Zapping The Post Office

It's really good at handling letters. But what happens in the age of E-mail and faxes?

Once dependable only as an endless source of jokes, the U.S. Postal Service has just delivered its third straight year of billion-dollar profits. The service, shorn of government subsidies in 1982 to make it more competitive, hauls 630 million pieces of mail a day through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night with a savvy that has raised its on-time rate for first-class letters to a reliable 92%. Polls show that the Postal Service is rising steadily in the public's esteem. "The more a federal agency has to compete in the market, the more likely it is to behave in a...

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