- U.S. Senator Thomas Carper (D-Delaware)
Senator Thomas Carper (D-Delaware) is Chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the U.S. Postal Service. Over the past year and a half, Sen. Carper has held hearings on the ongoing postal crisis, and in May introduced legislation, the Postal Operations Sustainment and Transformation (POST) Act, to address the problem. Earlier this month, he sent President Obama a letter asking the President to take “immediate and dramatic action” to deal with the issue.But when DFM News’ Larry Nagengast recently talked Sen. Carper about the U.S. Postal Service – the conversation also included discussion of the Senator’s use of the U.S. Postal Service. Excerpts from that conversation are below:
During your time in Congress, our communications habits have changed. How does the Postal Service fit into your communications style as a senator?
First, let me go back to before I moved to Delaware. I was a Navy flight officer, and served three tours in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. The days we looked forward to most every week in my squadron were the days the mail came, and we received cards and letters and packages and newspapers and magazines. It was a day to celebrate. A couple of months ago, I was in Afghanistan with our troops and they communicate with folks back home. Occasionally they get or send letters, but they use Skype, Facebook, email, cell phones. And hey have Twitter. The world has changed dramatically … in the past 10 or 12 years.
The postal service made their money on first-class mail, but first class, both personal and for business, is going away, at an ever increasing rate. As a congressman [1981-1993], we would send hundreds of postcards or letters to every address in a ZIP Code or a community to announce a town hall meeting. When I first got to the Senate [in 2001], I got an occasional email from constituent, but received a lot more letters.
Today we receive far more email than letters. It’s not uncommon to get 2,000 emails a week. Emails outnumber letters by three, four, five or six to one, depending on what the issue might be.
Does that mean your use of the Postal Service is declining?
We still mail, but we email a lot more than we mail. For legislative updates, it’s more email than mail, and we have a website that people can access for all kinds of information. We use Facebook, we use Twitter. Those are communication tools we never thought of a decade ago. I’m happy to use these new communications tools, but some of my colleagues don’t even use email. We want to communicate in whatever way the people in the state want to communicate.
So do you use the Postal Service more often for individual constituent issues and the Internet and social media for broader issues?
No. If someone communicates with us by written letter, we reply with a written letter. If they communicate by email, we respond by email. If someone asks for photograph of president, the vice president of information that they need in hard copy, we mail that out.
If we have a young man becoming an Eagle Scout, we want to send them a hard letter so they can have it as a keepsake.
There’s a lot of mix in what we do, but it’s more electronic these days.
In your personal life, what do you normally find in the mailbox at home?
We find a lot of people asking for money. I suppose that’s true for a lot of folks…. We’ve gotten on a bunch of mailing lists.
We get some invitations too. Most communicate for Senate business reasons through the office, but every week we get a couple of letters, some invitations that come to the house. And there’s advertising, solicitations. The Postal Service calls that general mail. The Postal Service makes their money on first-class mail, but we get a lot less first class than even a decade ago.
Do you use the Postal Service a lot for personal matters?
Flat-rate boxes are great. Our boys get mail sent to the house. [Chris now lives out of state and Ben is a student at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.] We send it out to them every week in oversize envelopes. There are a lot of notes that are campaign related. They’re mailed out first class. Compared to other families, we probably get more first-class mail than most.
By sponsoring legislation, you believe that the Postal Service is worth saving. Who do you see as prime beneficiaries of the postal service: the ordinary American family or the direct mailers and commercial interests?
A lot of people still like to get magazines and weekly newspapers by mail…. People who get my handwritten notes say they really liked that note. People talk about … how much a card, or someone who writes a note, means to them. You can send an electronic birthday card, but it’s not quite the same. Christmas cards, holiday cards, we send a ton of those.
There is a diminished use of first-class mail. Businesses are moving away from it to save money…. Banks charge extra if we want canceled checks returned in the mail.
But nonprofits consider direct mail a cost-effective way to raise money and businesses believe the bang for the buck that they get for advertising via mail is about as good as anything they do….
Catalog companies use UPS, Federal Express or the Postal Service to deliver, but in more rural areas, FedEx and UPS do not want to go to every door every day. So they have agreements with the Postal Service to take a package the last mile, five miles or 10 miles. So the Postal Service is in a partnership with UPS and FedEx. It’s picking up. It’s good business for UPS and FedEx, and also for the postal service.
