With the invention of online bill payment the need to send a check in the mail is getting less and less necessary. In fact one of the reasons the post office has raised postage rates is because a lot less people are using it as a way of sending bills, and letters.

 Letter use started to go way down when people saw how fast an email could send data. You have people who use emails for notes, occasion cards, photo transfer, and data transfer. Instead of a person waiting a couple of days to get a postal letter an email user could send letters almost instantaneously. So what was left for the post office to deliver?

 Well you had magazines, coupon books, basically junk mail and boxed packages mail, like boxed laptop computers, or boxed items from eBay. Oh, and don’t forget movies by Netflix.

So, It is hard to see the post office dying out due to a lose in personal correspondents or online bill pay but to keep boxed packages it has to fight with UPS and Fed Ex, the long time leaders in box packaged delivery. So they hike up the regular postage stamp costs and use it to keep boxed package rates cheap.

But will the post office become irrelevant and price itself out of the postage market? I believe there will come a day when the post office will have to make a choice. It will either charge higher and higher base postage rates to offset the price of boxed package rates or more market driven boxed deliveries that are faster delivered and easier to send will become the norm. A lot of the hassle of sending something by the post office is standing in line waiting to see a clerk who then weighs the packages and charges you the shipping.

        Already some post offices have a machine that weighs your package and by charging your credit card prints out postage sticker that matches your delivery speed need and you place the box if it fits into a mail box.

But I see a time when a postage scale tied into your computer would weigh your boxed package and print out a postage stamp charging your bank account or credit card account, you then would pull up to a post office and instead of going inside you drop off your boxed mail through a huge slot. Then depending on how much postage you paid your box would be sent either over night, same day, or two day delivery.

Already, the post office is behind because Fed Ex and UPS have such a system. You go to their website, print out a postage sticker, with the weight and speed you want it shipped and you get it charged to your account when it is picked up and mailed.

The future for the postal service is not totally bleak, there will still be a need for official government letters to be sent in the mail, god knows officials would not dare send correspondence by email, and mass mailings are still better to send to a physical address then to an email address where someone could just hit delete.

So the post office is not going anywhere.