U.S.P.S. GIGO

Neon Memes • "Revenue from direct mail 'is the financial underpinning of the [U.S.] Postal Service―it could not survive without it,'" stated an October 6 Newsweek piece that quoted a former deputy postmaster. Two accompanying pie charts showed that last year, direct mail constituted more than a quarter (27.70 percent) of the service's total $75.1 billion in revenue and just under half (48.77 percent) of U.S.P.S. deliveries by volume. The Newsweek piece prompted me, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, to save a week's worth of direct mail, from Saturday, October 18, to Friday, October 24. Perhaps unreasonably, the exercise excluded coupons and supermarket ads, which seemed to me to have some small automatic utility. Also, somehow or other, the week saw just one telecom solicitation―though political fliers more than offset that shortfall. In any event, by week's end, a stack almost an inch high decorated my desk. Its weight? One pound, 15.9 ounces. Two pounds each week for an entire year, of course, yields more than 100 pounds of material that mostly goes straight to the shredder and the trash. It seems almost inconceivable that a man as smart as Benjamin Franklin first oversaw a service today so dependent on stupidity. ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor