End of an era
Bookworm on May 09 2008 at 10:43 pm | Filed under: Britain, England
When I lived in England, the mail arrived twice a day, six days a week. (Maybe only once on Saturdays; I can’t remember.) Within town, you could mail something in the morning, and know that it would arrive at its destination in the evening. It put the American postal service to shame — although it had the signal advantage, of course, of operating over a smaller geographic area than the US mail.
Times have changed. Small geographic area or not, the British postal service has fallen so far that it will now deliver mail only five days a week. Yup. Saturday service is getting the axe.
Frankly, in a day and age in which more and more routine correspondence — be it bills, invitations, thank you notes, or plain old howdies — is being handled over the computer, I can see snail mail becoming obsolete. Most of the time all that I get in snail mail is catalogs and hardware store fliers. It’s obviously still necessary for packages (although I’m sure they’ll be beamed through one of these days), but there is a smaller role for the traditional kind of mail those of us over 15 remember. While I’m kind of saddened by the changes in England, all I can do is wonder when they’ll follow suit over here.
3 Responses to “End of an era”
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(although I’m sure they’ll be beamed through one of these days)
That’ll give a whole new meaning to “mail bombs”.
Same when I was there except in central London, where on business days delivery happened three times. It was always good for a laugh, comparing it to New York City, where it could (and did) take a letter seven or eight days to make it across town.
I do, having a number of elderly relatives all of whom have more important things to do than learn how to operate a computer at their ages, actually still write letters. I even get them, occasionally. My mail consists of bills, catalogs, flyers, and packages. (I continue to let people send me bills, I’ve never been oriented toward giving them direct access.) If snail mail disappeared altogther I suppose I’d manage - but it just strikes me as interesting that one of what was considered to be the first signs of the successful civilizing of a civilization, country, or territory was the establishment of a reliable, regular mail service.
A mythical moment, when it became possible for a business in Philadelphia to send a letter to a branch or partner on the west coast with some certainty that it would get there before all concerned had died of old age.
I get *pounds* of mail every day, and a lot of it is stuff in which I have no interest. I think the junk mail rates in the U.S. are probably signficantly too low, and that money & energy could be saved if they were to go up.
Regarding the comment above, I thought this was an interesting story about the impact of improved communications.