Neither Prestige Nor Punctuality
The Slow Death of the U.S. Postal Service
Once upon a time—not so long ago, but certainly long enough—there existed in these United States an institution of near-mythic dependability: the U.S. Postal Service. You mailed a letter, it arrived. The uniforms were pressed, the buildings were clean, and the word “postal” was synonymous with movement, not madness. Today, however, you walk into a post office and wonder whether you’ve stumbled into an abandoned Cold War fallout shelter or the set of a Kafka play with fluorescent lighting.
And now, in the most poetic twist of all, the USPS has the gall to raise prices. As of July 13, 2025, the cost of a first-class Forever stamp has climbed to 78 cents—up from 73. In a just world, this increase would come with a side of improved service, sparkling lobbies, shorter lines, and staff who didn’t look like the building was slowly digesting them. But no. The price goes up, and the post office continues to resemble the waiting room of a Soviet-era dental clinic.
The brochures are faded. The clocks are wrong. The poster showing “holiday shipping deadlines” is still hanging in July. The stamp display? A cardboard rack held together with tape and hope. The only thing that arrives on time is your growing sense of existential dread.
Let’s state the obvious: why shouldn’t the United States have the best postal service in the world? We are a nation that can deliver drone strikes with pinpoint accuracy, beam cat memes around the globe in seconds, and ship a gallon of mayonnaise from Cleveland to Boise in under 24 hours via Amazon Prime. And yet, at the post office, it still takes 18 minutes to buy a book of stamps and a commemorative Elvis postcard.
The USPS is no longer a civic marvel. It’s a punchline wrapped in bureaucracy, tied with red tape, and stamped “Return to Sender.”
You can’t blame it all on budget cuts, though they certainly haven’t helped. The deeper problem is decay—physical, cultural, and institutional. The very idea of service has shriveled like a coupon in the rain. You walk in and the mood is… damp. There’s a single clerk on duty, a broken self-service kiosk blinking like HAL having a stroke, and an elderly man trying to mail a live parrot to Milwaukee. The clerk gives him a form. The parrot screams. You think, “Ah, yes. The American experience.”
And don’t let them tell you the price hike is about keeping up with costs. If we were truly paying for performance, most transactions would end with the clerk handing you a refund and an apology written in cursive. Instead, we get corporate babble: the USPS says the increase is part of the “Delivering for America” initiative. Cute. That’s like raising the price of a sandwich and calling it a “nutritional excellence optimization protocol,” even if the bread’s moldy and the mustard’s expired.
But maybe, just maybe, this decline is by design. After all, what better way to kill an institution than to starve it, disgrace it, and then blame it for its own collapse? It’s the old trick of privatization by humiliation. First, you underfund the building, then you stop hiring staff, then you point at the result and say, “See? Government doesn’t work!” It’s like setting your house on fire and complaining about the smoke.
Meanwhile, the people still using the USPS are the ones who need it: seniors, rural Americans, veterans, small business owners, and people sending care packages to grandkids in Idaho. These are not fringe cases—they’re the backbone of the system. They don’t care about QR codes or NFTs. They care that a birthday card gets to Omaha before the cake goes stale.
But what they get instead are lines that snake through sticky floors, kiosks that reboot mid-transaction, and tracking numbers that should come with a warning: for entertainment purposes only.
And then there’s the image. Once, the post office was a tidy, democratic space—every town had one, and every one felt like a little outpost of civilization. Now, too many are neglected, their American flags tattered and sun-bleached like sad metaphors flapping in the wind. They’re still building post offices, yes—but they look like they were designed by someone who hates joy and loves beige.
Why wouldn’t we want more? Why wouldn’t we invest in pride, in public service, in the radical notion that a great nation deserves great mail?
Because here’s the secret: the post office was never just about letters. It was about connection. A card from your aunt. A package from your kid. A letter from the IRS, terrifying and inevitable. It was about being known, being reachable, being human. Now it’s about frustration, resignation, and avoiding eye contact with the guy loudly arguing over a missing coupon book.
So go ahead. Raise the stamp to 78 cents. Then 83. Then a dollar. But do us the courtesy of making the experience worth it. Clean the buildings. Train the staff. Replace the “Out of Order” sign that’s now older than the clerk.
And most of all, remember that a country gets the postal service it’s willing to pay for—and, sadly, the one it’s willing to tolerate.
Right now, we’re tolerating too much.