The price to pay for mailing a letter

"Recently, the mail has turned completely unreliable," says Hélène de Maredsous, a Parisian mother of four. "It's happening more and more that a letter I know was sent to me never arrives or shows up a month or two later," she says. "Then, when you go to the post office, you wait in line for a half hour, only to be treated poorly. Service should be better for the money."

The problem for postal services is that single-piece mail – as opposed to mass-mailing – is the high-margin business they've lived on. Some advertisers have actually helped this bottom line by switching from bulk rates to first class, in an effort to give their mailings a personal touch that they believe gives them a better chance of being opened by the junk-mail weary. But at the same time, some bulk mailers are doing more postal tasks – like presorting – themselves, which reduces costs but also the Postal Service's profits.

"Over the past 20 years, global mail volume has grown about 2 to 2.5 percent a year," says Thomas Leavey, director general of the international bureau of the Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency in Bern, Switzerland. "But now, in most industrialized countries, there's a flattening, and in some cases a decline."

The US Postal Service, blaming the economic downturn and last year's crisis over anthrax-tainted mail, estimates mail volume has fallen by more than 4 billion pieces since September 2001 – an "unprecedented" drop, according to Postal Rate Commission specialist Spyros Xenakis.

Mr. Leavey, a former US assistant postmaster general, says that one factor contributing to the drop may be mail-less bill-paying. "My wife does it all with a one-stop system using the Internet," he says. In Switzerland, both banks and the post office – which Mrs. Leavey diplomatically uses – offer the electronic bill-paying service. "But that doesn't exist everywhere," Mr. Leavey says, "and it's one place postal services are losing out."

Some postal services seem unlikely to ever win some customers back. In Mexico, Laura Ariza remembers when, as a teenager in the 1980s, she and her friends had fun exchanging gossipy, sticker-laden letters.

"It was fast and no problem," she says. "But now? No, no, no." The expectant mother, who manages some of the correspondence for her husband's pharmaceuticals equipment company in Mexico City, relies on individual couriers, or private delivery companies like DHL and Federal Express – anybody but the post office.

It's a familiar tale to Leavey, part of whose job is to help developing countries establish modern postal services. Pointing to successful postal reforms in Tanzania and Costa Rica, Leavey says, "What we've found is that if you get the post office out of some government ministry and run like a business, it can be profitable."

And to American consumers irate about another postal-rate increase, he offers his not completely unbiased view. "For a service that delivers 40 percent on the world's mail," he says, "the US Postal Service is one of the best."

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