.

Now this is much less the case. We still get magazines that we subscribe to by mail, and look forward to them.  Newsweek is gone, of course, now part of the Daily Beast online, as are Look and Life magazines. The National Geographic still comes, and some others. But the letters are mostly gone.  Getting a letter, by mail, is now almost a shock, it's so rare.

Almost all my correspondence is electronic.  All the friends I keep in touch with via correspondence I keep in touch with via email.  I don't even mail Christmas cards anymore, I just do an electronic Christmas letter.  The old vast flood of correspondence the mail used to bring is now all gone, a massive change over former times.  The mail now is made up of magazines, junk mail, and bills.  But even bills are slowly leaving the mail, as more and more people pay for things online.

This blog has, as one of is purposes, exploring the change in things over the past century, and here's a huge one indeed. The mail used to be absolutely central to people's lives.  Now, this is hardly the case.  There are some days we don't even check our mailbox out in front of our house, which is something that never would have been the case earlier.  Down at the office mail is still huge, of course, but even this is beginning to change.  We used to mail pleadings to every court.  Now we electronically file and serve in Federal court, and we also do the same for the Wyoming Supreme Court.  Ironically here, therefore, the Federal government's courts were the first to abandon the United States Post Office, in the legal world.

This trend is set to continue, there's no doubt. The Post Office is only accepting the inevitable, but the interesting thing this go around is that most people don't seem to care.  Shutting down Saturday delivery has been a topic of discussion forever.  Now it will happen, and it seems that most won't notice.