The Blind Leading the Blind

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito for Direct magazine. We doubt the views expressed here are solely the author's.

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a postal nut. The first thing I do every day is search the web for postal news from around the world and post it on the postcom.org web site. As a result of doing that, I get the chance to see what's the latest postal buzz in newspapers and on radio and television across the country.

Anyone who follows our web postings probably has noticed that for the past several weeks, there have been a flurry of stories about decrements in the quality of postal services. Most have concerned mail service in the nation's west and southwest, but there also have been stories about mail service deterioration in areas within the Midwest and the Gulf Coast.

Mailers say they clearly see mail service problems. Postal Service officials say they see nothing of the sort, and declare that mail service has never been better. This means that either mailers are seeing something that doesn't exist, or the Postal Service has gone blind. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

But where? How can one ever hope to know whether mail service is good or bad without having some metric against which to measure it? And that's the rub. When you really get down to it, the Postal Service consistently measures the quality of mail service for stamped, mailbox-entered, First-Class Mail and single-piece Priority Mail and that's about it. It does not have any standard of performance or measurement systems for the lion's share of the mail it carries. No service performance standards exist for Periodical or Standard Mail. None exist for Bound Printed Matter or Media Mail. And the Postal Service simply fails to measure or report on the quality of First-Class Mail service on items that carry a meter imprint or a printed indicia.

This kind of makes you wonder. How does a governing board of an enterprise that has "postal service" as its name not demand some form of private or public measurement and accountability of the enterprise's core mission performance? How will it ever know whether service is good or bad, improving or deteriorating without an effective service performance measurement scheme in place and without firm, public declarations of what any buyer of these services can reasonably expect?

So, who is or is not seeing what out there? Apparently, there will never be any real way to go as long as the blind continue leading the blind.