Who Will Bail the Iron Out? (But More Importantly, The Post Office?)

It’s official: The iron has gone to jail, and the cat is the new Monopoly token.

The more important news of the morning is that USPS is ending its Saturday mail service, which saddens me greatly. If you haven’t read this Esquire story about what’s going on, take the time, or at least watch the two-minute video at the top, which provides a nice summary.

Update: I wanted to include this relevant bit from the Esquire story:

In terms of growth, the brown pony could be a number of things, but particularly the burgeoning package industry. The postal service’s parcel division was robust — last year, volume was up 7.5 percent over the previous year, despite the limping economy.

The brown pony is also the network itself — its size and scope. Just at this moment, when e-commerce is booming, weakening the network seems like a terrible idea to Bloom. This is why cutting Saturday service, which would mean no Amazon or eBay deliveries over the weekend, and slowing down the mail are, in his estimation, more likely to kill the postal service than make it stronger. “If you degrade the network and your customers leave and you get into the death spiral, you can’t have it back,” he says.

We’ve seen what austerity does, he says: It kills countries and companies.

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