While Australia’s postal service is crying in its Foster’s over its plummeting popularity, the USPS is busting out the Bud. First-Class letter delivery looks like it may be up for the year… around 400 million letters. That’s not so much when your letter-stream totals 98 billion. It’s even less impressive when you look back a few years to the halcyon days of 2000, when 102 billion letters whizzed through the system.

As more and more folks opt for email, the long term prognosis for First-Class home delivery is not good. Unless you happen to be the monopoly that owns the franchise. While the latest plan cites eroding mail volumes (due to email, electronic bill presentment and payment) and rising costs (like an antiquated benefits program), the USPS says it isn’t through. Not by a long shot.

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Postmaster General John E. Potter, the long version:
We will promote growth by creating more value for every customer. We will continue to reduce costs by improving efficiency in all our operational and business processes. We will bring service performance to even higher levels. We will use the best technology to make the mail a rich source of information both for our customers and our operations managers. We will achieve all this with an energized, customer-focused workforce.

Postmaster General John E. Potter, the short version: Get ready for another whopping price increase.

How did the USPS get into this sorry position? Could it be… poor planning?

Way back in 2000, postal prognosticators confidently predicted that, after subtracting 20.7 billion email messages, the Service could expect a 9% increase in First-Class letter deliveries by 2005. Unfortunately, email volume is nearly thirty times greater than USPS dreamers imagined.

According to eMarketer, annual email traffic exceeds 2 trillion messages. Traffic going to personal email accounts: 614 billion. eMarketer confidently projects 2007 traffic at 2.7 trillion.

The latest Postal Service projections? By 2007, you’ll be paying one heckuva lot more to mail your grandma… and you’ll probably be schlepping it over to the local postal station.