POST APOCALYPSE
IN NOVEMBER 2020, George White sent his mother a birthday card from where he lives in Ohio to her home in Virginia. The typical United States Postal Service (USPS) promise is to get first-class mail to most destinations within three days.
White—as the president of an Ohio-based greeting card company, Up With Paper, that makes heavy use of the postal service—suspected that an on-time delivery wasn’t in the cards.
To be on the safe side, he mailed his mom’s birthday card a week early. It got there a week late.
“That was a bummer for me,” says White, who serves as the president of the Greeting Card Association, a trade group. It was also a bummer for his industry. The value of greeting cards rests on timely delivery of products commemorating particular dates, be they birthdays, graduations, or holidays. Late delivery, White says, “can lead to less greeting cards being purchased and mailed. Because if they’re not going to get it in time, what’s the point?”
White was far from the only one to experience late arriving mail in 2020. In the final months of that year, with tens of millions of people quarantining at home, Americans sent and ordered an unprecedented number of holiday packages. E-commerce, which relies on shipping services to deliver goods to customers, had been growing rapidly even before the pandemic, but COVID-19 moved retail online at an even faster pace.
Complaining about the post office has long been a national pastime. Years of declining paper mail volumes, persistent fiscal deficits, and a logistics network not optimized for package delivery were all challenges that predated COVID-19. The pandemic made them much worse.
At the same time, a record number of Americans voted by mail in what would become one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in U.S. history. Critics wondered if the troubled agency would be able to handle the added volume created by the additional mailed ballots, while some Democrats worried that then–President Donald Trump might use the government-run post to steal the election.
The combination of preexisting retail trends, increased package
