Blogfinger

OG Post Office, Main Avenue. Blogfinger photo

By Paul Goldfinger, Editor @Blogfinger

The United States Postal Service was established in 1775 in Philadelphia. In 1871, the first post office was opened in Ocean Grove near Main Avenue, near the gates. Soon it was moved to Pilgrim Pathway near the Tabernacle.

In 1873, 30,661 pieces of mail were sent out of the OG facility. After that, there was a movement to merge OG mail services with Asbury Park, but Grovers refused to agree.

In 1880, new Camp Meeting offices were built on Pilgrim Pathway, and the post office was situated in that building. Although the building has undergone changes over the years, the post office has remained at that location.

Ocean Grove post office interior. By Paul Goldfinger © January 2014

Everyone enjoys visiting that old fashioned post office on Main Avenue with its rows of quaint PO boxes and the glass service windows which can be opened to reveal a clerk who will sell you boxes or stamps and mail your packages.  In the back are the processing areas, a “back end” function perhaps not fundamentally  much different from what we now get on commercial and government web sites.

In 2011, the USPS announced that it was considering closing or consolidating 3,700 retail units, but, in the end, just 140 were actually shuttered. Ocean Grove was not on that list, but we all feared that it would eventually be deemed too old or too inefficient, or both. After all, the USPS has been losing money for years.

In 2013, our four OG carriers, all females,  were reassigned to the Neptune office where they each would pick up the mail in a truck and then return to the Grove and do a “drive and loop” procedure where they stop multiple times, remove a bunch of mail and then carry the heavy bags from house to house. In the Grove, where the houses are close together, those bags could be quite heavy. The carriers are not allowed to use the carts on wheels. Needless to say,they are not happy about this state of affairs

We asked Scott Keastead, the OG Officer in Charge, about this. He responded by saying that the bags weigh up to 35 pounds, and anyone who accepts a job with the USPS should expect to do that lifting.

We did hear that the USPS was considering not delivering on Saturdays as a cost cutting measure, but that was never adopted. Meanwhile Sunday deliveries of Amazon.com packages have just begun, and some UPS deliveries now occur on Saturday.

I asked Mr. Keastead about the idea that the USPS might be privatized. He said that the  post office is expected to cover all its costs and that it receives no government funding from taxes. He believes that the services provided by the USPS are still a bargain, and if it were turned over to FedEx or UPS, the prices would quickly go up substantially. He said that our postal service is less expensive than most other comparable postal services around the world, including Canada’s which is privatized.

Meanwhile the USPS top planners are considering modernizing by setting up streamlined “village post offices” or local vendor services where people can drop in and buy some stamps or boxes and ship a package.

In Fort Myers, Florida, near a big supermarket is a gift shop. In the back is a counter where you can do some basic post office functions, as described above.  It looks to me that most of what we do at the post office could be handled that way.

And for those customers who have interminable problems—you know, like the guy in front of you in line who has a bizarre looking  package for Madagascar, which the clerk never heard of,–they can go to a central facility.

JOHN WILLIAMS  and ITZHAK PERLMAN:  “Theme from Il Postino—the Postman”   This is so beautiful, it hurts.