It’s the 250th birthday of the United States Postal Service and a hearty congratulations goes out to all four of the local post offices in Washington Parish.
It is unfortunately true that on a national basis mail delivery has some problems. Almost everyone has a horror story about a letter that took forever to get to Aunt Bertha in Alabama or wherever.
But on a local basis, the post offices in Washington Parish do an excellent job of providing reliable mail service. With our occasional severe weather situations and our many rural roads that aren’t the best, our parish mail carriers and their supporting staffs still offer steady day-in and day-out top-notch service.
Here at The Era-Leader, where we rely on the post offices in our parish to get our newspapers to subscribers every week, service complaints are few and far between. The complaints we get about mail delivery of newspapers inevitably come from out of the parish or out of the state.
We work constantly with the local post offices to improve out of the parish and out of the state delivery, but we understand that there is little that a Washington Parish postmaster can do about mail delivery problems in New Orleans, Florida, California, or elsewhere.
Mail delivery is becoming more and more about packages vs letters. Email has totally changed the way we communicate, and even the monthly bills that formerly jammed the mailboxes are in many cases going digital.
This leaves the Postal Service seeing its mail percentages changing: Fewer letters and more packages. As more Americans turn to email in place of letters, they are also ordering more stuff online instead of going shopping, which means more packages to be delivered. Postal carriers have seen their workloads increase because packages, as you can imagine, are more difficult to load and deliver than letters.
As times change for all of us and particularly for the Postal Service, here’s a fond Happy Birthday wish to everyone at the Franklinton Post Office, the Mount Hermon Post Office, the Angie Post Office, and the Bogalusa Post Office!
