By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
There was a time carriers arrived like clockwork, were friendly, and lost mail was never a problem. Today’s USPS is unionized, bloated, arrogant, and inefficient. It even steals your checks.
U.S. law, specifically the Private Express Statutes, grants the USPS a legal monopoly over the delivery of letter-mail and access to mailboxes. While FedEx and UPS can deliver packages, the USPS retains exclusive rights over certain types of mail delivery. This monopoly supposedly helps the USPS fulfill its mandate of delivering mail to every address. The reality? It led to sloth and forced you to use the woeful USPS whether you want to or not.
I have lived at the same place for 34 years. During that time, carriers constantly changed and my mail might come from 11 am to 8 pm Or it might not come for days. Over the last three years my service nosedived. A significant percentage of checks sent to me “got lost.” During May-June 2025 three straight checks went astray. Finally, one arrived. It took 10 days to come from Georgetown. The Pony Express could have delivered it in 1.5 days, but at least it wasn’t stolen.
In a USA Today May 22, 2025, report, Mary Walrath-Holdridge covered how a postal employee in Charlotte was sentenced to prison for financial institution fraud. He worked as a processing clerk at the Ballantyne Post Office in Charlotte from November 2022 to April 2023.
“During that time, he took hundreds of business checks from P.O. boxes in the facility, amounting to 200 checks worth $1.9 million in stolen funds. He sold stolen checks to co-conspirators who committed bank fraud by depositing or creating counterfeit checks from the stolen ones. They withdrew or moved funds before banks could identify the checks as fraudulent.”
In September 2022 check thieves used a stolen water bill payment of mine to create fake checks and cash $15,000 from my account. Quick action by two bank branch managers near Mobile, Alabama, sent me to my bank where we stopped the theft by closing my accounts.
Let’s talk environment. Sixty-two percent of all U.S. household mail is junk, reports the U.S. Postal Service itself. The typical American receives 41 pounds of junk mail each year. The destination? Landfills. We’re paying people to deliver junk mail to us while some steal our checks. Postal service is a disgrace. Consider the experience of sources who shall remain anonymous.
“My daughter hasn’t received a check I sent her in January.” (June 2025 comment)
“I have a package coming from USPS and it’s several days overdue. Tracking shows no movement since arriving seven times in Atlanta last Tuesday.”
“We’ve been disgusted with the post office for years.”
“We live in a little town and the mail service here is horrible. You can’t even mail a package from here. The woman that works the post office chooses when she wants to work. A friend received a notification in his box that he had a package to pick up. When he asked about it, she told him there was nothing there. He checked tracking went back and told her tracking said it was there and that she had put a notice in his box. She informed him there was nothing there and he needed to leave. He asked her to please check. She told him to leave or she was going to call the police. She called 911 and tried to have him arrested. Guess what? The package was there.”
“My wife takes all packages five miles to another town where two ladies go out of their way to help her. They said they were aware of the problem in my town, but it was almost impossible to have someone replaced once they had the job because of the union.”
“The local post office is known for stealing people’s checks right out of the mailbox on their property. My wife received a birthday card today, and it was tampered with.”
You don’t put up with sporadic water service. You don’t tolerate unpredictable electricity, and yet many put up with pathetic postal service. My guess is the USPS has become irrelevant to their lives. They get their 41 pounds of junk mail and a few important pieces of mail, and life goes on.
As email, online payments, and UPS, Fed Ex, Amazon, and DHL suck the blood from USPS, its days are numbered. You want to see the day when stamps are $2? As I write, it’s six days before the USPS price increase comes July 1 with longer delivery times and price increases. What a surprise. What a disgrace.
