The post-postal society? The U.S. Postal Service struggles to stay self- sufficient.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

IN 2006 the nation's vast army of postal clerks, letter carriers, and facer-canceler machines processed and distributed 213 billion pieces of mail. By 2010 that number had dropped to 170 billion, and according to forecasts commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the total will sink to 150 billion by 2020. In March 2010, postal administrators announced that the USPS could run up a cumulative deficit as high as $238 billion during the next decade. To cut expenses in the face of eroding revenues, the postal service floated the idea of reducing delivery to five days a week and stepped up its efforts to shutter underperforming post offices and branches. This year, it hopes to close as many as 2,000 of its approximately 32,000 outlets

When this sort of thing happens, the locals typically express ... well, "outrage" might be too strong a word for it, but they definitely get mildly annoyed. In December 2010, for example, the USPS closed a post office located on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene. "I don't even know where I would go if it closes," a student told the campus newspaper. (There are seven other post offices in Eugene, including one less than a mile away from the university.) "I would never find another postal job as fun as this one," exclaimed a postal employee faced with moving to a new location.

All across America, in the small towns politicians like to iconize as citadels of self-sufficiency and can-do spirit, the lack of easy access to Pottery Barn catalogs and utility bills is threatening to tear things asunder. "This is how towns get broken/ the author Bill McKibben wrote in a 2008 New York Times article when the USPS temporarily shut down the post office in his tiny hometown of Ripton, Vermont.

"We don't have much left in our small town ... so it is nice to go up there and run into people that you wouldn't see otherwise," a resident of Tallula, Illinois, told the Associated Press in February 2011. "We have been hoping and praying [the postal service] doesn't close it," a resident of Crescent City, Illinois, lamented to USA Today the same month. "If we lose our post office, we're just about lost"

Closing a small-town post office, or even a couple thousand small-town post offices, isn't going to put much of a dent into the $8.5 billion deficit the USPS recorded in 2010 or the $3.8 billion deficit it racked up the previous year. The postal service's most pressing fiscal crisis arises from a provision in the 2006...