Local Mail

Back in the good ol’ days of the 20th Century, the LOCAL letter slot at the Post Office was for letters that you were mailing to people who lived in the same town as you. The postal clerk would personally postmark that letter with a rubber stamp that had the name of your town on it and slip the letter into that local person’s mail slot. Usually, that person would get that letter the same day.

This local letter-handling method was prized highly by just about everyone but, alas, no good thing goes undone. In the high-tech paradise of today that local letter goes in with all the other mail, even the mail to other countries, and gets sent to a city where it gets scanned and bar-coded by a big-ass machine that cost a bazillion dollars. Now that local recipient will get that local letter sometime that week. Maybe.

Back in the 20th Century, when the USPS was simply called “The Post Office” and the local mail carrier was called the “mailman” (OH, that awful SEXIST word!), the Post Office didn’t raise its rates every year to pay for technology. Human beings were still allowed to handle the mail and make a decent living at it. And, way back then, the customer wasn’t always wrong.