Why Do We Mail First-Class? Is Slowing It Down a Problem?

Your gas bill is due the day after tomorrow – do you send it First-Class Mail? You have a closing document you need to get to your lawyer across town to close a house purchase tomorrow – do you send it First-Class Mail? You want to have a lunch meeting with an important client in three days – do you mail her an invitation via First-Class Mail?

The answers, in order: No, Hell No, and Huh?

Long before COVID-19 darkened our shores, the use case for First-Class Mail was diminishing. There were, and are, pretty much six reasons for using First-Class Mail:

1)   You were legally required to. Certain content can only be delivered by First-Class Mail (invoices, checks, and the like) and some industries require it as part of their due diligence, such as insurance cancellation notices;

2)   You wanted to entice a prospect into reading your mail piece – folks are more hesitant to throw away First-Class Mail than Marketing Mail. There might be a check in it;

3)   You want it to get there kind of fast – faster than Marketing Mail, certainly – but there’s not big rush. A more predictable delivery time, too, please;

4)   You don’t have enough pieces to make a bulk mailing;

5)   You want some of the additional services provided by First-Class – free return, free forwarding, and so on;

6)   You are a private citizen mailing a few cards or letters – First-Class is generally your only mailing option.

That’s pretty much it. On a good day, the mail gets there in a couple days locally, but very few mail First-Class with a high expectation of a certain delivery date. 

Now, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, wants to modify the delivery standards for First-Class Mail to match the service level we, frankly, expect already. I’m guessing if the change was just made without an announcement, very few in the public would even notice. Some large scale First-Class Mailers might notice, and adjust their processes, but the changes versus the reality of today’s First-Class service would be minimal. 

Of course, the optics of lowering standards is always worrisome – slippery slope and all of that – but I think the reality is that this is more than simply easing standards. It is really adapting a product to the new realities the Postal Service faces. Again, it’s important to acknowledge that people don’t use First-Class Mail for speed of delivery, they use it for the better handing and available services, none of which are threatened.

If you really need something delivered in the next couple of days, date-certain, you have a lot of options from the Postal Service and their competitors. And they’re expensive – because it costs a lot to deliver something next day. The Postal Service just can’t do it, or anything close to it, for fifty-five cents. They can offer three to five-day service for that, using surface transportation in most cases. In reality, that’s what they offer now, although they strive, and most often fail, for more.  

So, for me, of all of the features of the USPS Ten-Year Plan this one kind of makes the most sense. Very few will be negatively impacted, or even notice the change, and it really can save the Postal Service money. Makes sense to me.

By the way, this is not the first time the Postal Service deliberately chose to slow down First-Class Mail. In 2011, the Postal Service decided to largely eliminate overnight First-Class delivery, by no longer processing it at night on equipment that sat largely idle during the day. By choosing to process First-Class all day allowed them to run their machines all day. That’s part of why they were eliminating machines for the past few years. There was barely a peep from industry, and certainly not from the press when that was done. In 2011 no one cared about the mail…it really is kind of boring.