The End of the Small Town Post Office
Decatur Metro | August 24, 2009Amongst all the tweets and updates, blogs and comments, some might not even notice (or care) about the news that up to 1,000 post offices might soon close in the near future. An article in this morning’s L.A. Times details the cuts being considered and reports the potential fallout for cities and neighborhoods nationwide.
What’s the great loss?
For hundreds of communities, it’s one more quiet step toward virtual extinction. Many of these small towns lost their shops and grocery stores to the outer limits of strip nearly two generations ago. Town greens were converted into a hopeful sea of asphalt that now sit empty.
These gathering places dried up long ago, but the U.S. Post Office remained intact thanks in no small part to the support of the American tax-payer. But now, not even a horrifying bi-yearly 2 cent increase in stamp prices can save this federal department from severe cost-cutting.
And while we all have our stories that exemplify how the post office is a model of inefficiency, these smaller branches served another purpose. It’s where members of a community could still run into their neighbors and share a few kind words. But no amount of nostalgia can compete with the very real fact that newer branches are where the volume is. So while the fed still maintains in the article that no final decisions on closings have been made, most of these neighborhood post offices and their customers can already read the writing on the wall.
We sacrificed these places along time ago, but they’ve hung around like a friendly reminder – for those who could remember – of a time gone by. But now it looks like the jig is up.
Rest in peace small town post offices. May you all one day become candy stores.
Now we can all meet our neighbors and share [kind] words on Decatur Metro’s blog.
Ha!
Hmm…I wonder if I could use that argument to convince the fed to subsidize me…
Why even joke about it?
Just apply. Seriously dude. Do it.
Even Ned Flanders hates the Post Office. I much prefer to meet the neighbors at Fed Ex Kinkos.
Considering the amount of time I wait at the Decatur PO, we should be spared extinction.
Yeah, considering the time all of spend in the Decatur PO in LINE, we could become EXTINCT.
Once I was waiting in line at the Decatur PO and the guy in front of me – a fifty-something, short, heavy-set man with tinted glasses – was having a a phone conversation about how he had just come from having lunch at Pin-Ups.
Oh! One of my favorite things to do – harsh on the Decatur PO. Speaking of small post offices, is the Avondale PO still open? It’s Post Office that time forgot, but the people there are (or were – I haven’t been there in a year or so) much more efficient and friendly. I thought I heard a rumor that it was on the chopping block.
I hope it’s not on the chopping block–when I need a Post Office I go to Avondale. I don’t know of this rumored Decatur Post Office of which they write. Sounds awful.
Avondale is a wonderful PO. Russel knows many customers by name, has a smile and laugh for everyone and has even helped me unload boxes from my car at holiday time. I hope it stays open!
…that should be “it’s THE Post Office that time forgot”..
My favorite is the teeny, teeny post offices like you see if you go home to East Podunk or if you are on vacation in the mountains or a rural beach resort. The bulletin boards always have a bunch of community stuff on them, not just the FBI most wanted poster. Sigh. In losing our worthy daily newspapers, post offices and hard copy, not virtual, mail, and telephone booths, we are becoming more isolated, our sociey less thoughtful, more R U thair superficial in communication. Is this not the communications equivalent of everyone driving their own mega-SUV instead of biking, walking, taking mass transit?
I like being able to word process quickly instead of painfully writing things out in my bad handwriting, but I still like folding the paper and putting it in an envelope. Am I the last on earth?
You’re not. Your post sums up beatifully what I think many people feel but don’t say.
There’s nothing quite like getting a handwritten letter/note in the mail. It is so rare.
The post office is great. It’s often looked at as the bastion of government inefficiency, but I think it’s under appreciated. You can scribble something on a piece of paper and it shows up there in two days. The problem is just that the PO should have been charging more for a stamp for the last 50 years. We might be one of the cheapest rates with one of the biggest land masses. It might be a dollar to mail something in the UK and it’s tiny. From Atlanta to California for forty something cents is just too cheap.
It’s funny, I was just thinking how I love seeing the postman delivering mail door-to-door on Clairemont instead of just driving up in the little jeeplet and shoving mail into a box. Something simple, something small to look forward to every day… Honestly, I would not mind getting rid of street mailboxes entirely and just go to the post office.
Empty Post Offices make great locations for new rural Starbucks. It’s a win-win.
The Decatur PO isn’t going anywhere. I’m pretty sure that it’s where everyone west of Atlanta and east of Athens needs to come to pick up a package!
Behind Beacon Hill and the Candler Hotel, probably my biggest “Oh my!” moment when researching Decatur history was when I discovered that our current post office was build on the spot of Ponce de Leon Elementary, which looked a lot like Clairemont Elementary.
Oh well…